It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody who lives
there, nobody at all, has much good to say about Delhi. ……it is one of the
world’s great unloved destinations. Its inhabitants, Dilliwallas, take a
perverse pride in complaining about it. At best they tolerate it. At worse,
some despise it with the fire of a thousand June suns. In his novel Delhi
(1990), the irascible Khushwant Singh describes how the city appears to a
stranger:
a gangrenous accretion of noisy
bazaars and mean-looking hovels growing round a few tumble-down forts and
mosques along a dead river … [T]he stench of raw sewage may bring vomit to his
throat.
- and he’s a fan.
Sure, there have been writers who praise the city’s
magnificent imperial past as the heart of Mughal civilization. But they lament
its subsequent decline into Punjabi aggression and consumerist bling. Others
damn it with faint praise …………..
Delhi’s inhabitants are scarcely more popular…..According to
stereotype….New Yorkers are foulmouthed, over-caffeinated snobs. Parisians are
viciously rude and dipsomaniacal sexual deviants (if exquisitely dressed).
Londoners are famously grumpy, as territorial and hostile to eye contact as
feral dogs ………Other Indians are just as brutal in stereotyping Dilliwallas. In
this bitchy vision……it is a city of touts, thugs, gluttons, brats, voyeurs,
hustlers, crooked politicians, suits, pencil-pushers, pimps, perverts – every
kind of sinner. Khushwant Singh again:
They spit….; they urinate and
defecate whenever and wherever the urge overtakes them; they are loud-mouthed,
express familiarity with incestuous abuse and scratch their privates while they
talk.
Many migrants……can become more Indian than the Indians,
militantly committed to a very particular idea of India. And ordinarily, no
community is more militant about this cultural preservation than the Bengalis.
In India, the ‘Bongs’ are stereotyped as braining dweebs……Bengalis
are bespectacled, soft-handed and sweet-toothed intellectuals, most often to be
found spouting leftwing political philosophy late into the night. The only
thing they love more than fish is arguing, and the only thing they don’t argue
about is Bengali culture: they are utterly convinced that their language,
literature and brains are the greatest in all world history.
But in London my grandfather’s plucky Bengali spermatozoa
encountered my grandmother. In this formidable Finnish ice-hockey player with a
taste for bespectacled brown men half her height, he met his match. The two
nationalities could not be more different. Bengal is muggy, filled with
mangrove swamps at one end and the hilly tea plantations of Darjeeling at the
other; Finland is flat and icy. The population of the Kolkata metropolitan area
alone is almost three times the entire population of Finland; its population
density is a thousand times greater. The Bengalis chatter and eat sweets and
dodge sport; the Finns ski in grumpy silence. The two share only a depressing
handful of things: the aforementioned love of fish, the ability to survive
sauna conditions, and a disproportionate propensity to commit suicide.
But we never visited India. My father had been, and assured
us it wasn’t worth it. He told tales of despotic relatives, diarrhoea and
magpie-sized cockroaches………
…….there is a lot of money in Delhi – and I mean a lot.
You can almost smell it in the air: the warm and faintly sweaty vegetable smell
of old paper money.
…….its frontier town reputation: that beneath the veneer of
universities and galleries lurks a semi-wilderness of casual violence,
opportunism, machismo, and enormous self-made fortunes.
The upshot of this moneyed ferment is that house prices, and
increasingly rents, are becoming more and more expensively bubbly, hitting
Manhattan or even Moscow levels.
………..Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) advises,
China leads India on all metrics,
except that you don’t have
entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity,
sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or
punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.
……….a 2011 Credit Suisse survey suggested Indians typically
spend 7.5 percent of their income on education, ahead of the Chinese, Russians
and Brazilians.
……….India has only 1 percent of the world cars, and 10
percent of the world’s road deaths.
The toilets of the French, Britain’s historical enemy, are
mere holes in the ground, which emit a terrible stench of cheese and surrender.
Japanese toilets sing and vibrate and spurt unexpected jets of water; German
toilets contain a sinister tray to catch and inspect turds; all Australian
toilets are rusty outside dunnies full of poisonous animals.
‘………It’s a formality. Paperwork. Just like a buffalo needs
grass, the government needs paper.’
- - Tarun J. Tejpal, The Story of My Assassins
…………transfer of the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi,
during the spectacular imperial coronation durbar of 1911…………. Delhi was in the
boondocks, deprived of water and full of fever. Former viceroy Lord Curzon, a
Calcutta fan, felt moved to condemn it in London’s House of Lords as ‘a mass of
deserted ruins and graves.’………..Delhi presented to visitors ‘the most sorrowful
picture you can conceive of the mutability of human fortunes.’
