Green peace

A few reasons to love the Lodhi Gardens. Not that you need any reasons but its a good way to celebrate this beautiful garden's 75th birthday. Did a version of this for (what else) the Time Out Delhi magazine.

It has been 75 years since the land east of Safdarjang’s Tomb was transformed, from a place where kings lay dead to a place where common people feel most alive. In 1936, the residents of Khairpur village were turfed out of the vicinity of the Lodhi tombs, so that the 90-acre Lady Willingdon Park could be planted here. This fortnight we celebrate the Gardens’ 75th birthday.


Democratic mingling It’s the only place in Delhi where Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma or Leader of the Opposition Arun Jaitley stroll by as families picnic on the lawns and octogenarians squabble about politics. Anil Ambani’s lobbyist in Delhi, Tony Jesudesan, works his charm on politicians over evening walks. Hopefully the tombs of the dead sultans send a message to today’s proud rulers.
  
The butterfly conservatory Visitors to the gardens will spot a multitude of butterflies, courtesy a three-acre area created solely for butterflies. Thanks to the NDMC Centre for Environmental Management for Degraded Ecosystems and the organisation Green Circle, the butterfly conservatory is insecticide-free and has 22 plants specially chosen to accommodate butterfly larvae.

The greenhouse Within the garden complex, this shaded area shelters plants unable to withstand the Delhi heat. Although the flora isn’t for sale, it attracts students of botany as well as visitors interested in plants like the golden fern.


 Time travel By now, its heritage is unconfined to any particular era. Muhammed Shah Sayyid’s tomb of Delhi quartz is believed to have been built around 1444. The athpula, or eight-tiered bridge, was built by Nawab Bahadur, a nobleman in the court of Akbar; it spanned a canal which was part of the river system that once drained Delhi. The gardens were designed in 1936 by Lady Willingdon, the wife of the Viceroy. In 1968, it was re-landscaped by architect Joseph Allen Stein, who also designed the India International Centre next door.

The trees Not just for sheltering canoodling couples, the garden’s foliage keeps all kinds of secrets: The pale grey bark of the Kaim, for instance, is used to treat colic and fever, while its pinkish-brown timber is used to make cricket bats. The leaves of the Jhinjheri are good for rolling beedis and the oil from Kosam seeds are used to treat skin diseases. The city’s only freshwater mangrove can be found near the entrance to the greenhouse.

Recycled water Don’t think about it too long, but the water used to water the lawns is recycled from the Okhla Sewage Treatment Plant. The NDMC plans to set up a treatment plant at the gardens to ensure it has no effluent smells.

Fourty-four species of birds can be spotted at the gardens. These include the Blackrumped Flameback woodpecker, which parks its cackling self on tree trunks. That noise is offset by the fluting call of the Eurasian Golden Oriole which can be spotted in April.


 Its literary prominence The Gardens crop up in every other novel set in New Delhi, recently including Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-goers. Khushwant Singh chose it for his latest work The Sunset Club, in which three octogenarian friends share secrets and discuss sexual fantasies. Singh’s son-in-law, the late publisher Ravi Dayal, chose to stroll in Sujan Singh Park rather than Lodhi Gardens because he said “Lodhi Gardens is a place full of rejected manuscripts”. Vinay Dharwadker called his collection of poetry Sunday at the Lodi Gardens. But it was Octavio Paz, the late diplomat and poet, who captured it best in this poem “In the Lodi Gardens”:

The black, pensive, dense

domes of the mausoleums

suddenly shot birds

into the unanimous blue

Delhi in the 50s

My latest piece for the TimeOut Delhi magazine as part of our cover story about the ten decades of Delhi. If this essay feels a bit abrupt, it's because it was part of a larger canvas that looked at Delhi life over the last 100 years. Read on:

As New Delhi struggled to its feet after Partition, it had at least two things on its mind. The first was rebuilding the lives of its refugees, in new colonies at the city’s periphery, areas like Rajinder Nagar to the west and Kalkaji to the south. The second was escapism. The elite cinemas of Connaught Place were too few to help refugees flee the difficulty of their new lives in raw, far-flung suburbs. Between 1952 and 1961, cinema halls sprung up right in the neighbourhoods they now inhabited.

