Black, cheap, dusty summer footwear. In this city, it has a life of its own.
I see a slipper, alone in the middle of the busy street. It’s melted by the sun and flattened by hundreds of cars, bikes, autos, cows, eventually elephants running over it.
And I see a slipper, alone, hanging from auto-rickshaws or trucks’ [...]
Archive for the ‘My India’ Category
Slippers in Delhi
Posted in My India on June 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Where have you been all this time?
Posted in My India, Same Same But Different on May 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Behind this.
Part magazine, part community, part media gallery, The India Tube is a space for everything that’s incredible about India. With its daily updates, it’s the directory for the inspiring and the unbelievable, the cutting edge and the bizarre. We have new stories and pictures every day, go check it out!
Z for /zɛd/
Posted in My India on March 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
India, English is British English.
Colour. Analyse. Fulfil. Centre. Catalogue. Mediaeval. Cheque. Licence. Judgement. Excelling. Pyjamas. Spoilt. Aubergines.
It’s not weird, it’s refreshing. For 1.2 billion people, American spelling, and words, and -in the end- language count nothing. And the language has a nice vintage and classy feel. Just like vests. Or polo. Or a gentleman (he’s [...]
Y for the five Y
Posted in My India on February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I wish I had something interesting to say about the Y. I really wish, and I say it with all the guilt of a western girl in India who is too lazy to do Yoga for more than a couple of weeks in a row. Give me one more year, and I might provide a [...]
X for X-ray, twopassportpicturesplease, and a lot of attempts at security
Posted in My India on February 13, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Maintaining security in a country of over a billion people is obviously no piece of cake. And the way India deals with it reflects two of the strongest forces in this country: boureaucracy and individualism.
I’ll begin with individualism, which here is much different from our western faber-est-quisque. It is not about concentrating all the energies [...]
W for Wedding
Posted in My India on January 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
And here I am, finally, talking about big-fat-incredible Indian weddings.
Ever since I moved here, I have been desperate for an invitation to a Indian wedding. It hasn’t happened yet.
During wedding season, Delhi roads were constantly congested with cars driving to wedding venues, party marquees popped up everywhere just like mushrooms, and music and fireworks went [...]
V for Visa
Posted in My India on November 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Visa chapter of my personal alphabet is a tough one. It is taking me months (months after arriving here) to be completed, and if at the beginning I thought I’d wait for the end of my adventures in the immigrationland before writing about them, but seems like the end has no end.
It all begins [...]
U for Urban
Posted in My India on November 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
There is something special about the first time I see a city. The spacial image of it that I build in your mind when you get there for the very first time, during the very first hour of discovering, is always somehow different from how that city exactly is. Distances are bigger, or smaller. What [...]
T for Traffic
Posted in My India on November 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The very idea of dedicating a post to traffic in Delhi is ambitious, to say the least.
Traffic rules the city, it sets the pace of your life here and it’s an uncontrollable force that never leaves you alone.
Because traffic is noisy. None who hasn’t traveled on Indian street has any right to talk about acoustic [...]
S for Same Same But Different
Posted in My India, Same Same But Different on November 3, 2008 | 1 Comment »
This story begins in Paris, Rue des Cinqs Diamants. There’s a restaurant there, yes, probably the one you are thinking about, and in that restaurant worked as a waiter a guy with the most theatrical face I have ever seen. That guy often wore a t-shirt that read Same Same But Different. For months, watching [...]