City Food – Bhutta, Delhi Streets Food by The Delhi Walla - August 11, 2010August 11, 20105 Soul snack for the monsoon. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] It's a monsoon thing. As the air gets humid, the respite is in the dry, crackling, slightly burnt ears of corn, the bhutta in Delhi lingo. Street vendors selling cucumbers in the summer replace their stock with these sticks studded with soft kernels, the colours of which range from pale yellow to a golden shade. A vendor in central Delhi's Kasturba Gandhi Marg, like others, get the bhuttas each morning from Azadpur Sabzi Mandi, Asia’s largest vegetable wholesale market in north Delhi. He keeps the ear within its light green leaves called the husk. Peeling them reveal strands of silken threads spread out on the bhutta. They stuck in the
City Notes – The Connaught Place Re-builders General Photo Essays by The Delhi Walla - August 9, 2010August 9, 20102 The people behind CP's new look. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] It is the twilight hour in F Block, Connaught Place (CP). Amid apprehensions that the renovation work will not get over by October 3, the first day of the 2010 Commonwealth Games that are being organised in Delhi, tired-looking labourers are carrying on the mud work with shovels and spades. Delhi’s colonial-era shopping district is being given a major facelift in the run-up to the D-day. Roads have been dug up, corridors have been barricaded and subways have been demolished to make way for new ones. Shoppers have to hop over dug-up portions to go from one block to another. While many Delhiites are dreading the impression that foreign visitors
City Life – Emma Spotting in Delhi Culture General by The Delhi Walla - August 7, 2010August 7, 20105 Searching for a Jane Austen's heroine. [Text and picture by Mayank Austen Soofi] In 1815, she was handsome, clever and rich in Highbury, England. In 2010, she is bitchy, sexy and rich somewhere in upmarket South Delhi. The English novelist Jane Austen has come to our hot dusty city. An adaptation of her novel Emma, the new Bollywood chick flick Aisha shifts the focus to Emma-like girls in Delhi. “I’ll play a typical south Delhi brat with a Modern School background,” Sonam Kapoor, the screen Aisha told The Delhi Walla last year. “You will see me jogging in Lodhi Garden and shopping in Select Citywalk.” Where else in the Capital will you spot Dilli ki Emma? Gossiping in a GK-I café? Splurging
City Monument – Metcalfe’s Folly, Mehrauli Archaeological Park Monuments by The Delhi Walla - August 5, 2010August 5, 20106 A soul-stirring ruin. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] One dreamy ruin that you must visit when in love is the Metcalfe’s Folly in Mehrauli Archaeological Park, that deliciously dense jumble of trees, graves, and domes in south Delhi. On the peak of a grassy mound stands a stone canopy built in 1850s by Charles Metcalfe, an Indophile British, as a ‘folly’. The folly was a very British thing, a new building meant to look like old and to be viewed in a picturesque landscape. In itself, Metcalfe’s hexagonal structure is unremarkable. The columns are minimally carved; the semi-circular arches are not ornamental, the surface is cobbled. It is the folly’s lighthouse setting — commanding a view of the towering Qutub Minar, the
City Moment – The Conference of Birds, Basant Lok Market Moments by The Delhi Walla - August 3, 2010October 25, 20107 The beautiful Delhi instant. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Delhi Walla was in Basant Lok Market, South Delhi. I was standing against a circular pool in front of Modern Bazaar departmental store. The pool had no water. Instead, hundreds of pigeons were sitting on its dry surface, busy feeding on grains. It was early evening and though the area is a hangout zone for dating couples, movie-watching crowd (PVR Priya is just behind), booklovers (Fact & Fiction is nearby) and serious shoppers, I was the only person there. Suddenly, a salesman in a red shirt emerged from a Vodaphone outlet, on the other side of the pool. He kept walking straight and as he reached the pool’s boundary, he
Mission Delhi – Ajeet Singh Chauhan, Green Park Market Mission Delhi by The Delhi Walla - August 1, 2010August 1, 20107 One of the one per cent in 13 million. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] He fills the jug with cold milk, checks the temperature on the thermometer (it should be 32 F) and keeps the jug aside. He switches on the espresso machine and brews the ground coffee into the white primo cup, then turns on the steam muzzle and fills the milk jug with foam. After banging (breaking the air bubbles) and swirling (mixing the froth), he pours the milk into the primo cup and sprinkles chocolate powder on the top. Cappuccino is ready to be served. Ajeet Singh Chauhan, 28, has made the morning’s first coffee. The Delhi Walla meets him at a Costa Coffee outlet in