Invisible City

Invisible CityThe Hidden Monuments of Delhi – Rakshanda Jalil From the Author I asked my soul, what is Delhi? She replied: The world is the body and Delhi its soul Mirza Ghalib may have been indulging in hyperbole when he penned these famous lines, but there is no denying that Delhi is a notch above the other great metropolises of India. What sets it apart is the multitude of historic ruins that are almost everywhere. Every ruler down the ages wished to adorn his beloved Delhi, to leave a mark that would last and so left behind a landscape studded with jewels from the past. Neophyte New Delhi has been quick to discard most of them on the rubbish heap of history, choosing to validate a bare minimum with a name, an identity and a place of visibility. Where it was possible to make the law look the other way, many of these monuments were razed to the ground to make way for colonization and development. Regarded as no more than inconvenient piles of rock, many have been pulled down, built upon, built around. Invisible City: The Hidden Monuments of Delhi explores this other Delhi-the little-known, seldom-visited, largely unheard of Delhi, the Delhi that has been rendered almost invisible.Till places and buildings continue to be visited, they remain visible the cloak of oblivion descends only when people stop looking at them, making them invisible, as it were. All ye whose heart beats for Delhi, don’t let that cloak fall just yet; go and see some of these beauties before they disappear before your very eyes; or worse still, before hand-made, kiln-fired tiles of the most azure blue are replaced by mass-produced bathroom tiles in the course of “restoration drives”.Khuswant Singh in the Foreword of the book, writes- You can love Delhi or hate it, you cannot be indifferent towards it. My attitude towards the city cannot be clearly defined . I started by loving it and continued to love it for many years. Then my passion for it began to abate