Day 3: Delhi is a Mandelbrot set

The G had said that she would force me to have breakfast this morning. This was in spite of my protests that we were to do some of sort of tour this morning that involved street food. Why, I said, would I eat breakfast only to stuff myself again later? Why indeed, but I did have a sip of guava juice and a paratha.

We met the other people of the tour at 0800 but because nothing here seems to run to anything that even masquerades as a timetable it was at least 0830 before we boarded a bus that was to take us somewhere exciting. We were going to see stuff.

I have remarked before that people had warned me that my eyes would be opened and my mind expanded. We have several more days here and in other places (Jaipur and Agra) so I cannot say whether my first impressions are either valid or representative. The reason for the title is that my underlying sense is that Delhi (I cannot extend this hypothesis to the rest of the country) is like a Mandelbrot set. Roughly speaking (and I take some mathematical license here (and I can do that as I am a mathematician)) is something that makes order out of chaos. It’s an infinite set that has finite borders.

We rode on the bus for perhaps 45 minutes to the accompaniment of a cacophony of horns all of which were probably uselessly blown. We wove through traffic that was clearly playing a massive community game of chicken. We drove past areas that looked completely desolate, a bit like the bomb sites I can still vaguely recall in England in the 1950s. These areas seemed to be home to people. They lived in structures that kept the elements at bay through any material that could be salvaged.

At some point someone had the money to spend on decorating the roadside verges. We drove down roads where there were what used to be planters in the middle of the road. We drove down roads with these planters at the roadside. None of them had any plants in anymore: they were desolate and forgotten. They reflected the attention that has been paid to the road surface; they were not useless but they were no longer ornamental and with a bit of love and attention would have been perfectly serviceable.

After about 20 minutes we drove through an area that was clearly a wealthier area that the one we had left. I noticed the Indian Defence College. We pulled up finally at a Metro station called Chawri Bazar which is the deepest station of the Delhi Metro network and is situated about 30 metres below ground level. This fact, no doubt a source of civic pride to an inhabitant of Delhi, was of no consequence to me.

Our companions on the tour (L to R): Matthew, Pam, Jackie, Jane (these two are referred to as "the girls"), yours truly, The G, Sandy (wife of Damien and ex officio Assistant Tour Obergruppenfuhrer), Damien (who is the Tour Obergruppenfuhrer, he our Spirit House dude), Anne and Kevin. We are lucky that these folks are all good companions and great fun. Eager readers will recall our Scottish experience where our tour companions were the most miserable bunch of hits you could imagine.

We got off the bus to be greeted by our guide for the tour. His name is Dhruv Gupta and he told us in no uncertain terms that this was to be an experience rather than a tour. He warned us about this and that, told us that we should buy nothing unless he said it was OK and generally impressed on us that he was like a big brother. He also told is that he had an MBA from Cambridge, had developed catering services for Japan Airlines and that his grandfather had been one of Nehru’s principal private secretaries. Some of this may be true and some may not; it did not matter. The guy was really good what he did.

The Metro is pretty clean but also pretty well packed with people. There are pink coaches for ladies and the ladies in our party were encouraged to use them. We men had to rough it. Actually it wasn’t rough at all. It was very civilised with little plastic smart tokens as tickets and signs that said when the trains were coming and all the stuff you’d expect from one of today’s metropolitan transit systems. And I had expected nothing else. But I had not expected that we would need to go through a metal detector before we got to the platform. That one was a surprise.

We went only a couple of stops before emerging into a streetscape the like of which I have seen before in parts of China but had not quite expected. There has been apparently a garbage men’s strike in Delhi and the evidence of this assaulted the nostrils and was lying in heaps all around.

Some serious cabling. A headache for a maintenance man.

What I hadn’t quite expected was the electrical cabling although I had been told about this and I have seen crazy pictures on the Internet. Running along each side of every street at first floor level is a spaghetti of cables. There are junction boxes here and there and every now and then the whole mess seems to converge on a pole on a street corner. It was this sight that made me think of the idea of chaos producing order. Because somehow or another this spaghetti works. Lights were on in shops. People were using computers.

We walked past a mass of humanity all of whom seemed to be in a hurry to be somewhere else or who were talking on mobile phones. Perhaps they were talking to each other but it’s amazing how much talking on mobile phones goes on. What happened before we had them?

The confection whose name
I do not know.

We’re on a food tour so, as you might expect, we visited some street food places. We had been assured by Dhruv that no one on any of his tours had been taken sick so it was all OK. Nevertheless we sanitised our hands before eating anything. Our first stop was to eat a confection that is made only in the winter months. I think it is called Dual Te Chard though I misheard it and searching the web has revealed nothing. It was similar in texture to an undercooked meringue though not as sweet. I need not tell you it was good.

The shopfront of Standard Sweet, scene
of our breakfast.