Jangpura, the colony originally provided to the villagers displaced from Raisina Hill, received a new deluge of the displaced, and with them Eros, south Delhi’s first movie hall. Karol Bagh had Liberty and Patel Nagar had Vivek. In 1954, the Delite and Golcha cinemas both opened at Daryaganj, the former with plush interiors and the first air-conditioned hall in the city. (Such was the impact of this new cinema-going experience that the Hindustan Times film critic gushed about Delite’s “carpeted floor, comfortable seats with sidelights [and] the lowest rates, lower than any of the New Delhi cinemas,” instead of reviewing their debut flick Angaray.) Come 1961, Shiela would expand the movie-watching experience with its 70mm screen.

The birth of these movie halls didn’t just provide Dilliwalas with entertainment, but also heralded the first days of an egalitarian cinema culture in the city. They collapsed the elite cinemas, like Regal, with the working-class scene of travelling fairground shows. With class-stratified seating and cheap front-row stalls, for the first time, people of many classes shared the same hall, receiving the same entertainment. Inclusiveness didn’t just mean cheap tickets, though. When Shiela opened, screening only English language movies, patrons were offered synopses of the story written in Hindi and Urdu. To add to the sensation, audiences were sometimes treated to live stage-shows, as at Delite in 1955, when the Pakistan-born father-son duo Prithviraj and Raj Kapoor enacted the play Yahudi ki Kahani.

Meanwhile, for the more established set of Dilliwalas, live entertainment meant Rudy Cotton enthralling listeners with his saxophone renditions of “Blue Moon” and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” at the Lagoona in Scindia House. Indians had finally inherited the thumping music-stages and dance floors from British officers and US soldiers. At the restaurants of CP – Lagoona, Alps, York’s and Volga – live jazz had centre-stage of Delhi’s social life. While Cotton’s melodies rang through Lagoona’s walls, Hecke Kingdom and the Jazz Quartet band propped up the fortunes of Volga in CP. Until the band arrived, Volga’s tables stayed vacant. After the Quartet tuned up, you were lucky to get in. “Hundreds have had the uncomfortable and embarrassing experience of either queuing up for a table, or going elsewhere for their fun,” recorded the listings magazine Delhi Diary. Those who went elsewhere often landed up at Alps, on Janpath, to hear pianist Mosin Menezes and his Quartet belt out his famous number “Night Flight”.

The crescendo of New Delhi’s jazz era was a visit by no less than Dave Brubeck, on a 1958 world tour sponsored by the US State Department at the dawn of the Cold War. Over 3,000 people crowded into a free open-air concert in the University Gardens to see Brubeck slam out “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and “St Louis Blues” (he would only compose “Take Five” in 1959, on his album Time Out). A sombre State Department communique reported the success of the Delhi show, in demonstrating to Indians that jazz “can display discipline and intellectuality of a high order”, and shouldn’t be classed with “wild and undiscplined” rock ‘n’ roll. Either way, the message from Brubeck that Delhi heard loud and clear was the title of his second song, “I’m In A Dancing Mood”.

A prince among men

Really enjoyed writing this piece since I got opportunity to meet Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma and the author of Dara Shukoh: A Play in Verse to talk about his book. It's a beautifully written volume which looks at the clash between pluralism and orthodoxy through the life of Dara Shukoh, the doomed, younger brother of Aurangzeb. Although my chat with Mr Gandhi lasted about 15 mins, it was one of the most enjoyable meetings in a long time. Read on:

At a point in Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s play Dara Shukoh, Mir Jumla, a staunch ally of the Mughal prince Aurangzeb, camps on the outskirts of Delhi. It is night time, and Jumla is dictating a letter to the prince when he is interrupted. A soldier enters his tent, informing Jumla that he has arrested a family that forced its 12-year-old daughter-in-law to commit sati. Jumla admonishes the soldier, saying “Law is law, custom custom/Therefore, their decrees cannot overlap/We uphold the former, Leave convention for some bold reformer.” His casual dismissal resonates with the Khap panchayat horror that still consumes Delhi’s hinterland, precisely where Jumla might have been camped three centuries ago.

