A few hundred feet down the road was the exact same sign, facing the other direction. It informed our mirrors that, even before we finished braking, we’d already exited Delhi.

Back in India, it once took our chartered bus four hours to travel from Gurgaon in the south to Delhi’s border in the north. Colorado Delhi’s transit time was slightly more than three seconds.

So we turned the car around and returned to the Western edge of this new Delhi. And as we balanced our camera on the car to document our visit, our eyes landed upon a granite monument in the weeds. Its faded inscription offered few details beyond the vague promise that, some time in the past century, Colorado’s Delhi was a bit more lively than it seemed today.

Once our visit was duly immortalized, we ventured back into city limits. No Hauz Khas, no Saravana Bhawan, no Red Fort in this Delhi — just a boarded-up general store with a detached outhouse that speaks to the building’s age.

Behind the house, the requisite detritus of rural America: skeletons of cars, piles of wood, a fence that may have once enclosed livestock. Not a soul to be seen.

Not that we went to investigate. This is rural America, and it’s written in the Constitution that the moment you step onto private property, a man in red flannel long-johns must appear to spit and holler and shoot a shotgun into the air. We contented ourselves with admiring the faded Pepsi billboard on the side of the store from the safe side of the property line.

The paint is bleached, the windows are plywood, the lot is overgrown. But there is history here: some time in the past, this Delhi had traffic. People stretched their legs, admired the monument, and presumably bought Pepsi, although not enough to keep the store in business. And then, thus fortified with enough sugar to survive the coming federal grasslands, the bottles were tossed in the weeds, the kids were coaxed back into the cars, the Studebaker kicked up dust, and Delhi was forgotten.

But it took us longer to develop the dexterity native to a culture of forkless food. Our friends and coworkers would casually perform acrobatic right-handed eating feats we’d struggle to duplicate, like using one finger to hold roti in place while tearing off chunks with their forefinger and thumb. Anyone who has done this all their life will have no idea how much practice it took us to accomplish.

And bread was the easy part. Meat was far more challenging. While our dining partners were effortlessly picking chicken bones clean, I’d either be smearing gravy up to my elbow or sending chunks flying across the table directly at the whitest kurta in the room.

In the guise of taking touristy pictures, we picked up techniques from other diners at Karim’s.

We learned to appreciate eating with our hands far sooner than we actually got the hang of it. But while the lack of silverware eventually ceased to confound us, the general shortage of napkins usually left me looking like a Jackson Pollock painted in the medium of korma.

Jenny would encourage me to point out the pronoun in that last sentence: I’m the slob in this relationship.

Even when I use a fork, I tend to require a half-dozen napkins in every meal. There’s clearly some general fault in my hand-eye-mouth coordination for which I compensate by using my lips like pinball flippers. So when you remove my fork as a tool for accuracy, every bite leaves my face looking like Heath Ledger’s Joker.

In fact, until I reached Delhi, I had no idea that I have an unconscious habit of wiping my mouth and my hands after almost every bite. But my attention was soon drawn to the challenges of this habit for two reasons: first, because there were always far fewer napkins at the table than I was comfortable with; and second, because the napkins were almost always smaller and less absorbent than I required to efficiently cleanse myself of my culinary lipstick.

This picture comes from our adventure with Karim’s famous goat. Note the bounty of food. Note the dearth—and the apparent absorbency—of napkins.

I don’t know if this neurosis is bred into most Americans or is  unique to me. Throughout the meal, I’d eye the napkin supply, imploring myself to conserve my resources; but a napkin junkie can’t resist his stash for long. Soon I’d be carefully folding and refolding my napkin in search of surface area not yet stained by my shame. And by the end of the meal, it still usually looked like I’d used my forearm to stir a cauldron of dal.

Why so few napkins? Supply and demand. Indian diners are given fewer napkins because they require fewer napkins. First of all, they’ve learned to get the food in their mouth, not on it. More importantly, they scrub their hands like surgeons before and after every meal. And during the meal, they just hold their hands in front of them to protect their clothes. Nobody worries about messy fingers during mealtime—when you’re done, you just go wash.