Like the elephant India is, in the words of a longstanding
foreign correspondent on his way out, ‘a country easier to describe than to
explain, and easier to explain than to understand.’
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect
- - Paul Theroux
….there’s a venerable tradition of not doing a whole lot in
India. Its no accident that one of India’s most famous exports, meditation, is
basically about boredom. It means taking that grey husk of frustration and
tedium and repetition, and enclosing yourself in it, exploring its corners,
until its something like bliss.
Clumps of bored young men – they are almost always men – are
ubiquitous. They ‘hang out’, smoke bidis, snack, drink tea, drink booze, piss
on walls, do odd jobs, wander around, mutter and whistle and sing to one
another. At college they are loud and lascivious and obnoxious. In the parks
they blast cellphone love songs and hold hands and lie in each other’s laps (macho
Indian behavior is more overtly homoerotic than its English equivalent). They
stand around watching their friends work, lounging against walls, sprawled over
the city.
I watch them sidelong, they stare at me. These sleazy and
occasionally aggressive young men, purveyors of sexual harassment, are
flippantly termed ‘roadside Romeos.’ They are everywhere and they are threatening.
Often they leer and catcall at passers-by………Everywhere they seek to dominate
space. Boredom, anger, fear. It shapes the city’s psychogeography.
……….as in so many countries, is a dangerously large and
disaffected group who are really, really bored with the status quo. And prices
are rising. There are considerably more young men than women around. Cities
everywhere tend to attract more men, and in North India’s patriarchal rural
regions women are scarcer still. And all the time, Delhi’s wealth is in their
face……….India’s population may be surprisingly unrevolutionary – but as The
Economist wrote recently, perhaps the country’s rich ‘might want to pay
their security guards a little more, though. Just in case.’
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
In the same way that Spain has a handy way with bulls and
America with portion sizes, Indians excel at festivals.
Admittedly in my Indian travels around I have encountered a
crocodile, cobras (twice), giant venomous spiders, moonshine, wild dogs, a
scorpion, a convicted stalker, homemade guns, angry monkeys, angry bulls, angry
camels, a Mach 6 earthquake, and a short circuit that exploded a lightbulb and
sent fan blades whirling at my head. I have been escorted by the military
through an armed uprising, and drunk tea with a group of opium-addled
headhunters – skull-collectors rather than especially extreme corporate
recruiters – who had facial tattoos to show they’d succeeded in carrying off a
head or two. (They were friendly enough,
but their children threw rocks at me.) I’ve also been given warnings of varying
degrees of plausibility about the dangers presented by to me personally by
black bears, Islamist terrorists, tigers, fake gurus, wildfires, striking
transport workers, leopards, bandits, corrupt policemen, bull sharks, wild
elephants, Maoists, tsunamis, Pakistan, disgruntled cricket fans, and the
metre-long flesh-eating turtles released into the Ganges to help dispose of
half-burned corpses.
I have encountered precisely one of these in Delhi: the
earthquake.
…….murder. Other countries challenging India as new emergent
powers on the global scene include Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Nigeria.
Big cities in all four of these are far more dangerous than Delhi. Latin
American cities are in an entirely different league of violence. A widely
covered study published in early 2013 showed that five of the ten cities with
the world’s highest murder rates are Mexican, and fourteen of the fifty worst
are in Brazil. Four cities in South Africa and the United States also feature
in the top fifty, but not a single Indian city. In 2011, the homicide rate per 100,000
residents in Delhi was 2.7, versus 20.7 in Philadelphia and 58 in New Orleans.
That’s a rate not so different to London. Reassuring conclusion: you’re extremely
unlikely to be murdered.
Indian men – and, dare I say it, especially Delhi men – are
notorious for their stalkerish tendencies. Rare is the woman, Western or
Indian, who has not been pestered far, far beyond the point of flattery.
…..estimated 23,000 rape cases are stuck in the judicial
system. In 2011 its chief justice reported that of the Delhi High Court was
lagging 466 years behind schedule, despite the fact that it considers each case
for an average of only four minutes and 55 seconds. ‘It’s a completely
collapsed system,’ the prominent advocate Prashant Bhushan was quoted as
saying. ‘This country only lives under the illusion that there is a judicial
system.’
‘Hinduism respects women,’ one of my interviewees said, in
yet another of those answers that seems puzzling in retrospect, given our
interview was about pylons.
…….Indians do not distribute pleases and thank-yous with the
same wantonness (and insincerity) as the British.
……..Mark Twain, I ‘never did succeed in making those idiots
understand their own language.’
