Life in Delhi is full of contradictions, but for charity worker and author Justine Hardy, it’s the perfect paradox.
Delhi was a hardship posting when I first came to live here as an adult, sixteen years ago. It was a place where ‘the men’ came, while wives and children tended to stay at home. It was the way it had been for so many English people during the time of the British Raj in India, from 1858 up until Indian Independence in 1947.
Before moving here to work as a journalist and NGO worker I used to travel in India with my mother, mainly in the 1980s, and mostly bouncing around on dusty village buses through the interior of the country in a state of childlike amazement, and often travel sickness. When we stopped in Delhi then, on the way in and out, only four people owned cars in the street where we used to stay, a quiet side road amidst the spreading gardens and elegant white-porticoed bungalows designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the main architect of New Delhi.
Twenty years on, the same street looks pretty much like an NCP car park a lot of the time. The old chai shop opposite where we stayed used to be the main focus of the street, a tea stall and gathering place for rickshaw and taxi drivers to chat, chew the fat and indeed paan (the red betel nut-based and mildly narcotic chew of India that results in ugly streams of blood-red spit being ejected all over town, all the time), to read the papers and, most important of all, drink glass after glass or thick, sweet chai. The tea stall remains today as a constant there, but it has become a tiny island floating amongst a sea of polished bonnets and shrieking horns.
When first moving to Delhi people tend to get over-awed by what seems to be a city existing in chaos theory. One way of easing the transition is through a set-up called the Delhi Network (www.delhinetwork.org), an organisation that helps foreigners who have just arrived in the city. In hard statistics Delhi has more than doubled its population and vehicle count since 1994. In human terms that means that the city now has in excess of 17 million people, and this does not include many of the slum areas in and around the city. Many of these slums are not officially acknowledged by the government, and therefore, well, they do not exist, and so do not get counted.
Read the full article in our March 2009 edition.