Their wash always gave me my opportunity. The moment my companions stood for the sink, I’d pounce on their pristine napkins and satisfyingly squeegee a meal’s worth of morsels off my fingers. But the evidence of my barbarism would remain: a mountain of dirty napkins stacked in my plate. Eventually I adopted the habit of hiding a handkerchief in my lap for surreptitious finger cleaning, and then folding it into my jeans when I was done so no one could see how sauce-laden it was.

From then on, for the duration of my stay in India, my pockets smelled delicious.

Among the yellowed pages were some of our favorite places as they were before we knew them. Like the  Singapore River in the 1960s, when the Clarke Quay steps — which are today crowded by the young and hip licking ice cream and watching drunken expats across the river — was a stagnant chaos of fishing boats and standing puddles and floating trash.

We also rediscovered Delhi in the 1980s, immediately after the Asiad Games. No pictures of the Lollipop building, alas, but the article sang the glories of the new flyovers and a presented an image Chandni Chawk so familiar as to be proof that the street is ageless.

And then there was a May, 1963 cover story. “India in Crisis” was the headline, referring to a historical fact of which we were previously unaware: in 1963, apparently, all of India expected to be invaded by the Chinese.

Here’s how the author justified his title:

Even as we talked, Communist Chinese troops forced their way deeper into Ladakh and the North East Frontier Agency, and India’s ill-armed jawans fought desperately to hold the world’s loftiest battlefields. Towns along the Himalayan border blacked out; home-guard forces in Calcutta and New Delhi frantically dug trenches and put up air-raid defenses. India’s cherished neutrality lay shattered—perhaps forever—and the nation was united as never before.

Despite the ominous title, though, the “crisis” question quickly takes a back seat to the author’s deep love of India and its people. Throughout his piece, he wrestles with a  singular question: how do you define India to those who have never experienced it? The article begins with this very challenge:

I met him one night in a Banaras hotel. Quite by chance, we had walked out together onto the darkened veranda after dinner. Now we stood chatting and listening to the nighttime sounds of an Indian city.

He was about eighty—a retired lawyer from Calcutta—dressed in an old-fashioned way and with an old-fashioned manner of speaking. We talked of the difficulty of explaining his country to anyone who had never been there.

“Look here,” he said suddenly. “Suppose all Europe could somehow be united under one government, with one parliament and one prime minister.

“Now, take away two-thirds of Europe’s area and three-quarters of its wealth,” he said “but leave most of its people. Let Spaniards speak Spanish and Bulgars speak Bulgarian. Let Turks mistrust Russians and Russians bluster at Englishmen. In short, leave everything else just as it has always been.

“Now,” he asked in his courtly, rather Victorian manner, “what would you have?”

He paused impressively.

“Why, my dear sir,” he said, “you would have something very like modern India.”

Then he bade me goodnight—“Old men must have their sleep,” he said—and left me alone to ponder his words.

From that introduction, the author journeys across the country. And it was as fascinating for us today as it must have been for subscribers forty-seven years prior. Varanasi, for instance, had fewer space invaders, but was otherwise as we know it.

And while we never made it to Kolkata, we instantly recognize this icon of the city.

And of course, here’s Chandni Chawk in 1963…

…and then as we first encountered it 44 years later.

A few more cars, a few more colors, but otherwise an ageless street indeed.

Throughout the article, the author attempted to understand the country in which he traveled. He summed up his attempts to do so in a way to which we could easily relate: “I was sometimes angered by my own inability to understand one aspect or another of this most complex of all nations.”

Complementing the article was a report from the battlefields of Ladakh, where India was defending its border three miles high in the Himalayas.

The highlight of the article was the quote that introduced the gallery of India’s diverse people. We reprint it below for its poetry and insight, and for how it amplified our longing to return. Soon, India, soon…

India presents a sample of its 440 million faces

People are India’s pride—and problem. The nation’s myriad faces all have mouths to feed and eyes that look questioningly for what the future may bring to a land that mixes automobile factories and wooden plows with jet aircraft and crossbows.

