Delhi City Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Delhi City. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked ‘What knowest thou of this wilderness?’ It replied: 'I can sum it up in two words: ‘Alas, Alas!
Khushwant Singh (Delhi)
Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)
Robert A. Caro (The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York)
For all its faults we love this city.’ Then, after a pause, she added: ‘After all, we built it.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities. We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.
Sami Ahmad Khan
To the sick man sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators.
William Dalrymple (City Of Djinns: A Year In Delhi)
The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
What matters it, O breeze, If now has come the spring When I have lost them both The garden and my nest?
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing.
Khushwant Singh (Delhi)
I don't want him to be in my passwords .. I want him for real !
Ritu Singh (Delhi: India in One City)
He is a thinker,’ wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, ‘who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.
William Dalrymple (City Of Djinns: A Year In Delhi)
It has been said that Delhi is not a city, but a collection of villages... There were Tamil villages, and Gujarati and Kannadiga, and over everything, like a blanket -- like a blankety-blanket -- a vast and spirited Punjabi joy in living that kept the city together and made it one, made it as much as was possible a city.
Vijay Nambisan
Gandhiji used to say, ‘True democracy is not run by twenty people sitting in Delhi. The power centres now are in capital cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. I would like to distribute these power centres in seven lakh villages of India.
Arvind Kejriwal (Swaraj)
Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. 'No one has any interest in the classics today,' he said. 'If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ‘chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded the strategic routes from the northwest, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers' town, a politicians' town, journalists', diplomats' town. It is Asia's Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.
Jan Morris
When a dust storm blows it means the djinns are going to celebrate a marriage …
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
Urdu is an aristocratic language. It was not the language of the working classes. Those who are left—the artisans—speak Karkhana [factory] Urdu. The Urdu of the poets is dead.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
of the great cities of the world, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can even begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains.
William Dalrymple (The Last Mughal)
The Rashtrapati Bhawan is a 340-acre house in the heart of Delhi. In the same city, 40 per cent people live in slums like insects.
Arvind Kejriwal (Swaraj)
The Light and the Darkness both flow in to Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr. Ashok lived, is the bright, modern end of the city, and this place. Old Delhi is the other end. Full of things that the modern world forget all about rickshaws, old stone buildings and Muslims. On a Sunday, though, there is something more: if you keep pushing through the crowd that is always there, go past the men clearing the other men’s ears by poking rusty metal rods into them, past the men selling small fish trapped in green bottles full of brine, past the cheap shoe market and the cheap shirt market, you come great secondhand book market Darya Ganj. You may have heard of this market, sir, since it is one of the wonders of the world. Tens of thousands of dirty, rotting, blackened books on every subject- Technology, Medicine, Sexual Pleasure, Philosophy, Education, and Foreign Countries — heaped upon the pavement from Delhi Gate onwards all the way until you get to the market in front of the Red Fort. Some books are so old they crumble when you touch them; some have silverfish feasting on them- some look like they were retrieved from a flood, or from a fire. Most shops on the pavement are shuttered down; but the restaurants are still open, and the smell of fried food mingles with the smell of rotting paper. Rusting exhaust fans turn slowly in the ventilators of the restaurants like the wings of giant moths. I went amid the books and sucked in the air; it was like oxygen after the stench of the brothel.
Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
And it would be nice if the roof was a bit stronger. Then the peacocks wouldn’t keep falling through. I don’t mind during the day, but I hate waking up at night to find a peacock in bed with me.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
Delhi. The ruins of an old city, markets, monuments, broken mansions, the zigzag of roads, the still sad times of music past. And rising up from it, her mother, wind in her hair, laughing like a witch.
Debotri Dhar (The Courtesans of Karim Street)
Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink.
Khushwant Singh (Truth, Love & A Little Malice)
The decision by the British in 1911 to build New Delhi, without integrating the old city with the new, sealed the fate of Shahjahanabad. From then onwards, purani Dilli would live on but only like an ageing courtesan abandoned by her new suitors, waiting to die.
