City of Djinns

I have only spent 6 years out of 24 in Delhi, but I consider myself a 'Dilliwala'. So, this is about Dilli.

This is not a travel guide, this is not a food guide, atleast that I am sure of. Then what is it, well this is something I cant answer, probably this is about Dilli as a city, its people, its monuments, its sights, its delicacies and I don’t know what else. This blog will not discuss unheard of places which you can visit, nor does it claim to dig out 'secret' restaurants and hang out places.

My credentials : I have been visiting Cousins in Mayur Vihar for as long as I can remember, lived in Janak Puri for 4 years, spent two of the best years of my life in North Campus and that is the reason why I attempt to write this.

Though I was born here, my first memories of the city are those of visiting my cousins from any of the numerous smaller cities where I spent the most of my growing up years. Those were the days when 'Jamuna Paar' was this godforsaken area and Mayur Vihaar was this hard to reach place, that you really had to convince the auto wallah to go there, tell him that he would easily find a 'sawari' back from Patpadganj. That Mayur Vihaar, which was like a self sufficient 'cluster' at that point of time, but for me that was Delhi. With its wide roads, DDA park next to Sanjay Gandhi lake, with loads of cars and buses on the road, that was my Delhi.

Then when I finished class IX my family moved to JanakPuri. Now this was a totally different Dilli, much different from the one I had grown up visiting. This was the Dilli where there were really loud neighbors next door, the Dilli where arguments over illegal construction and parking space were part of the daily routine. A 'Dilli' where Punjabi is everybody's first language, and you end up learning parts of it, whether you like it or not.

But the biggest shock for me was that in Dilli powercuts were as much a part of daily life as they were in all the smaller cities that I had lived earlier. For me Delhi (Mayur Vihar) was supposed to be this place where power cuts just didn’t exist).

This was the Dilli where I spent some of the most 'unhappening' years in the life of an Indian middle class teen. The ones where 'abhi career ke liye padhai kar lo, baad me sab set ho jaega'. And then when things got 'set' (or so I thought) I moved out of Delhi.

And the 'Vanvaas' lasted a decade less than that of Lord Ram, I was back here in 2008, and back I was in North Campus. This Dilli/Delhi was as different from my earlier Delhi/Dilli as Pasta from Tandoori Chicken as Subway from Karim's, as Metro from Blue Line buses. This was the Delhi of nightouts, of metro rides from Vishwavidyalaya to Rajiv Chowk,of drives up and down the ridge, of going to ComeSum at Old Delhi just for the heck of it, of BBG rides (Borrowed Bikers' Gang - that's what we called ourselves), of going all the way to Gurgaon for college parties.

These are the Delhis/Dillis that I am going to write about in posts up ahead.