Exodus at Connaught Place

Waiting, I never had realized could be interesting in its own strange ways. It was towards the onset of this year, on a breezy February evening that the jubilation of lingering to a particular space came to pass on me.

I have forever loved winters but there can be no denying that this one month of recess between the battering cold and the simmering heat is worth living for in Delhi. On this fine evening, sitting on a barely left out, pigeon-pooped-corner of a bench in Connaught Place, Delhi, I realized the restlessness of the generation that we are. The inadvertent and unconscious wending of mortals manifested in all ways a pitiful spectacle of cavorting and capering all around.

Sitting beside a stranger boy almost of my age but with a comparatively appealing bearing I was attempting to escape the judgmental gaze of the myriad couples scattered all around like bits of a kaleidoscope. Two boys of same age sitting together on this winsome evening, best suited for love, had apparently failed the hand-holding, waist-tied, love-birds of opposite sex. What if I was actually dating this boy next to me, or he dating me instead? Would our being in this pristine moment then in anyways qualify the prescriptions of Victorian “love”?

Aaah! What has become of me! Why do I even think of a reality even more spurious than imagination! Corrupt I have become, I thought.

Recollecting my corrupt psyche I turned around to appreciate the place instead.

It is on weekends that one realizes the spatio-temporal coincidence elevating places like this to sublimity. In cntrast, if one is to visit CP on a Monday evening for the most unavoidable of engagements, one can duly witness the void. It is strange how the melancholy of deserted pathways and the despondency of the unoccupied benches that stare right at one’s face on a mundane Monday transforms to a welcoming host full of possibilities on a Saturday evening.

Places like CP are archetype of sites of ambivalence and hybridity. The overlap of the colonial hangover of Lutyen’s imaginations and the subsequent post-colonial gentrification has sustained the hybridity. On one hand the place traces its Western nomenclature from the Duke of Connaught and its extravagant structural foundation from colonial heydays. On the other hand it stands up to the post colonial attempt to rename it to the Rajiv Chowk while restructuring bits and pieces of the super-structure every now and then. Amidst this ambivalence and hybridity the space thus survives the simultaneous becoming and unbecoming by dutifully embellishing itself every single day.

It is in spaces like this that the life worlds of the unending fleet of street vendors, beggars, vagabonds and lesser mortals like me come face-to-face with that of the rich and extravagant. On colliding with the deprived realities of being for mortals like us, the apocryphal narratives of India shinning and India growing meet their untimely and melancholic death in spaces like this.

It is from this point in time that the extravagant ambience fails in all ways to comfort you any further. For this is the moment of death of utopia. It is precisely at this instance that you lose all optimisms and hopes and you are haunted by the prophecies of the French existentialists. You thereby acknowledge the absurdity of existence and your veins get pumped by the blood of restlessness. It is then that you terminate your imaginations and recollect yourself before leaving the place, disheartened and disenchanted.

Hence I left! Biding adieu to the erstwhile pleasant evening.