“Very often the combination of orthodoxy and male chauvinism has wreaked havoc in India,” said Gandhi, considering the allegory. A long-time critic of India’s social violence, Gandhi powerfully channels the struggle against religious and social orthodoxy in the play, which was reissued in paperback last month. Gandhi, the former governor of West Bengal, is a prolific writer of history and translated Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy into Hindustani. In Dara Shukoh, he uses rhyming medleys – inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s 1892 play Akbar’s Dream and John Dryden’s 1675 Restoration Drama Aurengzebe –to tell the story of the famously enlightened Mughal prince, who despite being his father Shah Jehan’s choice as emperor, was overthrown by his conservative brother Aurangzeb in a bitter war of succession.

While the history is riveting, Gandhi uses the saga to illustrate a contemporary struggly between religious tolerance and conservatism that still blights sections of society today. “I didn’t take him [Dara] out of the context of history,” he said. “He was, to me, a figure in history who lent himself to dramatic presentation without any embellishments.” Of course, as with most tragic heroes, Dara’s character contained a fatal flaw – in this case an overly trusting nature. He was not built to slay his own flesh and blood, and bemused by how easily his brother turned him and their father in the pursuit of power. “From all I’ve been able to understand, Shukoh was a very trusting man to the point of being gullible”, said Gandhi. “His reactions to the intrigues of court were reactions of a trusting man who was bewildered by the betrayal of trust.” His gullibility was matched by severe anger-management problems, which Gandhi does not fail to present, as in the third act when Dara reacts to news of his brother Shuja’s rebellion: “Shuja you malignant tumour/ Cyst of a rumour/ Suppurating excess/ In pig’s recess.”

Yet for all its rage and betrayal, Dara Shukoh is a play counterbalanced with optimism. For the writer, Dara’s story is less a tragedy than a “triumph of tragedy”. The prince has proved an enduring and popular figure in Indian history, a sort of icon for tolerance, Gandhi said. “In India, it is the illiberal who are on the margins but are more vocal. The centre-stage is still extremely tolerant which is why people respond to Dara Shukoh in the way they do.” This response has had traction elsewhere in South Asian literature. In his 2000 novel Moth Smoke, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid uses the prince’s trial as an allegory for the state of Pakistan during the 1998 nuclear tests.

Perhaps appropriately, Dara has received few of the grand memorials that go to men of power. It’s doubtful the visitors who course through Humayan’s tomb every weekend realise that the prince lies buried in an unmarked grave there. Unlike his father and brother, no roads in New Delhi were named after the Sufi prince. But it may be that Dara secured a greater seat than the one that was captured by his brother, Gandhi said. “Aurangzeb ascended the throne but Dara Shukoh was already enthroned in the hearts of the people.”


This piece first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Royal Rajah

Did this for TimeOut Delhi. A short profile of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal whose works are on display at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts until February:

As a 20-year-old student at Thomson’s Civil Engineering College in Roorkee, Deen Dayal was content sketching plans for roads, buildings and canals. It only happened that, in the final year of his course, the college faculty introduced photography as a subject. That was how Dayal came to be quite prepared when, in 1866, as he sat in his draughtsmans’ office at the Indore Public Works Department, he received the news that all draughtsmen were to be replaced by photographers. It was time for Dayal to shed his drawing instruments, pick up the camera and begin a legendary career of photography.

This fortnight, 200 of Deen Dayal’s photographs will be dusted off and exhibited at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the bulk of them on display for the very first time. The images in Raja Deen Dayal: Studio Archives from the IGNCA Collection range from portraits of Indian royalty to grand shots of monuments. Just like the other non-royal Raja, his exact contemporary Ravi Varma, Deen Dayal skilfully adopted a European technology that Indians had had little access to, became a greatly sought-after artist, and broke a new frontier in the visual capture of nineteenth-century Indian life.

“What made Dayal special was the way in which he photographed monuments and portraiture,” said Jyotindra Jain, the director of the IGNCA, who curated the exhibition along with Pramod Kumar KG. “In his portraiture, he recorded almost the entire lifestyle of the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mehboob Ali Khan. The British hired him to photograph 78 monuments in central India, and he became famous because of the manner in which he took them. He’d use a slightly low angle to shoot a monument, so its upper part would appear against the sky. The contours of the monument would be extremely clear. But it wasn’t just Dayal’s talent that won him fame. He combined his skills with a tenacity that ensured his friendship with the high and mighty of that era.”

