My most fashionable friend dumped her handbag on my dining table and announced in wonderment, "I passed a Starbucks in Punjabi Bagh!" Sounds innocuous; actually remarkable. A canny observer, she meant to say that West Delhi - new-rich, but to centre-city folk as poor in class as it is in trees - was suddenly kosher for global brands seeking Indian spenders. The contrast was with old-money, supposedly upper-crust and leafy South and Central Delhi, where in a previous age (that is, until a few years ago) any big brand would have fired its opening shots.
As anybody who visits our capital can observe, we Delhiites practice a rather mad segregation between the rulers and the ruled. The border between the green middle bit and the brown and grey outer swathes is so stark as to be shocking. Come down off a flyover through a clutter of commercial signboards and suddenly all you can see is low brick walls and large whitewashed houses peeping through abundant greenery. British-built Central Delhi is, as Peter Popham of the UK Independent wrote in Seminar magazine in 2002, "an act of sleight of hand, an imperial imposture, the grandest of frauds".
That essay is part of a slim collection of ageing pieces from the same periodical, titled Delhi: The First City (Academic Foundation, 2011). A number of the authors are decidedly Central and South Delhi names. It is fun to flip the pages of this book in Delhi today, when a new political party has shaken our picture of "the establishment", when the money sloshing around the city has long escaped the bounds of the centre-city - and when, yet again, talk arises of changing the nature of what is called Lutyens' Bungalow Zone (mistakenly, because Edwin Lutyens had little to do with these 1,100 bungalows).
The approach of the previous Delhi government was conservative, to say the least - the city's Master Plan 2021 rules out fresh construction or mixed land use in the LBZ - but then the former chief minister said more than once that she hated the idea of spoiling this green place. The new CM, and new New Delhi MLA, isn't from here at all; his own flat is in the outer swathes to the east. "Imperial imposture" is out, in style at least.
So the LBZ today looks more vulnerable, just as the outer swathes and Delhi's satellite cities are growing richer and less dependent on, not to mention less respectful of, the government in the green centre.
The centre-city essayists of the Delhi book see this change differently. " [As] New Delhi began to spread outwards slowly like a stain," begins journalist Anupreeta Das, before going on to describe economic migrants as "bloodsucking fleas" on the "arteries of power". Was that body clean and wholesome to begin with? These folk say it was. "By the '90s," writes artist Anjolie Ela Menon, "a loud and noisy population of nouveau riche puppies had taken over this other Delhi, flouting all those values that the Dilliwallahs had held dear." Others use phrases like "there was a time", "only to find" and "despite all this". And journalist Satish Jacob goes all the way back to Mughal times to paint an evenglow scene.
Certainly a few contributors do mention the fertilising and nourishing effects of millions of "outsiders". But such gloom! The ideal Delhi, here, is the remembered Delhi of the past, not any imaginary Delhi or even a Delhi of the future. And this is why a change in the DNA of the LBZ would be so welcome - it gives this city and its 21st-century thought leaders an opportunity to think of a better New Delhi, right from the heart.
rrishi.raote@yahoo.com
As anybody who visits our capital can observe, we Delhiites practice a rather mad segregation between the rulers and the ruled. The border between the green middle bit and the brown and grey outer swathes is so stark as to be shocking. Come down off a flyover through a clutter of commercial signboards and suddenly all you can see is low brick walls and large whitewashed houses peeping through abundant greenery. British-built Central Delhi is, as Peter Popham of the UK Independent wrote in Seminar magazine in 2002, "an act of sleight of hand, an imperial imposture, the grandest of frauds".
That essay is part of a slim collection of ageing pieces from the same periodical, titled Delhi: The First City (Academic Foundation, 2011). A number of the authors are decidedly Central and South Delhi names. It is fun to flip the pages of this book in Delhi today, when a new political party has shaken our picture of "the establishment", when the money sloshing around the city has long escaped the bounds of the centre-city - and when, yet again, talk arises of changing the nature of what is called Lutyens' Bungalow Zone (mistakenly, because Edwin Lutyens had little to do with these 1,100 bungalows).
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Simply put, the aim is to people the LBZ more densely so as to better utilise its excellent infrastructure, and to release land for non-state use. The government has already started on a small scale, by dropping new houses, for senior sarkaris naturally, onto the enormous lawns of a few of the so-called Lutyens bungalows.
The approach of the previous Delhi government was conservative, to say the least - the city's Master Plan 2021 rules out fresh construction or mixed land use in the LBZ - but then the former chief minister said more than once that she hated the idea of spoiling this green place. The new CM, and new New Delhi MLA, isn't from here at all; his own flat is in the outer swathes to the east. "Imperial imposture" is out, in style at least.
So the LBZ today looks more vulnerable, just as the outer swathes and Delhi's satellite cities are growing richer and less dependent on, not to mention less respectful of, the government in the green centre.
The centre-city essayists of the Delhi book see this change differently. " [As] New Delhi began to spread outwards slowly like a stain," begins journalist Anupreeta Das, before going on to describe economic migrants as "bloodsucking fleas" on the "arteries of power". Was that body clean and wholesome to begin with? These folk say it was. "By the '90s," writes artist Anjolie Ela Menon, "a loud and noisy population of nouveau riche puppies had taken over this other Delhi, flouting all those values that the Dilliwallahs had held dear." Others use phrases like "there was a time", "only to find" and "despite all this". And journalist Satish Jacob goes all the way back to Mughal times to paint an evenglow scene.
Certainly a few contributors do mention the fertilising and nourishing effects of millions of "outsiders". But such gloom! The ideal Delhi, here, is the remembered Delhi of the past, not any imaginary Delhi or even a Delhi of the future. And this is why a change in the DNA of the LBZ would be so welcome - it gives this city and its 21st-century thought leaders an opportunity to think of a better New Delhi, right from the heart.
rrishi.raote@yahoo.com