Pavan K. Varma
He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai. ‘Chota hazari, sahib,’ said Ladoo. Bed tea. ‘What a nice gesture,’ I said returning to Olivia. ‘Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.’ ‘I wish she had sent it up two hours later,’ said Olivia from beneath her sheets.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
Yet, there is a Chennai that hasn’t changed and never will. Women still wake up at the crack of dawn and draw the kolam—the rice-flour design—outside their doorstep. Men don’t consider it old-fashioned to wear a dhoti, which is usually matched with a modest pair of Bata chappals. The day still begins with coffee and lunch ends with curd rice. Girls are sent to Carnatic music classes. The music festival continues to be held in the month of December. Tamarind rice is still a delicacy—and its preparation still an art form. It’s the marriage between tradition and transformation that makes Chennai unique. In a place like Delhi, you’ll have to hunt for tradition. In Kolkata, you’ll itch for transformation. Mumbai is only about transformation. It is Chennai alone that firmly holds its customs close to the chest, as if it were a box of priceless jewels handed down by ancestors, even as the city embraces change.
Bishwanath Ghosh (Tamarind City)
Indian children are more likely to be malnourished than children from Zimbabwe, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s three poorest countries,1 and in Delhi, nearly 5 million school-aged children have irreversible lung damage from that city’s air quality, which is twice as bad as Beijing’s.2
Martin Lindstrom (Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends)
It’s a city of refugees, one that is still hurting from the wounds of Partition. We take time to trust people, to let them in. As for this friendly city of yours, Bombay is a place of pleasant aloofness, full of small talk and token kindness, but selfish and closed when it really matters. But Delhi, it lives on abrasive warmth.
Amrita Mahale (Milk Teeth)
His diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.
Barry Lopez (About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory)
Mohenjo-daro was one of the chief cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished in the third millennium BC and was destroyed around 1900 BC. None of India’s pre-British rulers – neither the Mauryas, nor the Guptas, nor the Delhi sultans, nor the great Mughals – had given the ruins a second glance. But a British archaeological survey took notice of the site in 1922. A British team then excavated it, and discovered the first great civilisation of India, which no Indian had been aware of.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
When the news of the creature broke, it was possible that the victims had attributed to the Monkeyman injuries that they had unknowingly inflicted on themselves in their sleep. 'It could be mass hysteria caused by mass media,' he concluded. Dr. Desai's report lay on my desk for many days: a snap-shot of a city splintering under the strain of a fundamental urban reconfiguration- a city of the exhausted, distressed, and restless, struggling with the uncertainties of eviction and unemployment; a city of twenty million histrionic personas resiliently absorbing the day's glancing blows only to return home and tenderly claw themselves to sleep.
Aman Sethi (A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi)
But no literature grows in isolation, and looking at the history of Indian writing in English is like looking at a silent movie made up of static postcards of Delhi, or Mumbai, or any other thronged Indian city: the life, the colour, the hubbub of hundreds of eager new writers and high-minded editors, peacocking poets and fiery-eyed pamphleteers, all of that has been bled out of collective memory. In the same year that Dean Mahomet wrote his Travels, the Madras Hircarrah (1794) started up, joining Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780) and the India Gazette (1781); the first in a flood of periodicals and journals that would breathlessly, urgently take the news of India running along from one province to another. The
Nilanjana Roy (The Girl Who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading)
The news from Delhi brings tears to everyone’s eyes. Neither Nadir Shah nor Abdali, neither the Marathas, nor the Jats, nor the Sikhs caused so much havoc as is reported to have been caused by the ill-begotten Ghulam Qadir, the grandson of Najibuddaulah, and his ruffianly gangs of Rohillas. This villain insulted and deposed Shah Alam II before putting out his eyes. May Allah burn his carcass in the fires of gehennum! Only Allah knows how long murder and looting will go on in Delhi! They will have to revive the dead to find victims and bring back some loot to be able to loot again. Delhi is said to have become like a living skeleton. Burnt in flames till every building was reduced to ashes How fair a city was the heart that love put to the fire !
Khushwant Singh (Delhi: A Novel)
In Delhi we drove past dozens of Jain Sādhu holy men in saffron-coloured clothing which symbolises their saṃnyāsa (the ashrama life stage of renunciation). The Sādhu are respected for their holiness and feared for their curses, and 2000 years ago military generals laid down arms rather than wage war against a city protected by the Sādhu. In ancient Vedic verses they were called the long-haired ones and even today they have long stringy locks of hair that resemble dreadlocks, and many smoke sacred chillums of hashish all day long. They survive off alms or the goodness of others, often eating food provided only by prostitutes or low-ranking ‘sweeper’ caste people. The ones we saw, we were told, had walked 838km from the holy Ganges River carrying a spoonful of holy water. And it is with profound sadness that we missed the photographic opportunity.