Deen Dayal used his friendship with Maharaja Tukoji Rao II of Indore to have himself introduced to Sir Henry Daly, the British Agent at Indore. Daly had Dayal appointed the official photographer of the Prince of Wales’ tour of India in 1875. Later, he was appointed official photographer to Viceroy Lord Dufferin. “After that, there was no limit [to the extent of his work],” said Jain. “He scored over British photographers because even they didn’t have that kind of access to maharajas, the upper classes and nobility. Being an Indian, he established a certain rapport with these people, and it reflects in his work that his sitters were much more comfortable with him.” In his fourties, he was appointed court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad, who gave him the title Raja.

Dayal worked in a time when the tools of photography were still rudimentary, yet he created some stunning clear visuals. Photographers used glass-plate negatives, which required long exposures and extreme care. Another striking quality is “the quality of performance in his photography”, Jain said. “The people who he photographed were always performing. For example, the Nizam of Hyderabad held a durbar thrice week. He and the visitors would dress up, and there was a certain hierarchy [of who followed whom]. The whole scenario was almost a theatre backdrop, in front of which these people performed. Deen Dayal understood this element of performance he was photographing and that drama comes out very well in his photographs.” No wonder then that his patron the Nizam composed a couplet in praise of Dayal: “Ajab yeh karte hain tasvir mein kamaal kamaal/ Ustaadon ke hain ustad yeh Raja Deen Dayal [In the art of photography, surpassing all/a master of masters is Raja Deen Dayal].”

Building a legacy

Apologies for ignoring this blog. Have been swamped with work with very little time to do some exclusive blog writing. Will try and be more consistent now onwards. Below is a Q&A with the eminent Delhi architect Raj Rewal who's left his unique mark on contemporary Delhi. Read on:

As a young boy in Hoshiarpur village in pre-Independence India, Raj Rewal loved drawing. In a few years, his meandering sketches grew into comic strips for Shankar’s Weekly, a journal of political cartoons. Fifty years later, Rewal’s further sketches have produced some of Delhi’s most prominent buildings, including the Asian Games Village, the State Trading Corporation and the Parliament Library. This  fortnight, the India International Centre will screen Resonance: Raj Rewal and Tradition, a film shot by Rewal’s filmmaker son Manu, centred on the construction of the Parliament Library. Rewal talks to Time Out about Delhi’s architecture and working with builders who are “architecturally illiterate”.

What’s fascinating about your work is the unconventional, striking shapes of some buildings. How do you design those projects?

All our buildings or design projects are related to a context. The Hall of Nations [at Pragati Maidan] was built to commemorate the 25th anniversary of India’s independence. It was 1972, I was very young and I wanted to project the idea of intermediate technology… that we could do a lot with our own labour, use concrete and similar material, and create a building which, at 256 ft, was one of the largest span structures in the world at that time. When model was shown to Mrs Gandhi, she was very quiet. Later, Ms [Pupul] Jayakar explained that the reason she didn’t express herself was that if she liked it, the bureaucracy would go on and on about it, and if she didn’t, they’d run me down.


After studying in Paris, what was it like beginning your practice in Delhi?

The context here is very different. When I returned, we were not an industrialised country. We had to find our own idiom and grammar of design, which incorporates what is theoretically possible with what can be implemented by our own means. I used a lot of stone because we have brilliant stone-workers. Nobody had used stone much before I began doing it.

Have architects since developed an Indian idiom of design and do they pay a lot of attention to context?

[Chuckles] Well, some of them are sensitive enough to our own situation. We have temperatures rising right up to 45 degrees, so it’s absurd to make buildings all glass – that too in a way that the cost of air-conditioning increases four-fold. So there are those architects, particularly younger ones under international influence, who make bad copies of bad architecture. But there are also those who are interested in finding a vocabulary suitable to our climate.

How do you incorporate the cultural ethos of the city in your work when you design a building or public area?

