Stop 3 DILLI 6…..

Stop 3 DILLI 6…..

Finally the all famous chandni chowk. The moment you get down the station you start getting the true color and fragrance of chandni chowk. I wasn’t bothered about how closely will it resemble the chandni chowk of Dilli 6.

The greatest thing about being here is that everyone portrays a different image of chandni chowk, as if everyone is having their own canvas of colors. Its so colorful out here that 164million colors of your cell phones seems so few. The life here moves at its own pace. The crowd never seem to be in a hurry but still the scene is like a river raft, rapidly changing the colors and the context. For the foreigners it is heaven. Poor India, hungry India, crowd, dust, etc etc.

So our caravan started from the metro stopped at red fort. The fort looked grand. The biggest fight was not to see the fort but to cross the road. With iron chariots waiting eagerly to crush form the four directions, you feel like running is the only option. Actually nobody cares. The pedestrian thinks that it is the car”wala” who will hit the brake. The car”wala” thinks that it is the pedestrian’s responsibility to save himself. And the most dangerous among them is the Blue Line buses. With plywood roofs, rickety body, thunderous noise from the engine you sure wanna avoid the vehicle of death. The drivers are perfect for F1 race. Mr. Mallya you listening???

Well the red fort was awesome. Two days back the whole consignment of our political dictators were here. Listening to the great economist. Red fort: built by a muslim, our PM who gave the speech: A sikh, our next PM who prepared the speech: A Christian. And rest of us Hindus. Gosh that’s why it is India……

Next stop: Lajpat rai market of chandni chowk. The motivation for buying: it is next to pallika bazaar. Famous for counterfeit CDs, DVDs, dirt cheap computer hardware and software worth millions of dollars at cost of some rupees. If Bill Gates visit this place he will get a heart attack for sure. 6000 worth of windows XP CD @ Rs 40. Gosh I love India. Our final shopping list: 6 pen drives of 64 GB each @ Rs 240. Legendary.

After much of shopping roaming running with the traffic we finally reached the final destination the hugely famous “Paratha Wali Gali”. 25 parathes or the oily Indian bread as some say, under one roof. Name it and they have it. Right from the all time favorite “Aloo paratha” to highly unique “Rabri Paratha”. These guys are genius. A perfect business model. After much of appreciations we too started our journey to the nirvana. The Estd. 1972 shop had that wonderful smell that we couldn’t resist ourselves and literally dived onto the servings. With aloo to bhindi to rabri to mint we tried every god damn thing that was available there. My favorite the Mint one. The smoky flavor of mint is heaven. Finally we finished close to 25 odd and the bill whooped our eyes out: Rs .750/-. But it was worth investing. Some people cribbed some were just silent. Like the typical “tourists” some pictures were clicked some memories were stored.
With this our journey to one of the beautifully preserved historic area of India came to an end. One line for it: If you have a canvas, buy colors from here……

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Stop 2: CP

Stop 2 The CP ……..

We finally landed over CP after some zip zapping through hundreds of barricades bearing “Delhi Metro” emblem on it saying “Caution Metro Construction going on”. Ohh yeah we can see that buddy with huge heavy cranes and long stretches of pillars on middle of the road anyone can make out. Gosh when is it going to get over? Eagerly waiting for that day when Delhi roads will get some space and Gurgaon some connectivity.

With Manish’s newly installed woofer system trying to break the window with “Kaminey” song being the hammer, we reached CP. The plan was to board metro from here and reach chandni chowk as it is very difficult to park your vehicle over the already overly and pretty oddly parked area of Chandni chowk.

With nothing much to do at CP I insisted on going to Kavenders for a bottle of chilled flavored butter scotch milk. After circumventing the inner circle we finally spotted the shop. By then hooligans travelling in Raj’s car arrived. They were late as Raj had bought a new car so accelerating beyond 60Kmph was a strict no no (The thing which I realized pretty late and that almost deprived me the pleasure of NH 8)

I was made the cashier and thus suddenly I was richer by almost 5K bugs. I felt like fleeing the place. But when you are surrounded by 9 more persons you can think but can not act.

Finally we boarded the metro to chandni chowk from Rajiv Chowk station. CP station: an engineering marvel. With two metro trains running perpendicularly one above the other, you wonder gosh doing CSE was crap mechanical and civil engineers are the best. Hats of to metro.