Dilli mai ek Din- Freeverse poetry and Travelogue Spreads
Amidst all the frowns and lowered expectations of people
Who had thought if I ever write again
It would be about the reasons I don’t,
the beautiful metaphors that I would’ve beaded in my words
to justify my incapability to write or to form intricate sentences anymore,
Here I write again
because while I was bathing today it struck me,
few would write it for her
for the city, I love, to reassure myself,
Despite everything, it is still not despised by all
The old dingy, ill little heart of India,
Dilli.
The gas chamber, the rape capital
the city that causes the havoc
it might be all of that for you
but the way I know this place
Is because the people in it made it the city I loved
the people made the city.
Every time I visit, I feel my heart palpitating,
The sense of warmth that envelops me after I see the India gate
and the greens of the lanes nearby that go on circling,
The feeling that I will be in the place I grew up in
and around the people whom I grew up with,
breathing the same old air I had become accustomed to again
I feel welcomed.
Welcomed, with the range of mouthwatering delicacies,
the comfortable chaos in the metros
and the lanes that offer me something new to appreciate
every time I visit.
It would take a lifetime to see the marvels of Delhi
But in those fifteen days of my vacation,
I absorb, take everything in.
When its time to bid my farewell to this city
there’s always a slight hope that we would meet again
And revisit some more old memories
the corridors of my school, the banter during recess
the constant reprimands of teachers,
The Christmas routine every year
its entire script now memorised;
I’m left with only a void in my heart,
maybe one more day.
One more day to fill that emptiness,
But it’s just my greed
to prolong the visit, to prolong that feeling of homeliness.
Amongst all the hate and tragedy that lives,
I still yearn to see a better Dilli
The Dilli I was born into
And the Dilli where I grew up, the Dilli in 2006
when nothing mattered.
I might have visited several different cities
Mapping from the north to the south
But I know
the feeling of waking up at 6 on a foggy winter morning,
The warm milk I gulped down my throat,
to the perspiration that followed when I ran down my stairs
screaming for my friends to tell the bus wale bhaiya to stop
to boarding the bus which was on the verge of leaving,
This feeling would never return
I might have stayed in a few cities
but
I’ve only truly lived in Dilli
-truthfully Dil Walon ki.
Here are some spreads of a classroom project back in 2019 where I had to design a travel book within a time frame of three days.
I made a travelogue for people who would normally stop at Delhi for a day and wouldn’t know what to do in those 24 hours. The smaller size of the book makes it very handy for users to take around. It has a pull-out city and metro map in the middle for the convenience of the user.
The look of the book has been made very colourful to lure in users to understand the real nature of the rush in Delhi.