You know, Delhi is a very lucky city because it has great historical buildings and Mughal architecture. I lived in front of Humayun’s Tomb for around ten years, so it seeped into me. My work, in a way, is influenced and inspired by it [Mughal architecture], but it doesn’t copy it. It’s not a pastiche, ki vahaan se utha kar vahaan laga diya [you lifted it from here and pasted it there]. But it carries it further in different directions to suit different requirements. The World Bank building at Lodhi Road is next to Lodhi Gardens, so it carries the theme forward but doesn’t look like it. It’s the essence I’m after, not a cheap  copy.

What do you mean by the “essence of Mughal architecture,”?

I would say it’s geometrically very balanced. It’s built around courtyards, gardens, etcetera and that’s what I’d like to carry forward.

You designed government buildings through the ’70s and ’80s. Were you given a free hand to do your own thing or was there interference from the government?

Things were much better at that time, because the Government of India awarded work only to Indian architects. The projects were awarded based on architecture competitions, mostly judged by our peers and seniors. So it was architects assessing the work of others. This process was carried to the implementation stage, which wasn’t always great, but at least they wouldn’t interefere with the design ideas. Frankly, even with the Parliament library there was no interference. The then Speaker Shivraj Patil just said it should be in harmony with what we [the MPs] are doing, and that was that.

Nowadays, a lot of work is done through promoters and builders who are architecturally illiterate. Their main aim is to make fast money, so they don’t cater to architectural values. There’s been a transition from architect’s architecture to promoter’s architecture. 


Photo Courtesy: Shiv Ahuja


A version of this first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Crawling around in Nizamuddin

Did a version of this for the TimeOut Delhi magazine as part of their cover story on Eid/Ramzan food. One of my most enjoyable assignments till date.

In his famous travelogue of Delhi, City of Djinns, William Dalrymple writes that the sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya would eat little, unable to bear the sight of starving people sleeping in the streets around him. The neighbourhood around his grave is still a beacon for Delhi’s homeless, but also for visitors with great appetites for kebabs and for qawwali.

During Ramzan, the area’s forking bylanes are filled more than ever with the smells of roasting meat. But listening to qawwali – essentially what “going to Nizamuddin” means in Delhi parlance – is less of an option. The roza is a time of sombre abstinence, and after the lifting of the fast, the Nizami family gives over their dusk singing hour to the reading of the Quran. For that reason, to visit Nizamuddin during Ramzan is to get a sense of the direction in which the neighbourhood may be headed, as a lodestone of Sufism in North India slowly gives over to the sway of more orthodox Islam.

The erosion of Sufi culture from Nizamuddin, where it has thrived for seven hundred years, is largely due to the rise of the Tablighi Jamaat, an international reformist Muslim movement that does not appreciate the company of syncretic Sufism. The Tablighis, who function out of a mosque near the Nizamuddin police thana, run several schools in the area. In contrast, the Nizami family – which claims descent from the saint himself – have grown aloof, locals say. They’ve given back too little to the community, building no schools or hospitals, despite the money dropped by visitors at the shrine. “On the pretext of conducting special prayers, the khadims [dargah attendants] extract money from visitors and pocket the cash,” said filmmaker Yousuf Sayeed, who has researched the life of Nizamuddin Auliya. “There’s never any money to maintain the 800-year-old shrine, so it’s in a bad state.” Recently, the Agha Khan Foundation was entrusted with the massive and controversial task of restoring the shrine to its former glory. They’ve restored the saint’s baoli (step-well), but restoring his true influence is not part of their mandate.

That might just fall to young locals like Sufi Kamaal Hassan Shah, convenor of the Jalali and Rifai Sufi Order Group. During Ramzan, Shah organises private qawwali nights, where they pray, experiment with zikr, smoke chillam and – of course – tuck into those tasty kebabs. Shah’s gatherings welcome visitors with an appreciation for the ethos and the music (which is usually qawwals sung in Bengali). For visitors who are less adventurous, or just seeking respite from the madding crowd and the late-monsoon humidity, it can be found in the air-conditioned interior of the local branch of Karim’s. It rides on the reputation of the Karim’s at Jama Masjid, so prepare your tastebuds for sikandari raan, burra kabab and other Karim’s-popularised meats. 

