[Reader-list] on Delhi

[subhrodip sengupta]

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: subhrodip sengupta <sub_sengupta at yahoo.co.in>
To: Readers list Yousuf Sarai. <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Monday, 10 August, 2009 1:57:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] on Delhi


U know, I attended a seminaar by some reknowned Social Worker. Evry 3rd line was 'Aur Ma-beheno ke saath shosan hota hain!' (for present purposes,chicks not allowed!) Hilariously, most of the so called moms and sis left the discussion tired of the topic. True a hilarious note, but neither an insult, U know, I am poor and am sure the book'l take some time to reach the libraries, so hav no right to criticise;
nor an inabbriated a/c of a frustrated denpo(A person who thinks knows too much). Somehow amongst all crimes, only rape seems to be highlighted. However, leaving the mentality of MAle-dominated lineARAGE, I'd argue that though these have diraect physical and hormonal damage, as far as mental trauma is concerned many crimes are as bad.  I argue the hymen exists elsewhere... There are many good things about feminism, but this I feel is a another form of reductionism.  Thankfully there exists something which still arouses the society...................


This was a hilarious start to some more grave issues, precisely 2 distinct one which I wish 2 take up, I ought have taken one of  them, concurrently 2 weeks ago, but precisely for long hours involved in editing, very conviniently shirked. 
First on Gurgaon:
What I have learnt is in many pockets, Rickshaw pullers are called on their mobile phones,a truely novel thing...........
My experiences are quite vivid with a similar, may be not in terms of investment and culture, but in pattern of development, Dwarka, on which I'll try to jointly elaborate on this issue, involving the 'biker Gang' as well(they include not only sikhs or even jaats but Biharis and UP'ites as ell)
In every other convergence( classical ) model of 'development', we talk of convergence, adjustment of MPL/MPK( through various mechanisms, including learning in classical sense), a term which is dubious, for the latter is indeterminate,  promoted by free trade, What happens actually is quite different thing. Leaving out things like Wine, labour constitutes nearly 70% of a commodities cost. So, in development, in order to keep feed of properly skilled or highly skilled labour, at cheap rates, we need labour or mass labour to be cheaper....................... We can say thus two roads are created=== a high road, of people who can really afford the 22K+ flats in Gurgaon and the super-expensive sabzis et-al max cost extracted by the rentier clas and the Haftas, and outsiders, who have no stake in the place's culture. While Gurgaon even gets it's skilled feed from adjoining places like Dwarka, most of the workers in both places come from neighboiuring
 villages on Haryana which have their own culture, law and governance. The result is both the defenders and offenders come from the same place and culture, while the beneficiary or the woman on the street is left moire vulnerarable. However I'd reject all stories of reporting a crime which I fell are consoling stories, and attribute to the records of increasing crime a simple tendency Voyeurism, looking through Key-hole, diversed from immidiate society in immadiate conomic relations, a man does not 'belong to' his surroundings, nor a woman! A dead body was taken from a pool in Dwarka, A row of appartments lay opposite to the site. A amn robbed of his car and stabbed. There he lay, who knows alive and yet no body reported. MAy be of fear of getting picked up. But why, not even later?
Another experience, quite distant explores deeper in. We have all seen stories of gals getting harrassed in hotels. Yet many of the good ones are strictly reluctant to keep a single woman sans indemnity from any influencial group. In villages they give shelter, in cities, devoid of clan and confidence, we turn essentially voyeuristic and sarcastic of everyone else, thus finding a friction of cultures here. In villages since a city dweller doesnt get mixed with them , except where he tries to snatch land from them, they are usually friendly.............
Incity,a race is on A dal is on betting for union, Boldly, rules are broken, women insulted called randis, though I do not find any abuse in that except victinsising and mass humiliation, the conflict goes on. Here we are biharis, punjabis, tamils, marwaris, jainsetc, conflicting with each other out in the open. The friction of values much stronger. , , , ,  , , That is why women get little support and shelter here, because of dogmatism and narrow interest politics. Delhi is an elaboration, not an exception(Based on true experiences at a Kalibari at Safdarjung Enclave). 
Yup Gurgaon is gliterring coz it is newly planned, but we need expert health care etc there too!




________________________________
From: Naeem Mohaiemen <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
To: sarai list <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Sunday, 9 August, 2009 8:49:31 PM
Subject: [Reader-list] Sam Miller on Delhi

"Twelve of India’s 54 billionaires live in the city, but the majority
of its citizens are poor, powerless migrants from rural areas in
India, Nepal and Bangladesh. It is one of the most unsafe cities in
India for women, who are murdered, raped and harassed at home and in
public more widely than anywhere else in the country, while the use of
expensive ultrasound technology to enable the selective abortion some
24,000 female foetuses every year has resulted in a skewed sex ratio
of 820 girls to every 1,000 boys."


The National (UAE)
In his new book, Sam Miller tackles Delhi’s disparities by walking
through it, eschewing its new arterial roads and flyovers for back
streets and slums. Siddhartha Deb considers the city he discovers.

Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity
Sam Miller
Jonathan Cape
Dh94

On October 31, 1984, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was
gunned down in her Delhi bungalow by two Sikh bodyguards. There was a
bloody war going on between Sikh separatists and the Indian state, and
the assassins were said to have been outraged by Gandhi’s decision to
send soldiers into the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines, to
capture a separatist leader. After a brief period of calm, a process
of savage retribution began in many parts of the country, directed at
Sikhs who had nothing to do with the killing or the separatist
movement. Delhi, despite being the most heavily policed city in the
country, saw the worst of such violence. Leaders of the Congress
party, then in power, led mobs through the alleyways of poor
neighbourhoods like Trilokpuri, where they pillaged and murdered,
often setting people on fire after dousing them with kerosene. By the
time the army took control, nearly 3,000 people were dead.

Twenty-five years later, none of the senior Congress functionaries who
directed the mobs – and whose names are well known – have been
punished. The killings of 1984 have instead become one more incident
relegated to the past by an elite singularly obsessed with entering
the future. As for Delhi, it has been busy transforming itself for the
past decade, embracing the market economy of the West and furiously
erecting shopping malls, five-star hotels and flyovers. The upper
classes of Delhi talk about plans to remake it into a futuristic
“world city” (a goal usually proclaimed by posters on the walls of
public restrooms), and gesture with pride at the new train system
whose steel-coloured cars can be seen racing across the skyline.

But millennial Delhi remains an unequal, violent place. Twelve of
India’s 54 billionaires live in the city, but the majority of its
citizens are poor, powerless migrants from rural areas in India, Nepal
and Bangladesh. It is one of the most unsafe cities in India for
women, who are murdered, raped and harassed at home and in public more
widely than anywhere else in the country, while the use of expensive
ultrasound technology to enable the selective abortion some 24,000
female foetuses every year has resulted in a skewed sex ratio of 820
girls to every 1,000 boys. As for the new train system, it is an
exception in a city where public transportation is erratic and unsafe
and the roads are resolutely hostile to pedestrians. In every way, the
high-rises and slums of Delhi are filled with so many stories of
disparity that the city demands the kind of muckraking attention that
Upton Sinclair, for instance, brought to a similarly corrupt Chicago a
century ago. But even within India, there are few books on Delhi that
compare to recent writing on Bombay, from Suketu Mehta’s nonfiction
account, Maximum City, to Vikram Chandra’s thriller, Sacred Games. In
spite of the city’s energetic publishing scene, its best writers,
usually people who have migrated there from other parts of India, seem
uncertain about how to engage their new home.

This invisibility of Delhi, the way its most significant stories flare
briefly into headlines before being rapidly extinguished, is something
I think about every time I return there. So when I started reading Sam
Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity in a local bookstore, I was
intrigued to find that he had tackled Delhi’s disparities head on by
walking through it. Miller, a BBC journalist who has lived in the city
for seven years, writes: “If you don’t walk in Delhi, large parts of
the city will be invisible to you. Its slums are mainly situated away
from the main roads, hidden from the upmarket residential areas.” He
knows his project is dangerous – pavements and pedestrian crossings
are rare, and speeding vehicles are known to run people over – but he
thinks the effort worthwhile, not only for the narrative frisson it
yields, but also because it increases the possibility of sudden,
serendipitous encounters, especially with the hidden poor.

A writer walking through the madness of Delhi needs a method, not
least because the route one chooses determines the story. Miller is
aware of his literary precedents: Baudelaire, whose flâneur strolled
the boulevards of 19th-century Paris at night, thereby encountering
pimps, prostitutes and police agents; WG Sebald, whose walks along the
Norfolk coast of England in The Rings of Saturn offered a slow,
melancholic consideration of the once-frenetic energy of the mansions
and hotels of the region, now fallen into ruin; and Ian Sinclair,
whose “psychogeographical” approach of walking along a route suggested
by an arbitrary letter drawn on a London map helped create a portrait
of a city unknown to tourists or gentrifiers.

After reading about the concentric circles used to build Muslim cities
in India, Miller chooses a spiralling circuit for himself. It was an
astute decision, ensuring not only that he would cross tightly
segregated demographic zones, but also that he would follow the
circular layout of the old Connaught Circle and the two Ring Roads,
once central to the city’s layout, but now obscured by the hauteur of
straight arterial roads and looping overpasses.

Miller starts his tour in the concentric circles of the British-built
area of Connaught Place, then takes in the chowks of the Mughal city
to the north known as Old Delhi, and wanders past the five-star hotels
and high-walled bungalows of Luyten’s Delhi, a neighbourhood of
politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists. As his spiral widens, he
also navigates the affluent neighbourhoods of the south, the arriviste
settlements of the west, and, just across the toxic strip of water
that was once the Yamuna rivers, the middle-class clusters of the
east. It is telling that he finds no fixed address, no set
neighbourhood, for the poor. Instead, he encounters them in the
interstices of the metropolis, sleeping on the streets and under
flyovers, in blue plastic tents next to construction sites, or in
slums that can be cleared away at a moment’s notice. Walking along the
banks of the Yamuna, Miller sees on its east side the Akshardham
temple complex, a sprawling monument of Hindu kitsch approved by the
courts despite concerns that it would impede the river’s flow of
water. Almost directly across from it, he finds a police barracks on
the site of what was, until recently, Delhi’s largest slum, housing
some 300,000 people.

