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Published: April 29th 2006
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By mid-morning, Sunday, Feb 26, we were installed in Residency accommodations, with the professional and business class of New Delhi: roomy, three stories; marble floors; fine wooden doors; French windows; accessible roof top; set back from the street; tastefully gardened; honour system for refreshments and varia; community green spaces; wide boulevards; dogs on leashes; a 5-star in the neighbourhood; a golf course and a thoroughbred track on the perimeter.
We spent the rest of the day at the 5-star, in a beauty salon that tended to the needs of both women and men. Penny had her usuals. I set out to get a cut; by the time they were done with me, I had been given my cut, as requested, a manicure, a pedicure and a colour. They insisted I had to have all of this, like any suave Indian gentleman of a certain age, who would attend this establishment. Protesting in English was to no avail; they would not depart Hindi, supplemented by ‘pointing and naming' to express themselves. What could I do? My first quandary, Monday morning, alone with my mirror, pre-tea, was: "Now; why would Penny have brought a strange man home last evening."
On Monday
morning, we took a leisurely, long walk, from our place on Golf Links Road to the Canadian High Commission. New Delhi is a place of beautiful gardens, where many of the floras, annual in Canadian climes, bloom perennially. A relaxed and dignified pace pervades the mode of life. It was quite relaxing, browsing the small shopping centre in the neighbourhood; crossing sweeping boulevards on pedestrian walks that are honoured; strolling the large parkland, named The Lodi Gardens, after a medieval line of Sultans, caringly gardened, weaving its way through tombs of long gone rulers; going by a rose garden in contained bloom at the far side of the race track; enjoying flowers in their gaiety along the bountifully treed boulevards; pausing to enjoy the textured grassing of traffic circles; marveling at the relative quiet and orderliness transpiring around us. At the High Commission, we sought and were given a letter of introduction and reference that should get us into the Lower House of Parliament.
Tuesday we visited the Mughal Gardens. The gardens are in the President of India’s backyard; some back yard, some garden. It is open to the public mid- February to end March each year. We were
pleased to be able to see it. The garden is part of the President's residence and no cameras or note books are allowed.
At the entrance to the Gardens, proper, is a herb garden, some thirty plots, that leads into an archway of banyan trees; more correctly, banyan roots, since this specie propogates itself by branch rooting. The banyan arch opens out into a riot of annuals, putting on a show of flowering brilliance that would make any metropolitan spring garden event proud. Classical Indian music and several eruptions of spiking fountains lead to what is considered the main event; about an acre of cleanly segregated plots of varied plants, shrubs, grasses and flowers: budding, in bloom, past bloom and pruned. Plot segregation is occasioned by tiled waterways, in which the flowers are reflected, fed by fountains that gush, run over mounded paths and glisten in the sun. This section leads into the Long Garden which is all roses in bloom, in a full range of colours, two rows on each side of a quarter mile path.
Which brings us to the true object of our affection, the Circular Garden, by their account; the gardening of an amphitheatre
New Delhi - March 1, 2006
Lok Sabha - Indian Parliament by my sights. Perched, on each ring of seats, is a bright band of fluttering flowers, their green under bedding serving as soft cushioning. The outermost circle comes as a wall, fully draped with trailing bougainvillea vines, dotted with petals of pink, white, coral, lavender and salmon; and intermingled with eight foot high dahlias of white, red, yellow, pink and orange hues. Just where do we go from here, I thought at the time.
Never mind; in the first ring of actual floral seating in this amphitheatre, there are cosmos- pink and red, coreopsis- yellow, verbena bonarsis-lavender, all yielding willy nilly to the feel of an errant breeze.
Sitting in the row ahead of cosmos and company are tall, white, yellow and pink snapdragons; white larkspurs, blue bachelor buttons, orange straw flowers and yellow daisies.
In the third flowering circuit of this blooming bowl, sitting up, primly, are pink dianthsas, short, white assylum, blue salvia and pink penstenmon.
A silent pool graces the centre stage; its water cradling lotus and water lilies, abiding in its cool embrace.
The final section of the Mugal, fittingly I thought, is the Spiritual Garden. It is dedicated to plants
and flowers that play some role in one or other of the divine books. Marigolds, bale patra leaves, green grass, roses and lotus appear, among many others.
Wednesdsay morning of our final day in New Delhi was spent visiting the Lok Sabha, lower house of the Indian parliament. The Rajya Sabha is the upper house. We had tickets for 11 am, the first hour of question period, that exercise which has the potential, it never fully delivers, of being a true daily accountability session in parliamentary democracies.
The substantive question of our hour asked the government to explain why India's share of the world tea market had decreased from 50% to 10% over twenty years. High cost of production and lower yields, in essence, was the answer; those two, particularly combined, will get you every time; as every self respecting farmer knows.
Of no substance, but occasioning lot of hilarity, was the spectre of an opposition member gesticulating furiously to a government minister, that, as he stood in his place to answer a question, two buttons on his clothing had become undone. It took a whole chorus of M.P.'s, miming with vigour, before the chastened minister understood, dutifully adjusted his clothing and sat down to applause from all sides.
Aside from the government and opposition main benches, it seemed to us that seating in the chamber was assigned more by seniority than by party affiliation.
Our hour of question period up, we wandered around the building, along its circular, outside verandahs. Statues stand on the grounds of people who were in the fray of Indian political history. We recognise Gandhi, of course, and Jewahlal Nehru. I saw one that looked very much like Louis Mountbatten, who was asked to stay on as the first governor general, after formation of the modern day Indian Union.
There was one quaint little constitutional tidbit we unearthed from our close reading of scripts on the exterior walls. When a general election is deemed not to have produced a significant representation of the Anglo Indian population, the President is empowered to make appointments that address that anomaly. Let it be said, that nearly sixty years after writing, some would say negotiating, the constitution, the last general election results had to be adjusted, by appointment, to include two Anglo Indians. This is as curious an application of respect for minority rights, and of proportional representation as one could expect to see.
We moved on outside the grounds of the House to the Raj Path and the buildings that stand along it. The Raj Path is an immensely wide avenue: man made rivulet, treed grassland, pavement, asphalt; then repeated again on the other side. It runs from what was the Viceroy's Palace to India Gate, dedicated to losses in the two world wars. Between the two land marks are the Secretariat and Foreign Affairs Buildings; imposing structures, in the British colonial style, with a token bow to Indian motifs. In sheer scale and scope, this whole scene must have been as a powerful statement of imperial domination as one could see, expressed through architecture. Small wonder, it took, not an armed struggle, but non-violent civil disobedience, to bring an end to that phase of India's history; it would have been un-imaginable to promote an end, by force, to a regime that expressed itself in such powerful symbols. Redemption for all of this, lies in the fact that this complex, of major physical proportions, survived to be handed over, as the home that shelters the affairs of the world's largest democracy, determined to be secular, protecting the peacefully expressed belief systems of all its people. To wit, its President is a scientist of the Islamic faith, its Prime Minister is an economist who is a Sikh; and the political leader of the governing party is a mother, who is Christian by birth, Hindu by choice.
Our visit to Delhi was done; we had spent all of it in New Delhi. Agra would have to show us what Old Delhi would have. It was a six am train ride away on Thursday morning
Vernon
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