From Flea Market to Protest Central

'And then she added, My box takes pictures of things that aren't there. And it sees things that weren't there. Or sees things you'd never in your wildest dreams imagine.'

                            Gunter Grass (The Box: Tales from the Darkroom)                                                                                              

As I read The Box, I step out with mine. I see through The Box, if not through Herr Gunter.

As I walk from Janpath flea market to Jantar Mantar, a thought comes to mind. How many would notice that Jai Singh Road, adjacent to the observatory, is named after Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur--the very raja who built the observatories in Delhi and Jaipur? It’s in fact one of the five observatories that Swai Jai Singh built between 1724 and 1730.  It was Emperor Mohammad Shah who requested the polymath king to build these observatories—the aim was to correct the information then available on astronomical positions.

Jantar Mantar is now ‘protest central’, a place where the quixotic is a grind. On a Sunday, revolution takes a break. Mendicants, police informers, revolutionaries, take off. Police men loiter around their pickets, looking less bored and even less menacing. The NDMC food wallahs are also on holiday.

The walk started from Janpath. The road houses an art museum, the national museum and a sarkari handicrafts dukan. The flea market gets set up at around nine. Hawking preceded by setting up. The hawks are busy nesting their wares, before the prey predates. The mendicant looks like an ascetic bhikshuk unfazed by the commerce. I snapped it up.

Oh, by the way there is this satire, Janpath Kiss—a play written in the ‘70s by some Akhileswar Jha. It’s there on Amazon’s India site.

Please buy.  It’s all about a young married man meeting a beautiful lady on the pavements of Janpath… Now, let’s see.

Asadoma Sad Gamayah

Box Time

Magic Real

Play Book Kids

Janta Ram Manta Ram

Chandni Bloom

Peter Francis Mackay figured out a chaos theory from the midst of  the Dublin System that Joyce's Bloom and Dedalus voyaged. When I was out with my wife in the midst of Chandni Chowk (chaotic, hot, dangerous, gastronomic-where the exotic and the quotidian waltz), I could hear that damned line buzz, "Wait . . . Half a mo. Maximum the second."

Half a mo. Maximum the second.

Bloom gives way to oddities. The male herd crosses path with a lone woman. The urban pug marks stain the wall that regiments each kind of movement. I capture the moment in transition. It seems momentous. Every moment, movement, momentous in (the) transitive.

The Momentous in transitive

Contradistinctive is the word, the red-lined word in MS Wor(l)d. The whole acquires a distinction in the contrariness of its parts.

When did you stand up to weigh down on a scale? I mean last time. How would it feel to know you are being watched being weighed? How would it feel to be watched by someone informed and ill-formed? Simultaneously?

postscript:
And finally, food: Enter Ballimaran by walking on the main road towards Fatehpuri from Sishganj, cross the joota/jooti wallahs and sit on bench. Ask for food. (Mutton Korma: Rs 80; Chicken Korma: Rs 70; Buff Biriyani: Rs 40; Rice and Romalis available.) The korma is bloomicious.