DELHI DEMENTED

Delhi is losing its sanity. The beautiful wide roads, the great monuments and gardens, the spring flowers and clean air - where has it all gone?
Ankita Chawla Delhi

I love Delhi. I love my city. And have forever defended its case when the sanity of the city has been in question.

The saving grace was sometimes the 'extremist' weather and how the slightest change in temperature was felt, such that it made Delhi transparent, despite the heat and the cold. The roads were always wider, wide enough for the rickety DTCs, cars and cycle rickshaws. The air we could breathe, it was cleaner. Delhi always seemed to go by slowly, at its own pace. 

Chromatically greener, historically wealthier, geographically well-placed, art-ily proactive, and architecturally blessed -- that is the Delhi I love to defend. 

Sadly, I feel that my city is losing it. It's losing its sanity. It's losing its peaceful air to the loud motor mayhem of millions of cars and SUVs, the infinite jams of slow madness and utter helplessness with the infinite loss of time, space, rationality. It's losing its cultural inheritance to the livid, aggressive, crude mannerisms of those who inherit it. 

As I write this for Hardnews, Delhi is swarmed by a raging Yamuna, nothing but a static sewage drain, and dengue is fast becoming an epidemic, with some hospital beds full. Plus, the jammed streets, and a completely botched up Commonwealth Games, even as slums are floating in dirty waters. What did they do with the crores spent on cleaning the Yamuna? 

A large population of Delhi uses public transport, which includes the killer blue lines, the arrogant autos and the, as yet limited in reach, messiah Metro. We have over-reaching men and dodgy women with the strategically hidden safety pins in their hands -- to prick the prickly prick if he tries to get too close. In peak hours, its back to back, shoulder to shoulder, but not so much as in the battlefield, here it is the drudgery of everyday employment. While you escape the nauseas gases from the vehicles around, the pollution played out in this excruciatingly forced closeness inspires a different sort of queasiness.

Whether you're inside a DTC or in an auto-rickshaw, it's a lot of pollution. This pollution is not limited to the air around you. My date with the DTC luckily ended after my second year of college. As if looking for ways to avoid being pinned down by sweaty, slimy MCP Delhi males in buses wasn't a task enough, I tumbled from the steps one day. Running  through traffic heading towards me from each direction, shaken, I directed myself to what only seemed like a safer bet to commute in the capital -- the scheming, cheating, unchanging, three wheeler mafia. Hence, starts my daily disaster diary.

Delhi autos have been a struggle, despite the best wishes of the Delhi government and the Delhi Police: from trying to get onto one, to pleading, begging, cajoling the auto-driver to please chalo bhai, even if you going to the most accessible heart of the city; and if he agrees, so will he put the revised higher rate meter down please? Then you enter the crazy road rage in a soulless city where if you're not a sleek Honda today, you're neither significant, nor socially meaningful.