Dec 14, 2006 07:42 PM
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Ring out the old, ring in the new…
The grandest durbars in the world, “paradise on earth” quoted by bards and Urdu poets, praised by the genteel calligraphers and courtesans, abode of Nehru’s family of Kashmiri Pandits, revered and celebrated, but ending in decay…
What Alfred Tennyson wrote for the New Year sadly holds well for the capital of many kingdoms. This is the Delhi which rose and fell, rose and fell, with every change in destiny of its rulers was woven into the destinies of its peoples. Even the partition of India spelled destruction for this Old part of the modern metropolis. Old Delhi dies and suffocates and unspeakably passes away with every passing second…
Its monuments still stand grand, still evoke the same sense of grandeur and radiate an unspeakable effervescence of its magnificent past.
Old Delhi is eons of spaces and time removed from the chic shell of New Delhi. And the video which I shot in Jama Masjid seems to make time stand still – a place where pigeons still flock in hundreds, nay, thousands like they used to when Humayun freshly perched on its towers…
This place is haunted… and I am not referring to a bird haunt.
