International Sulabh Museum of Toilets

“Toilet first, temple later” – Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi The International Sulabh Museum of Toilets is not a popular tourist destination. It is hidden away in SW Delhi, in Kali Nagar, Mahavir Enclave. It isn’t close to any metro station, so I checked Google Maps and discovered how to get there by bus. I walked…

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…

Aajeevika Mela

Delhi has a massive exhibition centre, called Pragati Maidan. The Mela held in Hall 18 was promoting ethnic handicrafts and handloom cloth. I was infected with the fabric bug from my wife and now my sister-in-law, so I had to take a look. I felt like a hippy in the late 1960s – “Wow, the…

Thursday Doors

An eclectic bunch of photographs for you passionate portal people this week. Let us begin with this set of marble doors, inset with iron for the hinge at the bottom. It is the tomb of a follower of the famous Sufi Chishti saint, Sultan-ul-Mashaikh, Mehboob-e-Ilahi, Hazrat Shaikh Khwaja Syed Muhammad bin Abdullah AlHussaini Nizamuddin Auliya, known…

Thursday Doors

Goodbye Old Delhi. Hello Chhatarpur Temple Complex in South Delhi. You can read more about my visit here last month in my blog. If the link doesn’t work, try this URL https://wordpress.com/post/ianbcross.wordpress.com/11815 Doors in polished wood or beaten silver, opulent and splendid. I think these door are rather amusing with their pink nipples (or are…

Red Fort

“Lal Quila” means Red Fort, because of the magnificent red sandstone walls. When it was constructed in the early 17th Century, it was known as the “Lal Mubarak”, or Blessed Fort. The Moghuls ruled their diminishing Indian Empire from the Fort for two hundred years before the disaster of the Mutiny in 1857 (known here…

Thursday Doors

Here are some fine doors from the Red Fort or Lal Quila, in Delhi, about which I must blog when I get time. The fort was designed by the same architect who built the Taj Mahal. It took 10 years to construct and the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan moved his court there from Agra in…

Portraits from Old Delhi

“Dilli ke na kooche thhe, aurake musavir thhe, jo shakl nazar aayi tasveer nazar aayi”  written in Urdu by Mir Taqi Mir, an 18th Century poet. Delhi’s streets were not alleys but the parchment of a painting, every face that appeared seemed like a masterpiece. I love wandering down the galis of Old Delhi, taking…

Delhi Traffic

I have become blasé about the lawless nature of traffic in North Delhi. I say North Delhi because our drivers say that drivers in South Delhi tend to be more law abiding – possibly because of a greater police presence in Lutyens’ leafy avenues around the diplomatic enclave and the PM’s house. Or maybe because there…

Delhi ComicCon 2016

We weren’t sure exactly how to get to the venue, but on the Metro, I noticed someone with a mask from a character in Star Wars. Our eyes met across a crowded carriage. “ComicCon, right?” I asked. He nodded, so we went over to join his crew. He told us he had spent three weeks…