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
four separate columns launched into Delhi through breaches in the city’s northern and western walls, between Kashmiri Gate and Lahori Gate.
Rajmohan Gandhi (Punjab)
In February 1859, after military rule ended in Delhi, the city was formally ceded to Punjab, becoming one of its districts.
Rajmohan Gandhi (Punjab)
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Hikmat Singh
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Dhaval
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Rachel Louise Snyder (Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir)
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The first twenty-eight years of my life I lived in the smallish town of Madison, Wisconsin, but in my work I traveled across the U.S. weekly, since my team members were scattered across the country. The regional differences in the U.S. are strong. New York City feels entirely different than Athens, Georgia. So when I began working with foreigners who spoke of what it was like to work with “Americans,” I saw that as a sign of ignorance. I would respond, “There is no American culture. The regions are different and within the regions every individual is different.” But then I moved to New Delhi, India. I began leading an Indian team and overseeing their collaboration with my former team in the U.S. I was very excited, thinking this would be an opportunity to learn about the Indian culture. After 16 months in New Delhi working with Indians and seeing this collaboration from the Indian viewpoint, I can report that I have learned a tremendous amount . . . about my own culture. As I view the American way of thinking and working and acting from this outside perspective, for the first time I see a clear, visible American culture. The culture of my country has a strong character that was totally invisible to me when I was in it and part of it.
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
Tughluk was far too free in shedding blood,’ writes Battuta. ‘Every day hundreds of people—chained, pinioned and fettered—were brought to [the sultan’s hall] and those who were for execution were executed, those for torture tortured, and those for beating beaten. It was but seldom that the entrance to his palace was without a corpse. One day as I arrived at the palace my horse shied at the sight of a white fragment on the ground. I asked what it was and one of my companions said: "It is the torso of a man who was [this morning] cut into three pieces.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
Later, when Aurangzeb ordered the decapitation of the naked fakir Sarmad, an Armenian Jew who had converted to Islam, the sage allegedly picked up his head and walked up the steps of the Jama Masjid. There he said a final set of prayers before departing to the heavens.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
When I was in school, every student’s grades and position in the class were printed in the leading newspapers for all to see. Success or failure was reason for public pride or shame. One of my closest friends toyed with suicide after his high-school exams because he did not stand first in the entire city of New Delhi. Another one of my classmates in college actually burned himself to death because he did not make the grade. Such
Ravi Zacharias (Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message)
In 2005, 36 Christians in Demsa, Nigeria, were killed by Muslim militants; al Qaeda bombed London’s Underground, killing 53, and injuring 700; 64 died at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh; 60 died in bombings in Delhi; and 60 died in a series of coordinated attacks on hotels in Amman, Jordan. In 2006-2008, there were several terror attacks in India, including a coordinated blast of 16 bombs in the industrial city of Ahmedabad in July 2008, and a November 2008, attack on Mumbai, India’s financial center. These terrorist killings were clearly meant to provoke confrontation with Pakistan, with the intention of destabilizing or deposing the Pakistani government to allow the Jihadists to secure the nation’s approximate 100 nuclear weapons.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
Travels in the Mogul Empire and Manucci’s Mogul India.
William Dalrymple (City Of Djinns: A Year In Delhi)
The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe. The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori. Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves. The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.
Chris Hedges
There is nothing wrong in building flyovers in Delhi. What is not fair is when we do not also build an approach road to villages across the nation. There is nothing wrong in having fountains with coloured lights in the capital. After all, Delhi should be beautiful. But it is unjustified when we have not provided drinking water to all our villages. There is nothing wrong in having a modern, private hospital in Bombay, or the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, or other large medical institutions in our big cities. But it is not justified when we have not arranged to have two drops of a medicine put into the eyes of a farmer’s newborn baby, and that baby goes blind. While this would have cost us nothing, we have preferred to spend crores of rupees in building five-star hospitals in cities. Why does this happen? Because policy making is in our hands – in the hands of the elite – and naturally, even unconsciously perhaps, when we make policies we make policies that suit us; we usurp the resources of this land somewhat shamelessly to benefit ourselves. The most charitable interpretation of it is that we do it unconsciously.
Verghese Kurien (I Too Had a Dream)
How rich ‘rich enough’ is in a city like Delhi is debatable.