India is atomic physicists at Bombay and Naga tribesmen in Assam. It is ruby-decked maharajas and ragged street sweepers, Oxford-trained philosophers and unlettered farmers. It is tough Sikh soldiers, peace-loving Jain monks, Hindus, Moslems, Zoroastrians, Christians, Buddhists, and Jews. India wears fedora and fez, turban and Gandhi cap, the latest London fashion and the simplest loincloth. It speaks more than 800 languages and dialects, ranging from the Hindi of millions to Assamese tongues used by as few as half a dozen.

Seeing this reminded me of the name I was given in our Delhi office. Not that anyone had any trouble pronouncing my name, but my coworker Dipankar insisted that if I was going to work in India, I needed to have a proper Indian name. None of this American “Dave” nonsense. He studied me intensely for a moment before announcing to the office that I was henceforth rechristened as “Dev Prasad.”

The name stuck. That’s what half of my coworkers still call me.

———-

Clicking around Youtube to find more from Goodness Gracious Me, I came across this sketch, which is even funnier than the last one.

And this one is just weird.

Thanks for the lead, Sumit! If anyone else has any other Indian-related comedy bits to share, please post in the comments. Russell Peters, perhaps?

One thing is clear: judging from this promo, they already stole my joke about Frogger. Eagle-eyed readers will have to see if they used any other jokes from this site.

Hey readers, what do you think about portrayals of India like this? It’s clear they’re going to make jokes about “funny” headwear and “silly” names, but they’re also going to take their digs at the American lifestyle as well. Based on this four-minute promo, readers, what are your thoughts?

Streetside shrine near Nehru Place. Photo by us.

Flowers are the foundation all Delhi’s nasal signature. It’s the reminder that the plagues of the expanding city are fleeting, and that nature will reassert itself when humans are done playing their games — the frangipani trees will rise through the pavement, the oleander will climb the steps of Raisina Hill, wrap the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and collapse it in the floral embrace in which all civilizations eventually end.

Flowers bloom in Delhi’s parks and on its medians; frangipani trees drip blossoms onto the sidewalks; discarded orange garlands hang from tree branches. (We were told that you’re not supposed to throw ceremonial flowers away — instead, you hang them from trees so they can return to nature). More ubiquitous than the blooming flowers are those that are for sale: the market florists in their canvas tents, the old ladies stringing together bright orange marigolds outside of temples, the young boys walking through traffic selling plastic bags full of petals to scatter when you get home.

Diwali-time flowers for sale in Hauz Khas market. Photo by us.

All these flowers come from wholesale markets. And Sunday may be your only chance to tour these markets — because, according to Red Earth India, they’re about to close.

Red Earth is the organization that helped us discover the joy (and bhang) of Holi. This weekend, they’re hosting a tour of Delhi’s three main wholesale flower markets — all three of which, they tell us, the city is soon shutting down. Here’s what they say:

The walk will take you to the three main flower markets of Delhi. The flower markets of Delhi are temples of beauty amidst the concrete jungle of the city, and an integral part of the city’s heritage and culture.

Delhi flower market. Picture by Flickr user Douglas Martell. 

Sadly however, the Government of Delhi, in an extremely myopic vein is relocating these flower markets to one singular flower market in Ghazipur. We at The Genda Phool Project however are formulating a strategy of building public opinion against this proposal. We are working towards the possibilities of a campaign to save these markets on grounds of right to livelihood, issues of displacement, as well as issues of urban heritage and aesthetics, and those of people’s participation, involvement and consent in development initiatives.

Each of the three flower markets is beautiful in that they have a distinct and unique character, which will be lost once they are relocated in a strange ‘flower market building’ on the outskirts of the city.

Another flower market in Delhi. By Flickr user kdombrowski. (Spot the monkey!)

We will start our Phool Mandi walk with the market at Baba Kharak Singh Marg, opposite Hanuman Mandir. The mandi operates from 4 am to 9 am, and accomplishes business worth crores in this duration. The flash in the pan phenomenon – here now, gone in a second, is fascinating. This is the city’s largest flower market, and specialises largely in cut flowers of all varieties and even some dry flowers and flower decoration equipments.

