Rocking in the Free World

After moving out of home in 2004, Gurgaon is the third city that I have lived in after Bangalore and Hyderabad.

In Bangalore, my weekend planning was initially governed by when I would leave the city to head to Mysore. When things settled in and I began discovering, exploring and understanding Bangalore, and eventually falling in love with the place (for the most part), my plans revolved around spending time in the pursuit of various things within the city, as I slowly trudged up the Maslovian pyramid.

That glorious run of nearly five years came to an end in 2009 when I had to move to Hyderabad to study and weekends there were mostly spent working on assignments or studying or doing something or the other that entailed being on campus for the most part, as a result of which, there was no real need to make any weekend plans or follow through on them had they been made in the first place.

Cut to the NCR where I have been at for the past three months now, and I find myself in completely different circumstances. I don’t have the comfortable proximity to Mysore that I had previously found myself in when I was in Bangalore. Nor do I have enough work yet (if work at the office is discounted from the equation) like I did either in Bangalore or Hyderabad to keep me completely preoccupied.

In such situations, weekend planning becomes vital to one’s attempts at keeping the ennui monster at bay. When travel to places outside of the NCR isn’t conducive due to constraints that narrow down to lack of time or money or enthusiasm or a mix of two or more of the these factors, checking out the sights, sounds and tastes that Delhi has to offer then becomes part of the weekend menu.

As part of my sojourns, here’s snippets of experiences I’ve had that I find worth documenting.

A walk down Chandni Chowk – I had a chance to walk down the world-famous Chandni Chowk, built by Shah Jahan’s daughter Jahaanara Begum one particularly humid evening in early July when the train I had to take to head towards the mountains was delayed by two and a half hours.

I’d had a tiring week, I hadn’t had enough sleep either and this delay only compounded my misery. Since I had to board my train from Delhi junction (the old Delhi railway station) which is served by the Chandni Chowk Metro station, I figured I might as well see why this place deserved as much fame as it had.

The exit from the metro station led onto a temple and a huge Gurudwara right opposite it. It was late in the evening and most of the shops were closed. Traffic volumes weren’t as high as they’d have been during the day, but there was a lot of hustle and bustle still around. I walked westward and could see lines of shops on both sides and it seemed quite like most crowded main streets in most towns or cities that I’d visited.

What was different, however, was the sight of the iconic Red Fort looming large on the horizon. I am not quite sure how long the walk was, since I was numb from having walked so much already. But the heat and dust notwithstanding, with tracks from Incubus’ ‘Morning View’ playing in my ears, the sight of the Red Fort in Old Delhi was majestic and the way it awes you when you see it first is probably a good reason to visit it both during the day as well as after sun-down.

I am however still to figure out what the big deal about Chandni Chowk is. Only time will tell.

I’m going to be there at the Red Fort on Independence Day to see our Prime Minister give his speech live and that, I think, is quite a big deal.

Safdarjung’s Tomb – My forays into the capital have been more or less through South Delhi, thanks to its proximity to Gurgaon and also thanks to the yellow Delhi Metro line running along in that direction.

On this route, I’ve seen the remains of Tughlaqabad and even the sight of the Qutub Minar is now something that I’m used to. But whenever I get a chance to go to any monument or building that looks like it is older than a hundred years, I make it a point to step inside and take a look. I like them much better than the glass high-rises that dot the landscape, air con being the only redeeming quality about most of these buildings.

At the start of Lodhi Road lies Safdarjung’s Tomb. The tomb is a majestic building with water fountains on all four sides, making the aerial view of the place look like a plus sign with the tomb in the center. One can clearly tell that Safdarjung wasn’t probably as historically important as the Mughal rulers (SJ was in Ahmed Shah Bahadur’s court), since my friend and I were the only two people that were at that place at half-past five on a Saturday evening.

There was a solitary guard and pretty much nobody else with administrative capacity in that huge plot of land dotted by numerous trees including the coconut palm, the sight of which, I confess, was a refreshing change from the traffic outside.

My landlady, who seems to be a bibliophile, judging by the huge number of books lying around in her house, has been nice enough to give me two books on the history of Delhi, and combined with ‘City of Djinns’ by W. Dalrymple and some other literature that I plan to read, should give me enough information about these buildings and more when I begun a self-initiated tour to check out all the seven cities that make up our capital. Of course, this requires a strong dip in temperatures to set the ball rolling.

The Delhi Metro – I am a big Delhi Metro fan boy. My cheapness to a large extent and my sensibility to a smaller degree have made me like and enjoy public transport immensely. I am a judgmental person, and how much I like a city is governed by, among other things, how efficient its public transport systems are.

Gurgaon’s score on this is quite low, but the saving grace for now is the presence of the metro line that serves some parts of the city.

However, travel around Delhi is so convenient thanks to the presence of the Metro. In fact, the first time I used it was when I was traveling from the Indraprastha station to Rajiv Chowk in early June this year.

I wasn’t aware of the smart card / token systems that one needs to know about while traveling on these trains. The important difference between other regular modes and this one is that your token / smart card needs to be checked in at the turnstiles twice, once while entering the station and once, while getting off at your destination.

My first journey had me face quite a few d-uh moments; including being unaware of where to place the token at the turnstile and such, but casual observation of how other passengers behave is more than enough to understand how to go about using this service.

One of these d-uh moments was when it temporarily slipped my mind that Connaught Place was now officially named Rajiv Chowk. It was only thanks to a funny dinner-time conversation I’d had at home with the family that I remembered in time and was thus able to choose the right station while buying the token.

Since that day, I’ve got me a smart card and my frequency of visits to the capital has gone up. Most commuters, yours truly included, are waiting for the time when the metro line will open up fully until Rajiv Chowk. So far, trains travel only until the Qutab Minar metro station from Gurgaon.

The fact that the Metro is brilliantly air conditioned only adds to the charm of traveling on it in the cruel, cruel summer. But its presence has so far prompted me to not buy a car and instead divert all those funds into travel.

The weekends will get more interesting with time, as the mercury shall fall and more opportunities to indulge in new, interesting things present themselves.