A Dilli Haat trip after ages!

Places like Dilli Haat never grow old, however you do. I went to the place with a friend today after a very long time and everything was still the same. The types of shops, the types of people, the types of stalls and the types of tourists roaming about...all were exactly the same. Walking there like a grown up was an interestingly melancholic feeling. Untill...certain things cheered my mood up.

Let me register them in the memory lane...

This funny little place did not exactly cheer me up, but re-established the belief that I had not lost all my patience after all. We went there for a small earthen ghatam that bore the words Aam Panna. Having already downed a sinisterly buttery vada pav and a dry sev puri at the Maharashtra food stall Aam Panna came to the rescue. But only visually. It was hot and humid even in the late evening and a fan was not a luxury but a necessity. The gentleman sitting at the counter refused to acknowledge his having heard our quintuple requests to switch the standing fan on that rested in peace at a corner. Nevermind. We decided to take a look at the menu only to locate the Aam Panna. But what we saw made up for all the discomfort we'd been cursing the godforsaken man for...

        They were serving 'Thails' and if that wasn't enough you could always go for some extra 'Greavey'. 

Next, my friend wanted to have some fresh coconut water, as the Aam Panna was a disaster. So we went to an interesting machine manned by one Jeetendra who somehow squeezed the water from a coconut by only placing it on top of it. The mechanism was cool and we drank the most water-like water from the insides of a coconut.

Then we caught some very colourful shops and products, and my disappointment on the friend's bahalf, as this was her first visit, that it was already night and she would have liked to see things in the day light, vanished.

                                    Beautiful lampshades, not made of paper, but specially made leather.

Proud owners of the leather-lampshades shop from Karnataka. Their shop did not just have lampshades but a lot many colourful products...all made of leather.

             A shop of  very beautiful handicrafts from Odisha...manned by the most disinterested guy around.

                                                                      A sample from Odisha

For the entire time my friend spent checking out things at the Odisha shop, this dude never changed his position even once. And no he wasn't a mannequin, nor did he think that I was a producer of low budget films...I just know that one!

She was the most chatty shopkeeper in the haat. From Manipur, the shop had special stone made utensils and artefacts. The black bowls and kettles are all made of a light weighing stone called "serpentinite", a type of metamorphic rock. I ended up buying a small box with a lid from here. Haven't thought of what I'll put in there yet. But her sad and probably bogus story that nobody had come to her shop since morning melted my heart a little.

                                             "Sands of Time"...this remained the star of the evening.

                                                 Things of beauty...products from the valley.

The most ingenious depiction of Mahavira I'd ever seen. I was about to ask the shopkeeper to get these on a table so that I could better photograph them, but just then he saw me clicking pictures and showed aversion to my doing so.

There had been too much walking and I was hungry again. I was just too happy to see my plate of momos arriving at the Sikkim food stall. My mug of chilled fruit beer had already left a pool of condensation around.

                                 Yes...and the momos were fried and greasy. Ah...still remember them!

Cherry on top was this poster as we walked out of the gates of Dilli Haat. Such amazing art. And the man who was selling these posters and boxes refused to remove the boxes from in front of the poster as he realized that I was only going to click a couple of shots and not buy anything. Still...very interesting.

So, this was the end of a neverland journey to an odd place, reeking of nostalgia for me. What followed was the everyday struggle with reality as we tried to convince stern auto wallahs to take us to our respective homes.