Neena Dass (Delhi Remembered)
Almost imperceptibly, the Old Delhi returned. Rather than representing India, the city regressed to its historical self. Courtiers fawned, brokers promised access, and the writ of the queen ran unchallenged across the empire. When
Vinay Sitapati (Half Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India)
But logic never seems to get more than a few steps down the road in India before it stumbles into a pothole. While Vijay was happy enough to write off hundreds of millions of Muslims as sadists, he didn't seem to care enough to lift one finger to help the cow standing in front of us. She was busy spoiling potential clown acts by eating all the dropped banana skins on the street. But then while Vijay pontificated, she began to apply herself to the consumption of a plastic bag that had been dumped in the gutter. For some time the cows in Delhi and other Indian cities were found dead without any apparent cause of death. Upon investigative surgery it was found that their digestive systems had been clogged up with up to thirty kilos of plastic. Tens of thousands of evolution never required the cow to understand the difference between cabbage leaves and polythene. Until now.   But few Indian seem to see the incongruity of venerating the cow as the Holy Giver of Life and yet allowing her to die in pain by the roadside. Such a step would involve taking responsibility for the world around them. Perhaps it would even involve getting their hands dirty in work suitable only for the lower castes.
Tom Thumb (Hand to Mouth to India)
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one reason why we see so many young people from the North East in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and other Indian metropolitan cities is because Rajiv Gandhi made the north eastern states feel like part of the Indian mainstream. And
Vir Sanghvi (MANDATE: WILL OF THE PEOPLE)
Locally Old Delhi is still called Shahjehanabad. The city is surrounded by a great wall built by Shah Jehan but greatly strengthened by the British after they captured Delhi in 1803.
Carveth Wells (The Road to Shalimar: An Entertaining Account of a Roundabout Trip to Kashmir)
Another celebrated building that we saw inside the Fort was the Diwan-i-Khas. Here can be seen in Persian characters the famous inscription, “If a paradise be on the face of the earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” At the time of the Delhi Durbar in 1903 to celebrate the proclamation of Edward VII as Emperor of India, this exquisite building was used as a supper room. “This is the Chandni Chauk [Silver Street],” said our driver as we passed along Delhi’s main street. “It is the richest street in the world.” “Used to be,” corrected Sam. “It was sacked at least four times and most of its riches carried away.” Nowadays it is the abode of the jewelers and ivory workers of Delhi. Ten miles south of Delhi, amid the ruins of another ancient Delhi, stands the Kutb Minar, which is said to be the most perfect tower in the world and one of the seven architectural wonders of India. Built of marble and sandstone which is dark red at the base, pink in the middle, and orange on the top story, this remarkable structure, 238 feet high, looks almost brand new, yet it was built in A.D. 1200. Close by is another Indian wonder, the Iron Pillar, dating from A.D. 400. A remarkable tribute to Hindu knowledge of metallurgy and engineering, this pillar, some sixteen inches in diameter and twenty-three feet eight inches in height, is made of pure rustless malleable iron and is estimated to weigh more than six tons. Overlooking both the Fort and the city, and approached by a magnificent flight of stone steps, is the Great Mosque, also erected by Emperor Shah Jehan. It has three domes of white marble, two tall minarets, and a front court measuring 450 feet square, paved with granite and inlaid with marble. “Sight-seeing in Delhi is as tiring as doing the Mediterranean,” I
Carveth Wells (The Road to Shalimar: An Entertaining Account of a Roundabout Trip to Kashmir)
now all this is part of the gossip of old fogeys.
R.V. Smith (Delhi: Unknown Tales of a City)
Not that she had been to Cairo or Delhi. But, like many other Istanbulites, Peri held a firm belief that her city was more civilized than those remote, rough, congested places - even though, 'remote' was a relative concept and both 'rough' and 'congested' were adjectives often applied to Istanbul. All the same, this city bordered on Europe. Such closeness had to amount to something. It was so breathtakingly close that Turkey had put one foot through Europe's doorway and tried to venture forth with all its might - only to find the opening was so narrow that, no matter how much the rest of its body wriggled and squirmed, it could not squeeze itself in. Nor did it help that Europe, in the meantime, was pushing the door shut.