From New Delhi we move to Old Delhi, to explore the Genda Phool Mandi at Fatehpuri Masjid, Chandni Chowk. Again, only a morning mandi. Farmers and flower sellers are seen milling around, and again, by around 9 am the mandi vanishes, and the spice market of Khari Baoli, around which the mandi is located, emerges. This mandi only sells genda phool (marigold flower) in its loose form.

A Blueline tries to camouflage itself. Photo by Bradford Daly.

Finally, we will take you to another city of Delhi – Mehrauli. The Mehrauli flower market again largely specialises in Genda Phool (in loose and garland form) but also some cut flowers. This Mandi however, is open all day, unlike the other two which are temporary / morning ones.

Do join us for this one, it may be one of your last chances to see these lovely flower markets if the government has its way. But we are hoping it will not…”

It sounds like a spectacular tour. Here are the details:

• Sunday 18th July 2010
• 6 am: Collecting at meeting point
• 11 am: Walk finishes at meeting point
• Meeting Point: Near Ticket Counter, Dilli Haat, Opp. INA Market
• Please park your vehicles here, the group will proceed in an AC bus from here.
• Contribution: Rs. 500/- per person.
• No contribution to be paid for children if they are sharing a seat.
• To register and for details contact Himanshu Verma / 41764054 / himanshu@redearthindia.com. (Make sure you tell him you read about this here!)
• Please carry the following: umbrella / hat, water.
• We will provide some sharbats (traditional Indian cold drinks) / tea / refreshments on the bus.
• Carry bags for buying flowers. Say no to plastic!
• Dress Code: Wear genda colours – orange, yellow, red & maroon.

We encourage all our readers to go. Send us pictures that we’ll post here after the event!

Had a question for you guys. Have you ever been out clubbing in Delhi or to a pub in the evening. Would they let you guys cut the queue and let you enter even if to the rest of the people waiting they’d say the club is full?? It kind of co-incides with the privileges to white-folk in India. If you guys have a story regarding – think it could be funny, especially with the humor you two have. Hope to see both of you in September!

We’d be lying if we didn’t admit skin-based advantages are bestowed on foreigners in India. Auto drivers, for instance, would hone in on us at the expense of everyone else waving their arms at them. (And they’d give us choice grumbles when we’d refuse to cut ahead of those who’d been bypassed their rightful ride.) The sidewalk chaiwallah near my office would always boil a fresh batch for me, even as he poured from a premade kettle for the factory workers who arrived the same time as I did. And while the guards at Saket Citywalk would grope us for poorly-hidden bombs just like every Indian shopper — as if Al Qaeda’s training manuals advised keeping their explosives in their front pockets — their hands always seemed to linger more tenderly with us.

Wait, that’s not a good thing.

Also, Al Qaeda always obeys signs. Image by Flickr user 3_second_memory.

So we don’t deny that white people are given deference in India. But Jenny and I will insist that we never actively took advantage of it. Especially when it came to queues.

In fact, there were many times when our foreign-ness made us easy beacons for queue abuse. Our American standards of personal space always meant three or four fellows could slip into queue in front of us between the moment our eyes began to blink and the moment the blink was completed. If we weren’t constantly crotch-checking the people ahead of us, we learned, we might as well be moving backwards.

Image by Flickr user Loulou H.

And there was certainly no advantage for us at tourist sites — we’d have to elbow our way up to the ticket counter just like everyone else, jamming our fistful of bills under the metal grating along with all the others, waving the sweet scent of sweaty rupees under the ticket taker’s nose until his eyes met ours and our transaction was complete.

We certainly could have bulldozed queues and hopped unrightful autos like the worst of the tourists. Such modern expressions of the Imperialist mindset are impassively tolerated by the citizens of our host country; Indians are far more polite to Western rudeness than we Westerners would be to such behavior back home. But Jenny and I saw ourselves as ambassadors, and we fashioned our queuing behavior accordingly.

