Dumbfounded and foreign, I walk through the streets of Delhi – Old and New – peeping my head into different windows of doom. Masses congregate around ATMs waiting to get their twenty-five hundred-rupee rations in cash. Millions breathe the oppressive air that veil the city’s gates with cloaks of invisibility. The sun’s rays, orange, red, and yellow, fall heavily on the streets, ...
Vita Dadoo Lomeli
The Vintage Palace: Wedding Rituals in the Urban Space
Hyderabad, along with the new, old, and cyber cities that make up its urban landscape, invokes notions of time – past, present, and future – that demarcate porous geographical and historical divisions. In addition to showing off its chronologies through spatial boundaries, Hyderabad is a place that one can navigate through using stories – narratives that are imbued in its ...
Conquering the Other
Hyderabad is a city that occupies different realms of history simultaneously. The city’s geometry – maze-like, angular, and skewed – is replete with corners and side streets that invite its visitors to navigate freely through different times. Many of these epochs are clearly contained and outlined in its urban composition. Within Hyderabad one can find an Old City, a New City, ...
Cosmopolitanism and Environmental Imaginaries in the Northeast
The Northeastern Indian states of Assam and Meghalaya are home to hundreds of indigenous tribes that harbor unique traditions and historically distinct relationships to its natural environments. The Northeastern region of India occupies a geographically and culturally liminal space. As Nigam points out in his essay “When Was the Nation?,” ninety-eight percent of the borders of ...
The Advent of a New Species
Pondicherry looks as bittersweet as its name suggests. Puducherry, Pondicherry, or – in its most endearing form – Pondi, is a portrait of an imperfect, yet idyllic town by the sea. The unbearable humidity can be quickly assuaged with creamy gelato; its momentary noiselessness – save for the subtle rustling of waves – is interrupted by the sound of autos’ pathetic horns; and ...
