Delhi, the Overburdened Mother: A Winter Journey Through Many Worlds

December 12, 2007

People say Delhi's winter has its many charms, but on this foggy, smoggy, overclouded day, it appeared a cross caricature.

The prevailing monotony of crowd, traffic, noise, stuffed shops and offices—all embalmed in a peculiar, disinterested lostness.

The nullah along the National Highway, opening its tarred, beaten arms towards the Karnal bypass, stinks like hell. Humanity crammed in the slums buzzes like beehives behind this invisible, monstrous, disinterested veil of stench, filth and foul fumes.

And they live in this crammed world—a world inside the bigger world of Delhi, or rather, one of the different worlds of Delhi.

As you reach the Karnal bypass, a little garbage hillock, created over the years by the mammoth wasting and discarding forces of consumerism, stands with its polythene-dotted slopes.

Here, the coldness in the air seems to be subdued by the foul smell of the garbage dump, vehicle exhaust and human waste.

Delhi, the overburdened mother, has many children—poor, beggared, crippled, shiny, modern.

To make ends meet, it is forever trying to rise above the chaos and the clutter of cramped humans, buildings and vehicles.

So many flyovers have cropped up during the last decade that it is almost impossible to recognize the old shape on an old map. Though mobility is eased a bit on the toll bridges and flyovers, the ever-burgeoning sea of needs and requirements, sucking up miseries, hopes and aspirations from almost the whole of North India, still finds the system cramped to the gills.

Near ISBT, the Tibetan refugee colony, little bazaar and monastery stand discharmed with their religious picturization—flags, buntings, prayer flags, prayer strings, Buddhist robes and mute prayers.

On the road, you see everything from the most dejected, dispirited and hopeless looks of an unwed beggar mother to the pearly sparkling of a girl in Western outfits.

Just look around and you see the miseries against the background of ecstasies, surrounded by all such bird-caged noises.

Poor Lal Qila, the monument of red sandstone, the sign of Mughal imperialism, the watcher of colonial upheavals, stands like a poor, mute museum piece placed in the open under the mercy of the elements of time, history and modernity.

Its still-sturdy walls clasp in their stony hold a piece of culture, of architecture, of a golden era; its eyes afraid that the old child in its arms might be crushed under the mercilessly hurtling wheels of consumerism, encroachment and real-estate business.

Rajghat, the shrine of the man of peace, stands like a lush-green artificial superimposition over the shabby walls reeking with moisture, peeling plaster and dropping limewash.

It tries to hide many things, just as the legacy of the great father still tries to cover up for the misdeeds of the errant children.

It is a garden shrine. The beautifully undulating, lush-green avenue only accentuates the agony of the Mahatma's legacy.

The trees rustle their leaves with their natural messages, yet the honking noises from around are too many, and the whispers of peace dither back and creep towards the stony monument surrounding the great man's ashes, trying to find some real sympathy in the green eyes of some foreigner. For most of the eyes of his own children are cold, hard, mocking at the moment.

The soft carpet of grass under your feet tries to balm the bruises on your soles, but the feet which have got used to pummelling the stony hardness of tarred surfaces no longer listen to such murmuring softness of some great solace and sympathy.

In the posh areas of South Extension, rich people and rich enterprises try to shine like a lighthouse over the ever-turbulent sea of wants, miseries and needs.

They throw their flashes around through shiny, glass-fronted, multi-storeyed business centres, malls, big cars, smartly clad people and well-off gentry.

But the heaving waves of the gloomy sea are forever reaching up to drown the lighthouse, to make it invisible from the picture.

The Hyatt Hotel rises majestically with its brownish-yellow, stony loftiness. Its façade of prosperity is at least successful in holding its chin above the turbulent sea around.

Luxury is closely, safely fitted against all the unwanted ghosts of hunger around.

A garbage dump occasionally raises a protesting cry in the near vicinity.

Here, the road workers piss out their woes while the Hyatt-wala passes with a hateful look from his car.

The piss spots—the oblations at the feet of the goddess of wealth, offered by the ones not so lucky so far.

Nearby rises the glum, faded block of the Regional Passport Office.

Here are lined up the ones with the shiny Western stars in their eyes—the West, where your prosperity is not so heartrendingly tainted by poverty and gloomy contradictions and divisions.

All of this stony block seems clasped in the tentacles of touts who throng it from all sides, making it almost impossible to get your work done without becoming a part of their conniving scheme.

Under the open sky, taking a prickly snoop at all the lapses of administration, the touts sit around like hawkers in a mandi market, as though they are the unofficial employees of the building.