The city that India forgot

by Guest Mon Feb 11, 2013 5:13 am

ALLAHABAD today is a stagnating city which refuses to decay. The whitewash on the Romanesque arches and Greek columns of the bungalows is wearing off. The famed broad roads, structured on a grid-like pattern even in the old city area (once the envy of north India), stretch like abandoned dance floors of the great hotels of yore—still grand but less proud, jaded but not faded. This was a city with an ice-cream parlour, the Guzders, before which Bombay joints looked like stalls at a village fair. Snobbery came natural to aficionados of El Chico's movie-like restaurant decor. There was a class cabaret, the Gaylords, in the civil lines in the '60s when Delhi hid its night life behind sleazy doors. Delhi was Punjabi, crude and downtown. Allahabad was intellectual, upmarket and aristocratic; the girls were stoic, alluring, upper class and exclusive—a living amalgam of Brahmavarta elitism, modernity and westernism. During the day black coats of High Court barons flashed with condescending aura in the pillared halls of their great Georgian villa. In the evening, the men in black quoted Shakespeare and Voltaire while smoking foreign cigars. They had a way of drinking beer and a way of watching the mujra at exclusive haunts near the Ganga. Both the cabaret and the mujra, the west and the east, rubbed shoulders as non-colonial cousins. Old timers still remember Janki Bai 'chappan churi' (she had 56 knife wounds on her body, courtesy a sour lover) singing, full blast on a public crossing, about the jalwa (honour and sheen) of the beauty walking with 'das gunda aage' and 'das gunda peeche'!...

During a screening of Bombay, a viewer could not take Manisha Koirala's pretensions of crossing the river in a boat everyday to study. After a pregnant pause, he burst out: "Bada Lal Bahadur Shastri bani hai (trying to be Lal Bahadur Shastri)!" Now, India's second prime minister was an Allahabadi who swam across the Ganga in his struggling days to study. No lumpen anywhere in India—this is where Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Calcutta all fail—would have had the information or the perspective to give Manisha Koirala's inconsequential act a historic dimension.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?205750

by Captain Bhankas Mon Feb 11, 2013 5:57 am

i wonder how there is always an inspiring childhood story about every indian freedom fighter. we have this story about lbs and then there is that plague-treatment story of v patel. some of of also have heard that story of i-ate-no-peanuts-i-ain't-cleaning-up about tilak.

there isn't a freedom fighter whose life wasn't eventful as a kid. tell me one whose highlight of the childhood was championship in spitting/p!ss!ng contest.

by truthbetold Mon Feb 11, 2013 6:15 am

The story gets better every time its retold. That is how history is written and normal becomes extra-ordinary.

by Sponsored content

Hitskin.com

The city that India forgot

The city that India forgot

Re: The city that India forgot

Re: The city that India forgot

Re: The city that India forgot