More street art

Street art is fun. It lifts the spirit. Delhi has many boring walls which could do with a bit of colour and humour. When I heard that St+art had commissioned two Singaporean artists to decorate a grey, concrete metro station on the border between Delhi and Gurugram, I had to see it. Arjan Garh is…

Trucks

Lorries, wagons, heavy goods vehicles, call them what you will. Here are some superb specimens from India. The Hindi slogans are interesting. The detail is fascinating, with tassels, stick-on Shiva lingams and a representation of an eye and nose ring on a headlight. The paint work even extends to the tailgate. “Horn Please” = let…

Ganga – River of Life and Eternity

The National Museum on Janpath in New Delhi unveiled a large exhibition this month exploring the beliefs, histories, traditions, arts and cultures of India emanating from the Ganges – a river and a Goddess.   See below: A bronze vessel inscribed with the 108 names of Ganga, a map of the Ganges and a bronze statuette…

A Photo a Week Challenge: Golden Hour

My entry shows a sweeper lady, moving the dust from one place to another, in North Delhi where I am living.

Thursday Doors

I am gradually posting the remainder of my collection of Delhi Door Photographs before I end my mission here in June. Let us begin with a pinkie. Even though the door looks a wreck, it is still worth keeping secure with a couple of padlocks and a length of chain. Even if the guard appears…

At the barber’s shop

Barbers don’t just cut hair. They offer head, neck, shoulder and arm massages, too. I wouldn’t recommend the eyebrow massage; it did nothing for me and was really uncomfortable.

Also on the repertoire are hair dyeing, shaving, and most intriguingly of all, face washing. I witnessed this a few weeks ago. It is not just wiping someone’s cheeks with a soapy flannel. This is industrial strength cleaning, really getting the grime out of your flesh.

Morning stroll

TS Eliot wrote that “April was the cruellest month”. Even though he studied Indian Philosophy and Sanskrit at Harvard, he obviously hadn’t visited Delhi in May. The heat is oppressive, touching mid 40s Celsius in the afternoon and barely dipping below 30 at night. Google says the temperature is 44, adding the rider that “it…

Street Market Scenes in Ardash Nagar

The wholesale fruit and vegetable market across the road from our clinic is the biggest in Asia. Trucks crammed full of produce unload in the open warehouses. The distributors   divide up the produce into barrow loads for distribution across the city at formal and informal markets. There is an informal market along the side of…

Thursday Doors

This selection of doors features the surrounds, especially above the doors. All from Delhi, it goes without saying. The first door has a curious sedimentary rock surround, with faded garlands strung from a pole. The door is incidental, metal. Homage to the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty. There is even a painting of the Sikh guard who murdered…

Kutla Firoz Shah

Firoz Shah was one of the greatest builders of the Tughlaq Dynasty, at the end of the 14th Century. He built Firozabad, the fifth city of Delhi, which stretched from modern day Civil Lines in the north to Hauz Khas 20km to the south. Kutla Firoz Shah is a fort at the centre of the…