DELHI STREET SCENES
Today was to be my last day in Delhi, so before my final dentist appointment at 4 p.m. I wanted to shoot spatial videos of street scenes of places I had been to many times in the past. The first place I went to by rickshaw was Pahar Ganj near the New Delhi Railway Station where our Warren Wilson Student groups had found their own accommodations while in Delhi in hotels with no lobbies or amenities of any kind, just stark rooms with several beds and sometimes a toilet. But the streets of Pahar Ganj were and are full of life.
The first video is of the vegetable market. I am just learning to make videos so this one is shot at a slight angle. You can correct the vertigo this causes by tilting the screen when you watch it so the screen looks tilted but everyone on the screen seems normally vertical.
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The second video is a walk along the main street of Pahar Ganj filmed in a more level way. I didn’t recognize a thing on this street until I saw the word ANOOP, the name of the hotel where many of us stayed.
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After visiting the noise and constant activity of Pahar Ganj I went to Chandni Chowk, the center of Delhi when it was ruled by the Mughals into the mid 1800’s from the Red Fort on the bank of the Yamuna river. The main wide avenue of Chandni Chowk, which was crowded by vehicles when I was last there, is now a broad pedestrian avenue with motor rickshaws replaced by cycle rickshaws with drivers badgering me to go on a tour of the spice market and Chandni Chowk. I took a few long spatial videos of the hubbub but was beginning to tire. So I took a motor rickshaw to Connaught Place and had a quiet, expensive ($25) lunch of fish and chips at the Garden Party in the now very luxurious Art Deco Imperial Hotel ($300 a night) with its huge bouquets of flowers and gleaming halls lined with antique furniture and photographs of the British Raj.
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And then it was time to go visit Dr. Kakar, who was an hour late, for what was to be a quick visit to pop in, finally, my two crowns for my two implants put in last January.
One popped in and one didn’t. After trying, again and again, to place the crown which I had been carrying with me in a little plastic container since last year, into the tissue that been opened up by laser surgery yesterday (a very painful process), it simply wouldn’t fit for some reason. Dr. Kakar claimed that I wasn’t opening my jaw wide enough each time he pressed down painfully and that he couldn’t see what was going on. But finally he gave up and scanned the implant with an xray device he stuck in my mouth with the intention of making a new crown.
My train was leaving at 8 and I had to decide what to do. I could either make the ten hour train ride to Palanpur as scheduled and then at a later date take the 10 hour overnight train ride back to Delhi, have the new crown popped in, and then take another 10 hour train ride overnight back to Virampur or I could wait another day and, if I could get a train ticket on India’s overcrowded trains on such short notice, go then. Dr. Kakar checked and found tickets were available but was still seeing patients so instructed his assistant to make a reservation for me on line. She tried for 40 minutes and couldn’t manage it. Meanwhile my rickshaw driver who had been promised that I would done at the dentist in 40 minutes, had been waiting two hours for me, and was getting restless.
When I went out to check with him and told him my problem, he said he could get a train ticket, no problem. Using his own phone he checked with a travel agent and using his own money purchased a $50 overnight train ticket which he got back in cash from the dentist’s wife who had been trying to help out. Apparently, I’m not sure, Dr. Kakar is paying for my new train ticket making up for today’s unused ticket which my friend Hasmukh Patel had paid for and sent to me on line and I still have to pay for.
Except, it turns out there really wasn’t a berth available. My new ticket puts me high on the waiting list, 90% chance the rickshaw driver tells me (who is an electrical engineer working for a bus company who is supplementing his income with driving a rickshaw at night).
So tonight, Wednesday, after getting my newly made crown popped in (hopefully) at 2 p.m. I will go to the New Delhi Station with my bags and see if I really have a berth or not. If I don’t, I don’t know what the next step will be.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 