delhi bas?

I’ve just come back from delhi. Half frozen and near death. The capital of democratic India , I’ve realized, is not the sunny cuckoo-land I’ve always pictured it as. It is a vicious evil urban jungle which works in connivance with sharp chilling winds. Winds which slyly work their way around you undaunted by layers of woolies and wraps, under a bleak foggy grey sky.

People tell me that that is what you get if you go to delhi in winter. I tell them I wish they had told me this sooner. Then I could have saved many a shiver and many an ..er…wasted expletive.

Not to mean that it was a totally wasted trip. I saw things which I hadn’t before seen in delhi….the lotus temple.. much nicer auto-rickshaw walas who stop in the middle of the road incase you want to take a couple of snaps of India gate from that just-the-right-angle… famous kebabs from karim’s ( hidden in one of the numerous crooked, bustling lanes which surround jama masjid)… connaught place (a term which here means ‘shopping! shopping!’)… women who ( as rahul bose says in one of his films) dress like it’s diwali everyday,… and humayun’s tomb (which is not exactly a tomb, but a sprawling complex, which houses many monuments, all of which, in a sense, commemorate death).

Actually, now that I think of it , it seems pretty weird that the mughals celebrated something like death, which is usually supposed to be the ultimate-dampener-of-spirits, the ultimate-wet-thumb-on-hot-stove experience, in such a grandiose fashion. They built tombs,(beautiful ones, I agree, but tombs all the same) pretty much wherever they went. Infact, if you try throwing a ball around, in delhi, I’m pretty sure that you’ll be hitting atleast one such, in every three tries.

Talking of death, I recently read a poem by Emily Dickinson (a slightly loony poet who talked to her friends while being partially hidden, under her bed, and had her doctor diagnose her as she walked by an open door). In this poem, death is like a suitor who takes her out. Her attitude is such, that, she feels a bit annoyed at all the unwanted attention, and yet goes out with him for the sake of civility. Surprisingly, they have a great time-it’s a moonlit night, he gets a carriage, and they roam about the city and pass familiar sights together; the point being, that something, which you think is just going to be a fat lot of trouble, may actually turn out to be not so bad after all.

Well, I guess that’s true.

I could actually say that for this post of mine.

Ciao.