But the smaller restaurants of Nizamuddin are equally welcoming (and far more reasonably priced). No sooner has the muezzin signalled the end of roza, the fasting period, than floods of young men throng Nasir Iqbal Restaurant to devour its delicately spiced mutton qorma (Rs 60). The rough-edged Ghalib’s eatery has a following greatly out of proportion with its size, mostly thanks to its soft, mouth-watering beef shammi kababs (Rs 25). Diners who prefer their meat tough and crunchy should head to Yaseen’s Kebab Corner, which specialises in crunchy fried chicken (Rs 50 per piece) and roasted beef tikkas, locally called “bade ka meat”. Here, in the space between the Tablighi mosque and the dargah, it briefly doesn’t matter if you’re a puritan or a Sufi, a rozedaar (fast-keeper) or a lapsed Muslim or not a Muslim at all – if you have an appetite, you can believe Nizamuddin is paradise. 

Interview: Sam Miller

Author, Delhi: Adventures In A Megacity (Penguin India, Rs 499) and Former Managing Editor, BBC, South Asia

(On the Delhi of today and the yesteryears. And the current stalemate in India-Pakistan relations)

How and why did you start writing this book? What was the inspiration behind it?

I lived in Delhi in the early nineties and, to be honest, I hated it. I really didn’t like it in the city and I was posted back by my employers, the BBC, by the end of 2002. And to my surprise, it was a different city from the one I knew. It was a much more interesting city and I set out to try and find why and what had happened. I love walking and I don’t believe in researching about a city by reading books or talking to experts. I believe in walking, talking and meeting people.

It was also a very good way of improving my Hindi. But, basically, I walk the city streets in a route which I describe in the book, trying to explore what has happened to this extraordinary city and the most important thing was that, in many ways, it had become a world city. Before, it was quite a parochial place; rather small and dominated by an elite and, to a large extent, by a single community. Even now, it is still dominated by the rich and the elite but there are lots of different groups and elites. It is a very interesting place. It’s a place which feels it is moving ahead. It is not dominated by a single community any longer. Unlike other Indian cities, it has the right to decide its own fate because it has its government. I think all of these are positive signs. It’s far from perfect but that’s what interests me about it.

But the government in Delhi doesn’t have real powers. For instance, the Delhi Police comes under the Union Home Ministry, the DDA (Delhi Development Authority), which is responsible for the city’s urban development also comes under the Union government. Wouldn’t you say, then, that the government is a bit toothless?

Yes, its powers are not complete and they are not total. But they never are within a country. I would say look around in Bangalore, Calcutta, Bombay and look at how many of their problems are caused by the fact that they can’t make decisions the kind that Delhi can for itself – and make them quickly. And I think that’s been unfortunate for most of those cities. I think Bombay knows very well why it’s unfortunate. But, I think it is also very important for other reasons.

I think it’s important for the identity of the city. It is all about beginning to feel a loyalty towards the city. If they have a loyalty towards the city – and I don’t mean nationalism by that –then they will care about it. And unless a city’s citizens care about it, it will be a terrible place. And that is fundamental which people forget at their peril.

After the Bombay attacks, we saw citizens of the city actively protesting against the establishment. In contrast, after the September 2008 blasts in Delhi, nothing of the sort happened. In that sense, do you think Delhiites are laidback and just like to go with the flow?

I think there’s a real problem in Delhi that there is much less of a civic sense in the city and that has been damaging. I think it has improved a bit but still, people tend to care about their particular local area. So these RWAs (Resident Welfare Associations) have become a lot more active over the years. But, the attitude is ‘This is my turf and I’m trying to make it nice’. In comparison, Bombay has a much longer history of being a big city and of concerned citizens taking to the streets when they think there is something important to argue and demonstrate about. But, what they were also expressing were their powers to do anything and their discontent with the situation. So, the comparison to Delhi is interesting but not on a level playing field.

One of India’s veteran advertising professionals, Prahlad Kakkar, described Delhi as a city of jugaad (in local dialect, this is interpreted as fixing). Would you agree?