…….visually India is a graffiti wall. Across the country
different languages have different alphabets. Gujarati is crimped and hatless,
Bengali has gnarled runes, while the east coast’s Oriya (Odia) appears to made
up of cartoon Cubist faces…………Southern scripts have more curves ………Tamil is all
jalebi whorls, Kannada whorls with eyebrows, Malayalam McDonalds logos……..
India might just be the one big place where the internet has
yet to vanquish the power of print.
Nizamuddin is one of the Delhi’s more schizophrenic
neighbourhoods. It is named after the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and
simultaneously manages to host a urine-tinged railway station, a rather
covetable residential area, and a series of grubby chattering alleys of staring
eyes and pirate DVDs………at the end of these alleys is the saint’s shrine, and a
host of other tombs – including that of Inayat Khan, bearer of Sufism to London
and the father of a glamorous British spy.
Sufism is a mystical, ascetic brand of Islam, which over the
centuries fused bits and bobs of magic and other devotional traditions with Quranic
meditation ………..It welcomes all faiths; people of all religions visit to pray
for favours……The dargah is an oddly welcoming mausoleum, an onion-domed
and pillared shelter for the coloured tomb inside.
At a conference in Delhi I met a Nigerian who was studying
in Pune (near Mumbai – even more famous for its intolerance to migrants). She
spoke of insults in the street, of strangers touching her hair uninvited, and
how no Indian student would be seen hanging out with her. Nepalis are
stereotyped; Tibetan refugees are put in preventive detention……Nor is racism
confined to foreigners. Migrants from Bihar are mocked as crude, alien and
endlessly breeding……….Poor Muslims are accused of being ‘Bangladeshi
infiltrators,’ Kashmiris suspected of being terrorists, and everyone is judged
by how dark they are. All this is complicated by caste……Northeasterners face
particular discrimination, the beautiful Nagamese wife of a rugby player told
me: constantly asked for ID, called ‘chinki’ – an insult recently made
punishable with imprisonment – and treated as outsiders. In 2007, the Delhi
police produced the infamous Security Tips for Northeast Students/Visitors
in Delhi. ‘Dress code: When in rooms do as Roman does,’ it instructs, cryptically.
It goes on to warn Northeasterners against ‘creating ruckus’ by cooking their
‘smelly dishes.’ Boy does Delhi know how to win over the already disenchanted
margins…… The Nagas have become justly famous for their linguistic skills – ‘the
air is full of them!’ a middle-aged man told me, glaring at the plane’s
stewardesses – and all spoke four or five languages. But in the village there
was little employment, crap roads, no electricity …………
That India smells is a motif almost as classic as its
spirituality………..Blogs burst with horrified ramblings of travellers who have
forgotten their nose pegs. They complain about the smell of urine-soaked walls
and beaches covered in (human) turds. They complain about garlicky body odour
on public transport and rotting garbage in the heat. They complain about the
smell of cow dung, rivers of raw sewage, and offal around the Old Delhi
butchers………… But I think India’s stinkiness is seriously overplayed………the first
condition of understanding a foreign place is to smell it……….The problem is
that modernity is anti-smell. It might even be anti-nose entirely………’Civilisation’
means freeing us from streams of shit in the street, oniony dinner-table burps,
flatulent beasts……..Instead the world is scrubbed clean and neutered. Our workspaces
are chilled, food wrapped, flowers scentless, armpits deodorized, sewage safely
sealed on the other side of the U-bend. Noses dormant, retired like old
hound-dogs………..our noses are ignored, except perhaps at mealtimes, and when
they choose to dribble in the winter.
In India the nose is restored to its queenly place.
………..The glorious flat burnt smell of rain on hot dry earth
called manvasanai in Tamil, in English its little-known but evocative
name is ‘petrichor’ ………..
On one hand, bad smells play a potent role in upper-caste,
prejudice: traditional ‘untouchable’ work often involved ‘unclean’ substances
with unpleasant smells, like blood, corpses, leatherwork or human waste. Once
again, smell, disgust and bigotry appear closely linked. ………Pleasant or
auspicious smells are offered up to the gods…..
Journalist and professional sociopath A.A.Gill wrote, ‘If
New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked
uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is
slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.’ Delhi, then, might be an
ageing tsarina: ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid – and fond of bright
colours, pretty trinkets, and sex scandals. Like all grandes dames, she’s
showy, cash-splurging, hard to love, easy to photograph. Or perhaps, given her
recent reinvention, she’s more like a nouveau riche socialite – exactly as
above but on Twitter. The whole city jangles with theatricality, bling and the
so-bad-its-good.
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