Elif Shafak (Havva'nın Üç Kızı)
Anyone who has dabbled in Indian cuisine as a foodie may have wondered, “Is butter chicken actually a curry?” after coming across the irresistible butter chicken. You might be surprised by the response! One of India’s most beloved cuisines, butter chicken (or murgh makhani) originated in the city of Delhi. Tender chicken breasts are cooked in a rich and velvety tomato sauce with a variety of aromatic spices. When served with rice or naan bread, it becomes a substantial and satisfying dinner.
Spice Mantra
From Delhi, Gandhi travelled across the subcontinent to Madras, continuing his education into the habits and mores of his countrymen. In this city he was even more of a hero than in Bombay. A majority of those who went to prison in the South African satyagrahas had been Tamils. Some were women, which is why Kasturba accompanied him on this trip. When the train carrying the Gandhis reached Madras Central Station, a large crowd was waiting to receive them. They made for the first-class compartment, only to be directed by the guard to the back of the train, where they found their hero, ‘thin and emaciated’ after four days of continuous travel. The Gandhis ‘stepped out of a crowded third class [coach] with no posh travel trunks but bundles of old clothes, like a family of peasants’.
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
permission
Rana Safvi (Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, the First City of Delhi)
chehre pe saare shahr ke gard-e-malaal hai jo dil kaa haal hai vahii dillii kaa haal hai The dirt of pain has defaced the whole city. “Delhi is no different from my heart these days”, the poet/lover says.
malikzaada manzoor ahmad
As Sa’di said: "If a diamond falls in the dirt it is still a diamond, yet even if dust ascends all the way to heaven it remains without value.
William Dalrymple (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi)
If Bombay is India's New York-glamorous, glitzy, vulgar-chic, a merchant city, a movie city, a slum city, incredibly rich, hideously poor- then Delhi is like Washington. Politics is the only game in town. Nobody talks about anything else for very long.
Salman Rushdie (Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002)
The real estate market in Faridabad gets its hike day by day, with the majority of development in infrastructure. Faridabad’s improved connectivity with key cities in NCR, primarily Delhi and Noida, though KMP Expressway, Faridabad-Noida-Ghaziabad Expressway, Delhi Faridabad Skyway has been favorable for its realty market. This development becomes a boon for all builders in Faridabad.
Mansha Group
But do you know, you can love a city like a woman? My old father had lived in Delhi all his life. He died of a broken heart.
Girish Karnad (Tughlaq: A Play in Thirteen Scenes)
As Faridabad is Haryana's industrial hub and one of Delhi's major satellite city, the demand for real estate in this area is rapidly rising. The Mansha group has established itself as the top and most successful developer of real estate in India, including a number of builders in Faridabad. Mansha covers the following segments: luxury floors in Faridabad, commercial space, and office space building. We give the greatest services that are well connected to the rest of the city and are reasonably priced, according to our vast knowledge of the market and its dynamics. The organisation is working in Faridabad, where it is developing cutting-edge shops, apartments, and shopping malls.
Mansha Group
...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.
Stephen Markley (Ohio)
Faridabad is an IT city, commonly referred to as the leading industrial center. Finding showrooms, offices, retail spaces is now easy with the assistance of the most popular real estate provider Omaxe World Street Faridabad. Omaxe World Street sector 79 spread over around 50 acres, the largest central business district of Delhi (NCR). The stunning low-rise complex provides a retreat for every business and guarantees investors profits.
PROP TRADE
IN MANY RESPECTS, modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals. The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people—leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class. As a chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed like a fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who’d risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat who’d won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt. Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Capital to successive empires, and the independent Indian republic, Delhi
Malvika Singh (Perpetual City)
Building on the remains of the past, dreaming of a possible future is what makes Delhi, Delhi.
Malvika Singh (Perpetual City)
History should come alive and be an intrinsic part of the life of contemporary Delhi. Instead, it is fenced off, and we are forced to peer at our monuments from a distance. They remain crumbling cold edifices rather than spectacular arenas for energetic living cultures to thrive on and grow, adding value to the lives of new generations of Dilliwallahs.