I think there are still a lot of fixers around but, no, it’s much more than that. Any of the old definitions of the city are wrong now only because they are incomplete. Delhi used to be described as a set of villages or as a retirement home for bureaucrats or just a sort of a ‘babudom’ place. Obviously, there’s something in all of that but there’s so much more. It’s a city of more than 15 million people; probably more than 20 million if you include Gurgaon and other suburbs. Now, no one is suggesting that there 20 million fixers. Remember, that more than half the population are children or recent migrants. And that dramatically affects the complexion of the city. And yes, there are a lot of fixers around. There are companies in Bombay that have their fixers in Delhi to get permissions. But, more and more companies have set up offices in Delhi because it’s an important city in its own right.

Someone I spoke to was praising elements of contemporary Delhi, such as the Delhi Metro. Do you fear that due to the development of contemporary Delhi, the city’s rich heritage and culture maybe forgotten?

I think such a fear does exist. There was a mosque – or half-a-mosque – that I used to visit on my walks which was demolished or razed forever 15 months ago. I tried to get people interested in it, but they weren’t. Delhi is so rich in history that there’s a kind of blaazeness about it – people just think ‘how does it matter if some old building goes?’ I think that’s very sad because these things can never be brought back.

That said, it is the richest megacity in world in terms of historical monuments and that shouldn’t be forgotten. No other city, which has a population of over 10 million people (except, maybe, for Cairo), has such a range. So it is an important subject. But I think there’s a kind of maturity, which means that they are recognising that as an issue. And, not just sentimentally. But, I do despair for the minor monuments. I think more will disappear.

What is your opinion about the political nature of Delhi?

In some ways, it has become less political. When I was there in the nineties, the political elite and the bureaucrats were dominant figures on the social scene. Some high-profile secretary would always be attending some high-profile party. Now, who cares! It’s not a big deal anymore! There are all types of people. There’s a much bigger international community. There’s a much bigger elite community from the rest of India; not just the old Delhi families or people directly connected with politics. Of course, it’s the national center for politics and will remain so and that colours it. But it has outgrown it. It’s sort of sold one of its few descriptions.

So would it be fair to describe your book as a travelogue or as a wanderer’s findings about the city?

I would describe it as an attempt to describe a modern city. That I did it by way of wandering is my way doing it. Others do it in different ways. But, the key is to try and understand what makes our modern cities change and try and think how we can make them better in future. I’ve raised a few questions and got a few amusing stories to tell about what is an extraordinary city – with still a lot of wrong with it.

On a different note, after the Mumbai attacks, India-Pakistan relations hit a stalemate. This time, war is not an option; diplomacy doesn’t seem to be effective. How do you think this stalemate will end in a manner which is satisfactory to both countries?

I don’t think it will end in the kind of resolution you’d like. Key constituencies in both countries don’t want this stalemate to end. I think there is a lack of sophistication and knowledge in India about Pakistan. I wish more people would travel there and meet people. This festival (Jaipur Literature Festival) is a great opportunity to meet people from Pakistan.

My old friend from the BBC, Mohammad Hanif, has written an exceptional novel about modern Pakistan, (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) which shows that the country is just as vast and complex as India and we should stop thinking about it in binary terms. It has a range of people and ideas that you would expect from any country of a 170 million people. There are people there who hate India. I don’t think they are huge in number though they’ve caused a great deal of damage over the years. But, we can’t blame all of Pakistan and say that all people in government and civil society were directly involved in what happened in Bombay. It is very clear that some Pakistanis were involved, and that needs to be dealt with. But trying to tar everyone with the same brush will only make the brush useless.

Pakistan’s President, Asif Ali Zardari, described these terrorists as ‘non-state actors’. Do you really believe that they were just non-state actors?

I don’t know enough about it. But, according to my instinct, I think the people who trained these terrorists were, at some point, associated with the State directly or indirectly. However, I think it is very unlikely that a senior person, who is now part of Pakistani bureaucracy, gave an order for this to happen or organised this happening. I can’t swear it’s not the case. But that’s what my instinct and sense of knowledge about Pakistan tells me. Strangely enough, the confession that was printed of the one terrorist who was arrested rang true. He described how he became a terrorist and how he did what he did. It was a slightly banal story.

I haven’t read Tarun Tejpal’s book (The Story of My Assassins) but I think it’s important to understand what makes people into killers. And that every killer was once a sweet, smiling kid and what happens in between. If we don’t understand that we’ll have them haunting us wherever we go, as we have done for centuries.

