Back...

Bidip was silent for a few months. Some wondered whether delhi's summer had hardbaked my will to write. They're not far wrong. Delhi in summer is a tough place. The Brits escaped to the hills. And the modern Indian middle class escapes to the south of France or New York or wherever their diaspora connections take them. I escaped to ANYWHERE air-conditioned. But now the monsoon has broken, and the city is livable once more, I feel like sharing my stories again.

Today I visited old Delhi, a place that restores my faith in India like nowhere else. I played a few overs of laneway cricket, and smiled at strangers, and soaked up the wondrous multiplicity of the place. It is everything at once, woven, mosaiced and trampled into one. South Delhi with its posh shops and shiny cars feels like another country, separated by choice and chance. The latter is more pleasant by most metrics, but the raw goodness of old delhi draws me back again and again. People with nothing, and no agenda, are so disarmingly friendly. And the walls and cars and sunglasses of south Delhi, which inhibit so much communication, are gone. When I leave India it will be the smiling chai wallahs and the cheeky kids that I will remember, not the shiny malls or blinged up frumps in german sedans.