Malvika Singh (Perpetual City)
I moved to Delhi from Bombay in the 1950s, and was immediately struck by the broad avenues
Malvika Singh (Perpetual City)
city of Delhi was in a landlocked valley surrounded by mountain ranges, which basically trapped pollutants and swirled them around in a soupy smog. Air purifiers, generators, and water-filtration systems were as common among well-off residents as electric toothbrushes. Putting aside her own issues
Trisha Das (Never Meant to Stay)
Delhi is as safe or unsafe as New York, and I’ve been navigating it just fine for over a year. Besides, millions of single women live alone in Indian cities, Daddy. I’m perfectly capable—
Trisha Das (Never Meant to Stay)
The leaders now were Tokyo with 35 million, Mexico City with 19 million, New York still in the game with 18 million, São Paulo with 18 million, Mumbai with 17 million, Delhi with 14 million, Calcutta with 13 million, Buenos Aires with 13 million, Shanghai with 13 million, and Jakarta with 12 million.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
In New Delhi, all discussions are now about transforming India into a manufacturing hub, building smart cities and strengthening the country’s IT power status. A new government is talking about regaining India’s past glory and its rightful place in the global order. But here in Hridaychak, those words mean nothing.
Josy Joseph (A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India)
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Ramakant Shastri
Stone 1   Edward Durell (1902-78), U.S. architect. His notable designs include the Museum of Modern Art in New York City 1937-39; the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, India 1954-58; and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. 1964-69.
Oxford University Press (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
Marathas, Jats and Gujars who robbed and killed any man they could lay their hands on and raped any woman who fell into their clutches. It took me five days to reach Agra. By then Nadir’s horde was busy pillaging and looting Delhi. I said to myself: ‘No matter a city can be rebuilt and repopulated but no power on earth can put together a heart that has been shattered.’ Agra was the city of my heart’s ruination. I
Khushwant Singh (Delhi: A Novel)
Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked ‘What knowest thou of this wilderness?’ It replied : ‘I can sum it up in two words: ‘Alas! Alas
Khushwant Singh (Delhi: A Novel)
Six months later I ventured to return home. I quote from my diary written in the summer of 1761 : ‘I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live : meeting friends in the evenings, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it ? Nothing. Not a soul with whom I can pass a few pleasant moments in conversation ! I come away from the lane and stand on the deserted road, gaping in stunned silence at the scene of devastation. I make a vow that as long as I live, I will never come this way again. Delhi is a city where dust drifts in deserted lanes; in days gone by in this very city a man could fill his lap with gold.
Khushwant Singh (Delhi: A Novel)
Hunger and insecurity drove me from my beloved city to Lucknow. Here Nawab Asafuddaulah received me kindly and fixed a stipend for the upkeep of my family. However, the Lucknowis, who prided themselves on their etiquette and polished speech, displayed neither towards me. At the first mehfil which I attended, they looked disdainfully at my large turban, my loose-fitting clothes and asked me where on earth I had come from. When the candle was placed before me I gave them a befitting reply : You men of these eastern regions Knowing my beggarly state you mock me; You snigger amongst yourselves and ask me Where on earth can you have come from ? Let me tell you ! There once was fair city, Among cities of the world the first in fame; It hath been ruined and laid desolate, To that city I belong, Delhi is its name.
Khushwant Singh (Delhi: A Novel)
I do not really know if Bombay and Delhi together constitute India,” pat came her reply. “I suspect not, Besides, I have hardly been through both places with a finetooth comb, so I am probably the wrong person to pronounce an informed judgement. But, yes, there is one very obvious observation that comes to mind immediately: Delhi is far more cosmopolitan than Bombay.” What she really meant was, as she explained at length later, that there are many more foreigners (‘expats’ was the term she used) in Delhi than in Bombay. That apart, people look ‘varied’ here: they seemed to be from various regions, various cultures. “On the face of it,” she pointed out, “Delhi LOOKS very, very different.” Now that was something that was definitely not new—but, nevertheless, it sounded strange.
Sushmita Bose (Single in the city)
In addition, Sultan Iltumish, for all his rhetoric of being India's sole legitimate Muslim ruler, continued to issue coins with the old bull-and-horseman motif and a Sanskritized form of his name and title: 'Suratana Sri Samsadina', the latter referring to his given name, Shams al-Din. He also enlarged Delhi's Qutb mosque by three times in order to accomodate the many immigrants from beyond the Khyber who had flocked to Delhi during his reign. And he added three storeys to the city's famous minaret, the Qutb Minar. Notably, he placed a seven-metre iron pillar in the centre of the mosque's oldest courtyard, on a direct axis with its main prayer chamber. Originally installed in a Vishnu temple to announce the military victories of a fourth-or-fifth century Indian king, the pillar was now associated with Iltumish and his own victories. In transplanting the pillar in this way, the Sultan broke with Islamic architectural conventions while conforming to Indian political traditions. For in 1164, within living memory of Iltumish's installations of the Vishnu pillar in Delhi's great mosque, Vigraharaja IV Chauhan (r. 1150-64) recorded his own conquests on the same stone pillar on which the emperor Ashoka had published an edict back in the third century BC.