We walked down the smallest lanes, probably not much more than 2 meters wide but still enough for scooters to drive up and down with their horns blaring. After a while I became inured to the sound, and indeed the threat, of these scooters. They were just really part of the scenery! The labyrinth of alleyways seems to be split in to sections that relate to a particular trade or skills. We walked down a lane that was full of kitchen ware shops. None of these seemed to have any customers. All of them had a man inside talking on a mobile phone.

Breakfast

We went to a place called Standard Sweet an emporium that purports to specialise in Puri Chhole, Paneer Pakora, Samosa, Pinni and other Indian delights. We took breakfast here and it was extremely good. Puri (bread) with potatoes and some nicely spiced chick peas. The puri is a flatbread that is deep fried and blows up like a balloon. We had some later for lunch; you crush them flat and use them to pick up your food. We washed this down with a soft drink apparemtly not available outside India called Nimbooz Masala Soda. Its label proclaimed it to be “5% real lemon”. I do not know what the other 95% was! It was not unpleasant but not quite to my taste.

We walked on. The good thing about this tour was that Dhruv (who owns the company) had managed to ensure we didn’t get bored with seeing Old Delhi streets which, all other things being equal, are all pretty much alike. Dhruv arranged for us to take a rickshaw ride a sort distance to our next place of interest. We have all seen pictures of rickshaws but these guys have their work cut out.

The G and I fill our faces.

How this building stays up is beyond me!

After a little more walking we clearly needed some further sustenance and we stopped at a place to eat a snack. This seemed similar to our breakfast but was very good. We stood in a corner of a busy junction (well a junction - the "busy" goes without saying) and looked around. I am not sure what planning controls there are in Delhi. I suspect none as several buildings look as if they are staying up through good luck laughing in the face of the laws of physics).

Rubbish in the street and equipment to see to it. I wonder who that fellow on the left is: where did he come from? What does he do? Where is he going? Who knows?

We visited several temples (at one point when we were in a Hindu area there were temples on every corner) and stopped at one with a very old tree growing inside it. The building was built to accommodate the tree, which could not be harmed, even to the point of constructing the roof around the tree.

People stare in utter amazement at the famous tree. I cannot believe this picture - it is just too weird!

Spices aplenty. They looked better in real life than they do here.

Next stop was a spice shop. Most of the spices there are familiar to us but the colours are so much more vibrant when they are piled in heaps on the stall of an Old Delhi street seller. Most interesting to me was the Himalayan Black Salt which tasted of eggs. It had a high sulphur content but apparently low sodium. Since salt is Sodium Chloride I did speculate that Himalayan Black Salt may not really be salt at all! I see from the Internet that its health benefits are stupendous.

Street scenes. Note the family transport at the bottom right. There are four people on this machine.

Betel leaves

From there we walked along the street pausing to admire betel leaves and the rubbish that had accumulated from the garbo’s strike. We went up a very small flight of stairs and into what looked like a flower petal trading room. The view from the top of this building afforded a street vista that showed how much rubbish was lying around.

It was only a short walk to Dhruv’s house which, he said, had been in his family for generations. We went inside for lunch. We started with chai and then went to the dining room where we ate zucchini balls, cauliflower, lentils, potatoes and puri. Not surprisingly, it was good! Our luncheon concluded our tour and we walked to the bus and returned to the hotel.

This, believe it or not, is an iron.

It was still only just after lunch so we took a walk. We strolled down the road headed for a shopping area called Shahbur Jaat. This took a little finding as we wandered through tiny alleyways similar to those we had walked through in the morning. We found Shahbur Jaat to be a pleasant mall full of bridal shops. There were I have to say, and I am no fashionista, some stunning dresses in all manner of colours and colour combinations. All were decorated with silver and gold patterns. We passed several shops selling these patterns and also several places where people were dying cloth. There we also people who were ironing garments using the biggest irons I have seen. These irons contained a charcoal fire.

In the evening we met up and took the bus to Haus Khaz. This is advertised as a “walking village”. There are no cars allowed inside and there is a barrier to prevent their entry. But this is India so there was a cheery fellow in the barrier raising and lowering it to allows to enter at their will!

The Hauz Khas or the Royal Tank

Inside Haus Khaz is the Haus Khaz Complex. This houses a water tank, an Islamic seminary, a mosque, a tomb and pavilions built around an village with medieval history traced to the 13^th century of Delhi Sultanate reign. The complex is quite large and there are several very old buildings, in varying states of decay. We strolled about here for a while noting that in one corner of the complex was the obligatory rubbish dump. But our main purpose of coming here was to drink beer and this we did by discovering a bar that was up a flight of 67 stairs. We drank Indian beer and then went down to a nearby restaurant to eat. We passed on the opportunity of Mexican food (I mean, in Delhi? Really?) and headed for more conventional, and very delicious, fare.

The evening ended on a high. The ten of us on the tour piled into four tuk-tuks and headed off into the Delhi night traffic. It was a bumpy roller-coaster of a ride dicing with death and playing tag with other vehicles but we got back all in one piece. And so to bed.