The Commonwealth Games is a truck

You may have heard that the Commonwealth Games is coming to town. Delhi is turning itself upside down with renovations and recriminations.

I hope it goes well for Delhi. Such a huge amount of effort has been expended, skittishly, but expended nonetheless. It would be a great tragedy if the monsoon wedding predictions - akin to she'll-be-right-on-the-night - didn't eventuate.

This truck spoke to me. Not literally, but with the driver missing, one windscreen missing, and hemmed in by rubbble, it was still undeniably a truck. And the Games probably will lack a few windscreens, and perhaps never had a driver, but once we negotiate the rubble they'll still be the Games and we'll just have to love them like they are. I hope the athletes take heed and embrace the Games in all their glorious chaos.

Horizontal dog

Code cracking

If I had a rupee for every time I've been puzzled in India I'd be a very wealthy lad. Here's one example. All across India the walls of residential streets are decorated with speedily drawn chalk calculations. I thought at first they were house numberings. Later I thought they might be file numbers that prove house ownership. Or the calculation of debts. Or redirection notices for people who have moved house. Or the markings of a tax or electricity bill collector. I'm no closer to the answer. But there is a side of me that likes this. Clearly there is a system of sorts for the achievement of a socially useful end about which I have no idea. And thus I have faith that things will happen, even when there is no sign that they will. Invisible processes that I can't see will ensure it. How does India work - it's a secret written in chalk code.

Walls

We return again to my fascination with walls. India has lots of them, and they carry on their faces the scars and wrinkles of daily life. This Pepsi sign in the backlanes of old Delhi looks like it's been painted, subsumed, and restored many times over. A wall of torn political posters turns the contest of ideas into a contest for wall space - the end result resembles the output of a kindergarden. And finally an old wall - supporting a further five metres of ancient wall above it - built haphazardly but effectively by long gone bricklayers. These are the textures of India's cities.

The sun burns bright in Chennai politics

Udaipur

Udaipur's lake is shrinking under the pressures of drought and overuse. Some summers it is completely empty. But the upside to an empty lake is extra space to play cricket. I'll have to rent the Bond film Octapussy to see if cricket figured in it at all... I'm guessing not.

Be very careful where you buy your next pair of glasses. I'll be sad when India moves away from handpainted signs - even if the sales pitches might be a little more effective.

I was puzzled by this glowing-shield-thing. Then I discovered that the rulers of Udaipur once considered themselves sun-kings. Armed with this fact I found references to their solar lineage littered throughout the palaces of Udaipur, just in case they or their subjects forgot. Sun-king.... Hmmm.... Given it was about 50 degrees the day I was there I think I'd prefer to be a cloud-king.

Pinkish

After living in Africa and now India I am very conscious of one thing - white blubber ain't cool. Exhibit A: Seen through my hotel window in southern India. Someone buy this man some shorts!

Grace under shower

On saturday is rained and rained until my street was a flowing torrent. My neighbours adopted a variety of fixes, but none surpassed this lady for grace. She waltzed slowly through the flood as though it were nothing but a light shower.

Manholes in monsoon

Dreaming of her

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.

Old-school chai wallah..

Summer is here, so the frequency of my interaction with the chai wallahs of northern India is likely to dip a little. I shall soon begin my 'tales of the pani wallahs.' But for now, here is one of Rajasthan's most popular men-of-chai, Mr B.R.Choudhuri of Kerwa village. He can be found at a truck stop somewhere between Jodhpur and Pali. B.R is notable because he retains the old-school clay serving cups, which by reputation add much flavour to the sugary tea. Mine certainly had a little more smokiness than usual and when i got to the bottom I could see the charcoal residue of an open fire. While we sipped a villager was unloading thousands and thousands of these clay cups into a storage shed. I asked B.R whether these would last him a month and he laughed loudly in a 'where-did-this-amateur-come-from' sort of way. "Three days" he said, "a thousand cups a day". I handed the empty cup to B.R with thanks, but he gestured for me to throw it away so I placed it on the ground gently. But B.R said "no, smash it." So I did. When I went for a post chai pee, (Me: "where is the bathroom?", Driver: Bathroom is everywhere sir") I stumbled across the evidence of the thousand chais out back. 100% biodegradable, though I note that not all B.R's clients were forced to smash their cups violently on the ground. Such fun can be had with foreigners eh!

In search of a pitched roof

When I first arrived in Delhi I was struck by the glorious straight lines of the rooftops, as though every centimetre of height allowed by building regulations was being utilised. I played 'spot the pitched roof' - and I'm still looking. When I return home I'll try the reverse - 'spot the indigo washed walls'. I suspect the strike rate will be similarly low, sadly.

Cristo wraps a building in Delhi?