Richard M. Eaton (India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765)
The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation. Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land. The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.
Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
When asked for their opinion men, more often than not, blamed western culture as the source of the rape epidemic. This most often found expression in blaming the victims, whose clothing styles showed that they had been corrupted by western culture. Men who come to big cities like Delhi looking for work are shocked at seeing young women wearing tight western clothing that, in their minds at least, leaves nothing to the imagination. Men from the villages who are accustomed to seeing women wearing the ghunghat, or traditional veil, in public arrive in Delhi to find themselves sexually overstimulated by the Delhi girls, who are like mangoes. What do you do with the fruit? You eat it, suck it, and throw it away. These women are being used and overused. Sometimes, they have ten boyfriends. In such a situation, how can you stop rapes? The current discourse is being created by elites and it ends there. You have all these rich people talking on TV, but if the rich want to have fun, they can afford to hire women and go to a hotel. Where will a poor man go?
E. Michael Jones (The Jews and Moral Subversion)
Let me take you back in time a little,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, an elegant woman in a beige and pale blue wrap. She’s the director of the Center for Science and Environment, a group that’s played a leading role in the years of battles over air quality. In the 1990s, she tells me, Delhi’s air was so bad “you couldn’t go out in the city without your eyes watering.” India had no regulations on vehicles or fuel, so despite advances elsewhere in the world, engines here hadn’t improved for 40 years, and fuel quality was abysmal. It was the activist Supreme Court that changed that. Its judges started issuing orders, and from 1998 to about 2003, a series of important new rules came into force. Polluting industries were pushed out of the city, auto-rickshaws and buses were converted to CNG, and emission limits for vehicles were introduced, then tightened. “These were pretty big steps,” Roychowdhury says, and they brought results. “If you plot the graph of particulate matter in Delhi, you will see after 2002 the levels actually coming down.” The public noticed. “I still remember the 2004 Assembly elections in Delhi, where the political parties were actually fighting with each other to take credit for the cleaner air. It had become an electoral issue.” So how did things go so wrong? The burst of activity petered out, and rapid growth in car ownership erased the improvements that had been won. “If you look at the pollution levels again from 2008 and ’09 onwards, you now see a steady increase,” Roychowdhury says. “We could not keep the momentum going.” Indeed, particulate levels jumped 75 percent in just a few years.14 Even the action that was taken, she believes, “was too little. We had to do a lot more, more aggressively.” Part of the reason government stopped pushing, Roychowdhury believes, is that the moves needed next would have had to address Delhiites’ growing fondness for cars, so would surely have prompted public anger. “There is a hidden subsidy for all of us who use cars today,” she says. “We barely pay anything in terms of parking charges, we barely pay anything in terms of road taxes. It is so easy to buy a car because of easy loans. So there is absolutely no disincentive.” About 80 percent of transportation spending is focused on drivers, even though they’re only about 15 percent of Delhiites. “The entire infrastructure of the city is getting redesigned to facilitate car movement, but not people’s movement.
Beth Gardiner (Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution)
We were not allowed to leave the city limits of Karachi without prior permission, and such permission was rarely accorded. On the other hand, Pakistani diplomats in India merely had to intimate the External Affairs Ministry that they were going out of Delhi. This showed that we were not following the principle of reciprocity, which we should have been doing.
Prabhu Dayal (Karachi Halwa)
We had heard that the people of Delhi loved their city as bees love flowers. But we could not believe that the child of a courtesan would prefer to live in a Delhi brothel rather than in our palace in Iran!
Khushwant Singh (Delhi: A Novel)
Finally, on 14 September 1857, the British and their hastily assembled army of Sikh and Pathan levees assaulted and took the city, sacking and looting the Mughal capital, and massacring great swathes of the population. In one muhalla* alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 citizens of Delhi were cut down. ‘The orders went out to shoot every soul,’ recorded Edward Vibart, a nineteen-year-old British officer. It was literally murder…I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful… Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference …
William Dalrymple (The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857)