This used not to be a Delhi thing. I have lived in that city, as I have in Mumbai and Bangalore. Delhi was about the locals. The internationals always went to Mumbai, or sometimes Bangalore. So, when pictures of Chris Martin doing an impromptu gig at a Hauz Khas cafe started going viral, I was dumbfounded.
There was Martin, of course, but there was also the entire AIB gang, Vishal Dadlani and Frieda Pinto. They were hanging out there like they are expected to hand out in Fort or Bandra or somewhere such. But a cafe in Hauz Khas? I am still trying to wrap my head around this.
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Yes, Delhi is the national capital and the hub of politics, but since when have culture czars decided to consider it a port of call? Martin was in India for a social cause and I have the suspicion that he was in Delhi because he just got better rates for flying out of there. He walked into a pub for a drink and nobody would have come to know about this. But then there were Dadlani and Pinto, and Rohan Joshi and the rest of them, so obviously he had to come up with something, and he did. And now all of us sit sullen on Twitter, crying our eyes out over their good fortune.
No but seriously. I lived in Delhi five-odd years ago and even though the city had changed dramatically from the sleepy capital that it was once upon a time, it was still a city deeply steeped in tradition. Sure, there were whispers even back then of the new-age chic one could spot in places like Hauz Khas and of course there was Khan Market where the diplomatic crowd gathered. (My memory of the Stephen Hawking talk at Siri Fort in 2001 bolsters this impression.) But Delhi in the popular national imagination was still the city of babudom and influence where you could have the world's most expensive car run over you but where culture meant whatever had been approved and paid for by the government.
That was the impression at least. In truth, it wasn't as if Delhi did not get the gigs. When Bryan Adams toured India in 2011, he travelled to Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. But it was something about Delhi that made the idea of a gig there a highly niche affair, attended only by the "in-crowd". You felt that the city at large sniffed and looked askance at those performances.
Unlike Mumbai where it was Shiv Sena, that guardian of Marathi culture, which invited the King of Pop to perform as far back as 1996. I still remember a lustrous Sonali Bendre, dressed in a traditional sari, welcoming Michael Jackson with a pooja thali. Mumbai could carry off such blatant dichotomy without it coming across as a silly put-on. Delhi could not.
It was Mumbai, and to a lower extent Bangalore, where the real deal was. It was possible to spot young men in long hair and the occasional earring in these cities trying to rebel against the world and convert some of that sentiment into music. These people knew what they were talking about. I always had a hard time understanding the rebellion, to be honest, especially in genteel Bangalore, where these men (and they were mostly men) hailed from traditional backgrounds and returned to their simple meals and simpler homes after some rigorously violent head banging.
When these cities boasted underground clubs dedicated to, say, heavy metal, it made sense somehow, since these boys had carried around, or at least pretended to, a streak of rebellion. Delhi might have also had its pockets but one got the feeling that the pain there was not original. It was acquired, and the boys there were only imitating what they thought was "cool" or "trendy". Delhi was the perpetual follower, while it was the others that set the trends.
(I should mention here that my one memory of cultural bliss in Delhi was the piano hour at St Stephens College that I attended one afternoon during my brief stay on campus eons ago. But that was the only time I felt I had mistaken the city's cultural footprint.)
No more. After L'affaire Chris Martin, Delhi has truly arrived. And while the big players may have looked to the city even in the past, the kind of social media meltdown over this latest event will force one to revise one's so-far-sour impression of the city as India's potential cultural capital.
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