Kids going to school, people having their morning tea, men half asleep roaming around, a physically challenged beggar getting a cup of tea for another beggar from the alms he received this morning. It’s like the homeless, the ones deprived of home and family become each other’s family and the public spaces become their home. Women on the streets in their modern western clothes, hair open and wet of the morning shower. heading to the metro. A group of tourists being informed about old Delhi by their guides before they go on to explore it. They will head on to explore it, pay the guides. But what is the place getting? The people who occupy the place, who make the place what it is, even if it is to keep it in antiquity. What is the place getting back? The place on the must visit lists of foreign tourists, one that has a lot of history still living with it.
And I can hear one of the tourists in their foreign accent gleefully remarking “Very impressive.” While the old beggar keeps begging, “Baua Jee, baba ko kuch nahi doge?”
You know this place has not remained untouched by the forces of modernity, in dressing, culture, profession and other such characteristics. But the people transformed with those forces are all gradually leaving for their places of work and institutions, some running to reach on time. What might remain by mid-day are just the people who choose this place to be their own. Still seeped in history, in orthodoxy & patriarchy.