Dehlavi

It took me almost 16 years to come back to Shimla. The number may not sound as remarkable unless put this way: “the last time I visited Shimla, I was in the fourth standard at school.” Memories from the previous visit were very vague. I remembered our hotel room was very small and not too cozy, the hill station was royally crowded, and that we had been to the Hanuman Temple thay featured hordes of monkeys inside the temple premises! Of course these memories had not painted a very rosy picture of Shimla in my mind. And yet, I was ready and excited to embrace the city once again. Revisiting a place was not something new or unusual to me. However, this time it made more sense to revisit Shimla.  Shimla, as one is aware, has always served as the summertime refuge for the inhabitants of the plains, that keeps swelling up with more people every year, in tune with the burgeoning population of the plains. Having lived in Delhi for all these years now, I wanted to experience how it fel...

  The following is from an old Facebook post that I had written about 6 years back. While scrolling down my own wall in search of an old post, I chanced upon this. While I couldn’t find the post I was initially looking for, I thought let’s revisit this forgotten piece of writing. Imagine Safdar Jung  Safdar Jung must be some 270 years old now. How long has he been buried in Delhi? He wonders, why Delhi? Why did his son have to associate his last memory with the later Mughal tradition? Why did he not get buried in Awadh? Safdar Jung is not very impressed with the bulbous domes sheltering him. These are nothing new--a seventeenth century Mughal emperor had already used these forms for a monument in Agra, more popular than his tomb site. What is so unique about them? He is disgusted with the lack of symmetry and proportions at places. Couldn't his son commission a better group of architects? Why was the mosque built at the eastern end? He does not know. He feels helpless and sad....

 

  A year ago, when I started with Dehlavi , I realized this would be something challenging. For a moment, I thought: why start something new that might impinge upon my already limited time and efforts? I was also a little scared as to who might even bother to read these blogs. But over and above all of that, there was a sense of fresh excitement. I always wanted to pen down my thoughts on this city that I had occasion to know, albeit for a very short time span of three years. I failed miserably everytime I tried maintaining a journal. I realized writing something regularly was perhaps beyond me. What I could do was maintain a monthly record. What could have been better than a blog of my own to do that! That's how Dehlavi came about. Of course, I must have conceived of it as something quite different from what it is today. While initially I had thought of writing about very many episodes from my days in Delhi, I later realized that the aesthetic filter that exists between my inne...

  They say, Delhi rises from its own ashes, like the legendary Phoenix-- probably a statement with some semblance of historicity. This imagery is often conveniently used to refer to how the city was destroyed and ravaged numerous times in the past, and how it showed immense resilience in rebuilding itself and regaining its lost self. But I ask, what about the people? What about the lives destroyed, shattered and forced to rehabilitate again and again? There is not an iota of doubt that these experiences of the peoples of Delhi have been disruptive and transformative, not to mention, prolonged and painful. The present devastation of Delhi, my beloved city, is unlike its historical precedents. Indeed, the situation seems to have acquired warlike emergency and the piling bodies of dead brings to mind at once the victims of war. All of this makes me believe that probably it's true that we have come to view the limits of the anthropocene. What about those who didn't die? Those who...