It is this:

A pink house for a family of three pressed up against the wall of the Delhi metro.

A place where numerous forces from the past centuries have left their mark:

An anti-tribal colonial law

A failed American masterplan

A backfired Emergency

A modern law criminalizing artists

A betrayal of promised land

An ongoing crisis of identity

A dwindling way of life

This is a place where every cultural thread is tangled.

Every detail has a story,

and every story is told differently.

Every drop of water measured.

Every identity in flux.

Every window wide open.

Every passageway improvised.

Every home made by those who occupy it.

Every home in Delhi is a house of light.

~ Hakim Muhammad Ahsan

The pink house is situated among a labyrinth of passageways.

There are no interpretive museum-style didactic plaques on the walls here for us to read.

No QR codes for us to connect to in order to hear what the institutional-voice has to say about the history, culture, and closed-circuit like complexity that exists here.

They told me it’s actually very easy:

If any outsider tells you they know what's going on here, they're full of shit.

130 years ago, the Delhi poets were witnesses to an endemic urban life that they considered worthy of keeping alive through the power of words.

These poets captured Delhi in times of crisis.

A 21st-century shahr ashob about this place would evoke the crisis caused by the clash of two realities:

1) The joy of togetherness that is widely expressed in this place by those who live here…

….and

2) The painful awareness by these same inhabitants that every single home here is about to be crushed, swept away, and replaced with a luxury tower…

…but a tower that promises to offer indoor plumbing and virginal views from the 11th floor with smart windows that you can open with a tablet before going down to street-level to eat chaat and shop at Benetton.

That’s all in the design, at least.

This place’s complexion of social, cultural, economic, and political stresses, all playing out in the shadow of a massive re-development scheme, is now deeply emblematic of modern Delhi - the foundation for which was launched from the mouth of a King Emperor at what is now…