Such scenes are depicted with empathy by Miller, who uses the
privileged eccentricity of his whiteness to engage in conversations
that reveal much about lives usually relegated to the margins of the
city’s consciousness. He meets butchers who interrupt their slaughter
of buffaloes to threaten him with knives but who shake his hand before
he leaves; a young woman who, slightly sick from the smell of
industrial glue, offers the author a soda before returning to her job
demonstrating a 10-foot long printer; and a man on a bicycle who uses
a speaker magnet to collect traces of iron from vehicle emissions that
he plans to sell for 30 cents a kilo. Miller’s prose has none of the
baroque texture to be found in Baudelaire, Sebald and Sinclair, but he
blends anecdotes and details well. His decision to emulate Sebald in
placing small black-and-white photographs within the text is
particularly successful, lending the book a kaleidoscopic feel that
captures something of the ad hoc nature of the city.

In a chapter on Old Delhi, we see a grainy picture of a suspected
heroin dealer being beaten by two policemen against a
dystopian-seeming backdrop of a crumbling mansion, a dead tree, piles
of trash, and an audience of ragged children:

“The violent policeman slapped him across the face. He recoiled in
slow motion, his shoulder hunching up as if waiting for the next blow.
Instead, the policemen began emptying his pockets. A piece of string,
some tinfoil, some matches, a few coins, and what looked like a
tightly folded empty crisp packet, secured with a rubber band.
‘Evidence,’ said the violent policeman, speaking a word of English for
the first time, as he placed the little package in his pocket without
opening it. And then his second world of English, just a little
threateningly, a word of closure and command: ‘Goodbye,’ he said and
waved me away.”

There are many similar passages in the recent fiction anthology Delhi
Noir, whose 14 contributors use noir conventions to offer scathing
indictments of the brutality of the city’s police, the vulgarity of
its upper classes, and the desperation of the poor (the first story,
by Omair Ahmad, even reconstructs one of the killings of 1984).
Unfortunately, the stories rarely achieve the intensity on display in
Miller’s book. Often, their accounts of corrupt policeman and
resentful servants merely expand on headlines without offering a fresh
perspective or allowing for full immersion into the lives or city
being depicted. Those that succeed – Siddharth Chowdhury’s Hostel,
Hartosh Singh Bal’s Just Another Death, and the Hindi writer Uday
Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi – do so because they are alert not just
to the horrible things that happen in Delhi, but also to how it feels
to observe and write about them. In Bal’s story, for instance, the
idealistic narrator, an ambitous journalist who has investigated a
random, insignificant killing ends his account abruptly, on a cynical
note that captures the numbing effect of the city by borrowing the
hard-boiled tone of the noir detective who, ultimately, cannot make a
difference:

“What Mohanty had just told me didn’t make the case any simpler –
either the police or the councillor and his men were capable of such
brutality. But at that moment, the facts didn’t matter. No one in this
city gave a damn, and having made it so far, I was just beginning to
realise neither did I.”

Miller, too, has to come to some form of reckoning. At the end of his
walk, he finds himself in the suburb of Gurgaon, surrounded by
shopping malls and condominiums whose names (“Malibu Towne,”
“Belvedere Park,” “Maple Heights”) have been copied from suburban
America. Just a few pages earlier, he had visited similar housing
developments expanding through fields of mustard, with former farmers
doubtfully counting the cash they have made from selling their land,
hoping their children will find service jobs in Gurgaon. Miller
doesn’t like Gurgaon, but he repeats the conventional wisdom that
“Gurgaon is probably the future, and Delhi, and other Indian cities,
will become more and more like Gurgaon.”

This is a false note in what is otherwise a remarkably perceptive
book, for Gurgaon’s modernity is just as skin deep as Delhi’s, even if
it has been laid on by more competent cosmetic surgeons. Its apartment
blocks may be newer and cleaner, but they play out the same stories of
disparity and its discontents. Gurgaon represents not a solution to
the city’s problems, but an attempt to evade them in the manner
characteristic of India’s elite in recent years. Such an evasion can
work for only so long. There are already signs that the lopsided
economic growth that made such subterfuge possible is beginning to
give way to national slowdown. And in Delhi, one sees a return of the
repressed. In April a Sikh journalist outraged at a government report
absolving a Congress leader of responsibility in the killings of 1984
threw his shoe at the home minister. Meanwhile, there are biker gangs
on the streets, carrying out petty muggings and the occasional murder.
The perpetrators are thought to be the children of victims of the
anti-Sikh riots of 1984, survivors who have decided that what prevails
in Delhi is might, not justice.


Siddhartha Deb is a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe
Institute, and he teaches creative writing at the New School. He is
currently working on a nonfiction book about contemporary India.
_________________________________________
reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
Critiques & Collaborations
To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list 
List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
________________________________
Looking for local information? Find it on Yahoo! Local 


      Love Cricket? Check out live scores, photos, video highlights and more. Click here http://cricket.yahoo.com