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Critical Digressions: Twilight in Delhi
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
Last month, we packed our bags and headed to Delhi. We flew on a cheap ticket, got in at an ungodly hour in the morning, bleary-eyed but excited. Indira Gandhi International airport is typically third-world, featuring ramshackle busses, greasy walls, dull immigration officials, who, because we hail from across the border, gravely told us to fill out extra paperwork. Outside, we dryly smoked a Dunhill, spent close to an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the parking lot, traversed the dark swaths of the city by car and slept at dawn. In the afternoon, wide-eyed, we headed out.
This was our first time in India. We thought we’d be a foreigner in a foreign land but were immediately struck by the obvious (or not so obvious): from the anemic flow of water in taps to the quality of light in winter, India is like Pakistan, familiar territory, terra cognita; the flora, colors, topography, architecture, traffic and beggars, suggested that we had been here before. Delhi seemed like a larger, sometimes grander version of Lahore.
Touring the city on rickshaw, we rattled past the very impressive Rashtrapati Bhawan, the old Viceregal Palace, where preparations for Republic Day were underway. Here, where Lord Mountbatten once determined the fate of the Subcontinent, we now observed posters featuring the visiting Saudi head-of-state, King Abdullah; police with semiautomatics trolling the wide boulevards as the odd monkey scurried by; stands and seating and portable toilets busily being set up for the throngs that would in days observe artifacts of Indian martial identity: ballistic missiles named after gods (Agni, Prithvi), as wells as Russian-built T-90 tanks. Above, Sukhoi and Mirages would race against the clear sky. On TV later, we also watched colorful folk dancers and elephants participate in the festivities. Strangely, save the animals, it was all familiar, the sort of display we have often seen on the wide boulevards of Islamabad on Independence Day. Although we would have liked to stroll around, our rickshaw-wallah advised us against it.
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full at --
<http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/02/critical_digres.html>
.d.
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'Of course, you do realize this means war?" Bugs Bunny