President Obama has taken over from President Bush and, already, he’s reprimanded Pakistan. How do you see Obama’s foreign policy shaping up vis-à-vis Pakistan, India and the war on terror?

I think he will be driven by a much wider picture than the previous president and his team and not by what India and Pakistan want. India and Pakistan want people to agree with them and they’d win a moral victory. I think Obama is committed to trying to find ways of making the world a safer place. And if the means of doing that offend or delight India, is not really the point. India is a major world player and will be listened to by many other other countries. But the task that Obama has set himself is to make the world a safer place. And he needs to find a way of doing that.

In the current mess that Pakistan is in right now, do you think that there will be a coup and the army will assume direct control of the country? Or will the civilian government remain in power for a while?

I’ve got no reason to see a coup happening immediately. I think it would be very unpopular in America. I see no particular reason why it should happen now, but, there will be a coup sometime. We’ve had so many of them in the past. There’s no reason to think that the army is permanently out of politics.

The reason I ask is because India doesn’t know who is in control there. The President makes a statement one day only to be contradicted by the Prime Minister the next day. At least when Pervez Musharraf was in power, India knew who it was dealing with.

(Laughs) The only people in the world who are missing Musharraf are the Indians! There is this bizarre irony! Of course, when you have a dictator there is clarity in the command structure. Zardari is not a natural politician or a natural diplomat as anyone who’s seen his appearance will know. He admits that there are parts of the country which he doesn’t control. And he may not have a very good handle on making sure that everyone in the government speaks in one voice. But that’s not a reason to want a coup! I think democracy is again proving itself as not the very best of alternative options of government in Pakistan. And it forces the political community to take responsibility for what they’re doing. But, he (Zardari) is not in control of his country, he knows it and he says it. India has got to understand that he may not speak the truth about everything but he’s being very frank about it – he does not totally control the whole country.

Let’s just remind ourselves of what the Indian Prime Minister said some time ago. He talked about Naxalites in India who are playing a major role in a quarter of the country. So, it’s important not to become too high and mighty about this issue (of internal control). There are lots of serious problems here and in Western countries. And it’s very rare that a government or a Prime Minister feels in total control.

India will soon witness a general election in the next few months. What sort of government does the West expect from us? Would they like Manmohan Singh back as Prime Minister?

I don’t think the West has thought terribly deeply about this. I think most governments – if they’ve got existing good relations with the country – are happy to continue it. I don’t think there are major problems. India is seen as a bit prickly at international fora but much much better than it used to be in both, Congress and BJP times. In American and in Britain, it onside in the battle against terrorism. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another matter. But, obviously, there has been a closening of relations with America which is important. But, I don’t think there are preferences in terms of BJP or the Congress. I think what they want is a degree of stability. I think the idea of instability – political and economic - in India would worry them a lot.



The one issue that has defined this government has been the Indo-US nuclear deal. Do you think it has overshadowed or, in a sense, affected India’s bilateral relations with other countries such as Russia or China?

I don’t actually think it’s a major worrying issue for other countries. I think it was being made a bigger fuss of in India than anywhere else. It didn’t attract the kind of attention in America as it did here. I don’t think it was that kind of an issue. I think a lot of it here was about people dealing with old business and to which side you were on – stuff related to the cold war times. The debate here was about how close you get to your own enemies. The Left, in some ways, couldn’t stand it in their guts even if they saw some logic in it (the deal).

I think the Indo-US nuclear deal is a bit of a mistake to see it in global strategic terms. I don’t think it’s hugely significant. It is significant in terms of India’s attitude towards the rest of the world and its relations with the greatest powers of the world. Also, what this deal has also done is that it has de-hyphenated India-Pakistan as one subject. And it is India which has done it; not the rest of the world. And India should have done this a long time ago. Compared to India, Pakistan is a small country. India always behaved as if Pakistan was its equal and lowered itself to have an archaic battle at international fora about the wording on Kashmir which most people don’t understand. It’s just too complicated for even professional diplomats. For instance, the British Foreign Secretary (David Miliband) was unwise to say what he said. But, overall, there’s a sort of maturity about Pakistan and let’s see if it goes away again.

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