In fact, we recall a time when our fellow back-of-the-queuers tried to invoke our “white privilege” for us. This was at the conclusion of our birdwatching trip to Bhatarpur, when we decided to catch the late afternoon train back to Delhi rather stay another night and leave as scheduled in the morning. Arriving at the train station, we dutifully joined the 20-person queue; but, being off the tourist track as we were (Bharatpur gets its share of Westerners, but most have arranged their tickets in advance), we were quickly noticed.

“Ticket Queue – Bharatpur Junction Railway Station – India” by Flickr user string_bass_dave. (Who isn’t me.)

“You please go,” said the man directly in front of us, gesturing to the head of the line. Other nearby members of the queue signaled their agreement. But Jenny and I shook our heads and smiled in polite refusal. They insisted again. We refused again. They gestured more adamantly, insisting that our ticketing needs outweighed theirs; we refused more theatrically, insisting that progressive values can be no better illustrated than via a multiracial ticket queue.

Our egalitarian insistence won the day. Although twenty minutes later, when we reached the window and discovered we’d been in the wrong line the whole time, we kinda wished it hadn’t.

———–

Incidentally, when Gayatri said, “Hope to see both of you in September!”, she was talking about our book release party. She knows about it because she’s on our mailing list (and following us on Twitter).

We’re expecting the big event about a month before the Commonwealth Games. We already know the official title, which we’ll reveal, along with the cover design, soon. (The title of our book is NOT “Our Delhi Struggle” — as we’ve mentioned before, we regret that name, and we’re not going to make the same mistake.)

Beyond Delhi, we’re hoping for release events in Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, and so on. You, dear reader, have direct influence in the matter: email us to join our mailing list, and then pledge in the comments below that you’ll attend an event in your city. Our publisher will surely take note.

Great job, WebChutney! If you’ve got any free time, maybe you can make an animation for our book? Just imagine how much fun you could have animating two Americans taking autorickshaws, buying vegetables, and working at computers. (Or if you want something more exciting, you could take inspiration from our poster…)

This system is not unique to Delhi.

A recent New York Times article showed that Delhi’s Blueline is simply one (admittedly extreme) example of a worldwide municipal phenomenon. And this pattern seems to spontaneously replicate itself wherever a few initial conditions come into existence: high population density, poor public transit, private leeway to address public failings, and weak government oversight. Including, as it turns out, New York City.

Yup, I used the same picture last time, too.

The Times article was about the rise in competition, violence, and recklessness among the private vans that ferry passengers to and from New York neighborhoods that mass transit doesn’t quite satisfy. As in Delhi, the city nominally regulates this system: the routes are predetermined, licenses are required, and rules do exist. But like Delhi, the system has evolved faster than it can be controlled — and it’s begun to assemble itself into the shape and structure that Delhi has taken to the extreme.

Commuter vans are a familiar sight in many city neighborhoods, linking parts of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx not served by subway lines to subway stations and also to the financial district in Manhattan and to a large mall in Nassau County. The routes, which are defined by the city’s Transportation Department, are meant to supplement the public transit system, not compete with it, though that is not always the case.

There are nearly 300 van drivers in New York who abide by the rules, paying thousands of dollars a year in licensing fees and insurance. They are outnumbered by hundreds of drivers who work the same routes, but have no permits and no insurance, and whose numbers have increased as the economy has soured.

Picture from the New York Times.

I rarely saw these vans when I lived in New York; I was always lucky enough to live near the subway. The one time I distinctly remember seeing them was in 2004, on a crowded strip of Flatbush Avenue, far beyond the parts of Flatbush I normally traveled. We’d just moved back from London, and I was driving to return the U-Haul Jenny and I had rented to move out of storage. The reason these deep Brooklyn vans stuck in my mind is because they appeared almost identical to what we’d seen on a visit to Cairo a few months prior to that moment. In both Cairo and now in New York, the vans idled curbside, half-full of passengers, with competing drivers shouting in rapid-fire slang the names of their destinations. I couldn’t make sense of what they were shouting — like in Cairo, and like I’d come to see in Delhi, the system had evolved its own vernacular.

