Delhi September 19-23, 2008

I have now finished an eight-day trip to India that took me to Delhi and Hyderabad. During my years in India between 2000 and 2006 I had only spent a couple of days in Delhi, so on this trip I took the opportunity to see more of the city, before I went to Hyderabad to visit friends at the Henry Martyn Institute.

I flew with Gulf Air from Amman on Thursday September 18, via Bahrain, to Delhi, arriving early in the morning of Friday September 19. Things started out badly, when I could not find my hotel for the longest time. I had picked my particular hotel because the hotel’s website, copied by the various on-line booking websites, lists it as being a couple minutes away from a metro stop near the city center, even though the hotel is in fact a couple of kilometers away from where the website puts it, about a ten minute walk from the next metro stop down the line.

Delhi’s new mass transit system is excellent. The first segments opened for service a few years ago and further lines are under contruction. In the crowded stations in the city center, the passengers actually line up in order to board the metro trains in orderly fashion.

Passengers lining up at one of the Delhi metro stations.

I arrived in Delhi about a week after a series of bomb blasts, so security was much in evidence. At the metro stations passengers have to go through metal detectors and have bags searched. The same is the case for many upscale buildings, like shopping malls. As an anti-terrorism effort, someone got the bright idea to turn garbage bins in public places upside down so that bombs can no longer be placed in them; but then neither can garbage.

Garbage bins in the Delhi zoo placed upside-down as an anti-terrorism measure.

During my five days in Delhi I did a lot of sight-seeing of places I had not been to before, including the national archaeological museum, the Qutub Minar (the first imperial mosque compound in India from the end of the 12th century), the Purana Qil‘a (old citadel) and zoo. At the Qutub Minar compound, I was interested to see the extensive reuse of architectural elements from Hindu temples; the images were all defaced. (Muslim reuse of earlier buildings or architectural elements is a favorite research topic of mine, being part of my PhD dissertation).

Hindu architectural elements reused in the mosque in the Qutub Minar compound