To support this point, I just read this article about Cairo’s “microbus” system. If you change “microbus” for “Blueline” they might as well be talking about Delhi:

Microbus drivers! The very words elicits disapproving reactions from taxi drivers, private car drivers, pedestrians and the municipal authorities, police and the traffic authority. The reactions range from suspicion to open hostility and even envy. Taxi drivers complain that microbus drivers compete to pick up passengers, speed, and therefore are among the leading causes of accidents. Microbus drivers generally constitute a major menace to public well-being and safety in their view.

A microbus in Cairo. Image by Flickr user richardavis.

Cairo, Delhi, New York — if I’ve come across these systems in my own travels, then they surely must be assembling anywhere there are lots of people, few transit options, and limited government intervention into private solutions. These are spontaneously identical structures, these disparate fledgling Bluelines; the desires of commuters and of drivers independently assemble into mirror systems. And they set in motion predictable effects. From the New York Times:

Anthony Henry’s commuter van rolled west along Merrick Boulevard in Queens, packed nearly to capacity with nine passengers. It was 6:50 on a Friday morning, and the path ahead of him was clear until suddenly it wasn’t: A van with a wobbly left rear tire, illegally plying the same route, burst in from a side street and barely cleared a car parked at the corner to pull ahead of Mr. Henry.

“Look at this guy right there, picking up my passengers,” Mr. Henry, 47, said, clicking his tongue as the van swooped to the curb and scooped up two people waiting. “It’s a war out there.”

Compare that to the article about Cairo:

Last month there was a particularly nasty accident on the Corniche at one of the main entrances to the suburb of Maadi, eight kilometres south of Cairo. Survivors said they had asked the driver several times to slow down. Belongings were strewn across the street. Mercifully, the death toll was not high, but two lives were lost, and several passengers sustained serious injuries after the bus swerved off the road. Few emerged from the incident unscathed. Survivors said the driver took the curve too fast, trying to race ahead of another microbus alongside.

In each city, each driver on the route is in competition with every other driver on the route. Sound familiar? The Times’ article hints at the danger, destruction, and fatalities New York’s version could eventually come to:

… Beyond a financial threat, their legal competitors say the unlicensed van drivers are a growing safety menace. “They’ll run red lights, they’ll drive against traffic, they’ll cut you off.”

A Blueline during rush hour. Image by Flickr user parveennegi1979.

When I wrote my essay last year, Delhi was pledging to eliminate the Blueline in time for the Commonwealth Games. A quick look into the status of that pledge reveals setbacks, if not outright failure. It’s not surprising: the same pressures that drive Delhi’s death toll have also made a few men extremely rich, and busting a cartel is difficult even in the best of circumstances.

There’s a lesson here. Order has to be imposed before the system moves to the next phase: consolidation of power.

In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see if New York’s media evolves a response to this stimulus to mirror the way Delhi’s media has. This, too, is a self-replicating pattern of response: outrage stokes sales. If New York City were to continue in Delhi’s extreme direction, you could expect the New York Post to start publishing a dramatic daily death count of its own.

But even as NPR reports that major corporations are horking Vijay’s Bollywood aesthetic, it’s important to bear in mind that while one Bollywood artist may be experience a resurgence, many more have faded into the wake of multiplex cinemas and digitally-printed movie posters. And now we learn that it’s not just in India — in Pakistan, too, the art form is dying.

Royal Park, a place in Lahore still known for the film business, used to have many workshops where seasoned commercial artists like S Rahi, M Younas, J Arfi, Sarwar and others worked and taught students, Mani explains. “There were a number of cinemas around the area of Royal Park. Some of them have turned into commercial theatres and others into parking lots or restaurants. 12 years ago, around 100 established artists were working on film hoardings and they had many students too but you can hardly find any such artists now,” he said.

A sad situation. Perhaps some bloggers in Lahore can track down one of these artists, commission a painting, and start a parallel resurgence?