line break
Posts Tagged ‘Robert Lewis’
Rob Lewis’ blog – The Girl at Lahore Gate
February 25th, 2010 | 
Author: 
It didn't hit me until I was nearing the end of my stay. It was something, in retrospect, which I had been as worried about as food poisoning or diarrhea or Delhi-belly. It was in Old Delhi where I caught it, just outside the Lahore Gate of the Red Fort, where the flag of independent India had been raised for the first time. I had already walked the unbelievably claustrophobic streets of Chandi Chowk and its narrow alleyways, and I had thought if it was going to get me anywhere, it would be there. But it didn't, and I guess I let my guard down. I was waiting to be picked up by my private driver just next to the subway on Netaji Subhash Marg and a young girl came up to me in colourful but ragged clothes holding a baby boy in her arms. She said nothing. She just stood there. And I gave her money, slightly more than is customary. Certainly not enough to financially affect me in any way, I can tell you that, but more than would be expected. And she smiled, and told me she spoke Italian, German, Spanish and Chinese, as well as Hindi. It was an acknowledgement that this was what she did for sustenance. Almost certainly she was a professional beggar and possibly one that was pimped. This knowledge, which I accepted in retrospect, was not a truth that made me feel any better.
Posted in 
Rob Lewis’ blog: The Shatabdi Express
The Kalka Shatabdi Express pulled out of New Delhi Station at seven forty prompt, and the blind at my window was for some reason still shut. Once we were rolling north I used two fingers to lift it enough for a peek outside and saw on the dense lattice of rails, shining in the sun, dozens of small, crouched figures, their bare feet resting on the metal. To my surprise, it transpires there are a large number of transient Delhi-wallahs who consider the railway network a terrific place for a morning shit, even two hundred yards out of India's second busiest station. It didn't look particularly safe to me, but I suppose they knew what they were doing, and so I left the blind in place, feeling like an ignorant intruder, as if it was their window and not mine. In retrospect I'd be surprised if anyone else on the train was so delicate about it, particularly in the second and third-class carriages. Crowded, growing cities like Delhi hold many situations like that for the uninitiated, moments when you can't be sure whose space you're in, or how to act, or which rules are applicable.
Literary Salon, British Council, New Delhi
Photos from Melvin Burgess and Rob Lewis' visit to the British Council New Delhi this week for an informal Literary Salon with writers including Urvashi Butalia and Mridula Koshy
Robert Lewis’ blog: “Waves and Tremors”
The following is a highly partial and incomplete snapshot of some of the news items I have witnessed since my arrival in India five or so days ago:
Thursday: Mumbai police arrest or detain over 1,200 Shiv Sena “sainiks” largely for public order offences relating to their party’s protest over the release of Shah Rukh Khan’s latest film, My Name Is Khan.
Friday night: Professional hitmen assassinate advocate Shahid Azmi, who is representing the only gunman of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks who is held in custody. Azmi is shot four times in his own home. The terror attacks his client helped perpetrate killed 175 people.
Saturday night: The German Bakery in Pune, popular with backpackers and tourists, is blown up, apparently by a hitherto unknown Pakistan-based terror group called Lashkar-E-Taiba Al Alami International. The death toll at the time of writing is twelve.
Sunday: Maoist guerillas (or Naxalites) led by “a cobra-eyed woman” attack a security outpost in West Bengal and kill 24 soldiers of the East Frontier Rifles.
To take these four stories in isolation, you might be tempted to think India was veering towards some state of mild national breakdown. Certainly they have all made the headlines out here in India, where the media have run them as much as possible – but without the hand-wringing or flag-waving such events would generate back home. I don’t know how much coverage these stories got in the UK media. I’m sure the Pune bakery item, with its western “war on terror” motif, must have made the papers. I don’t want to undermine the impact of any of the above stories (with the exception of the Shiv Sena arrests they are of course all tragic on a personal level) but to the country of India itself they are but ticks on an elephant. They are nothing.
Thursday: Mumbai police arrest or detain over 1,200 Shiv Sena “sainiks” largely for public order offences relating to their party’s protest over the release of Shah Rukh Khan’s latest film, My Name Is Khan.
Friday night: Professional hitmen assassinate advocate Shahid Azmi, who is representing the only gunman of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks who is held in custody. Azmi is shot four times in his own home. The terror attacks his client helped perpetrate killed 175 people.
Saturday night: The German Bakery in Pune, popular with backpackers and tourists, is blown up, apparently by a hitherto unknown Pakistan-based terror group called Lashkar-E-Taiba Al Alami International. The death toll at the time of writing is twelve.
Sunday: Maoist guerillas (or Naxalites) led by “a cobra-eyed woman” attack a security outpost in West Bengal and kill 24 soldiers of the East Frontier Rifles.
To take these four stories in isolation, you might be tempted to think India was veering towards some state of mild national breakdown. Certainly they have all made the headlines out here in India, where the media have run them as much as possible – but without the hand-wringing or flag-waving such events would generate back home. I don’t know how much coverage these stories got in the UK media. I’m sure the Pune bakery item, with its western “war on terror” motif, must have made the papers. I don’t want to undermine the impact of any of the above stories (with the exception of the Shiv Sena arrests they are of course all tragic on a personal level) but to the country of India itself they are but ticks on an elephant. They are nothing.
Robert Lewis’ blog: “Raisana Hill”
Mumbai, with its stockbrokers and slum dwellers, its film stars and gangsters, had a reputation for being a city of strugglers, a place of competition and commerce and dangerous dreams. Delhi, six hundred miles inland, was the centre of government, where people lived lives of office and license, and was supposed to be more sedate. And so it proved. Of course it goes without saying that no city with a population of fifteen million could be considered sedate by Western standards. Delhi still makes London look like Basingstoke on a Sunday afternoon, but it is quieter than Mumbai, and in places hauntingly so.
Robert Lewis’ second blog: black sheep at the black horse
It was the middle of the night when I came down from the Black Mountains into Cardiff, and morning had broken by the time we descended over the snow-covered flower farms outside Schipol. Between planes I was frisked, body-scanned and interviewed by an apologetic Dutchman, at pains to point out these unfortunate intimacies were the result solely of an obligation to the US government.
And then I was on a Delta flight from Detroit, still half-full of American bodyclocks, the shutters on all its windows all firmly closed as we sped in strange darkness over the rest of Europe, dissected the Middle East, and skimmed the Arabian sea, this odd metallic tube of non-time, hurtling down pathways only computers could see. Read the rest of this entry »
Robert Lewis’ Lit Sutra blog: “Lucky Apple”
Isaac Newton saw an apple fall to earth, so the story goes, and was inspired to write the theory of gravity. It is probably little known, but that very same theory of gravity dictates that as Newton's observed apple plonked downwards, the whole earth rose up, imperceptibly, to meet it. For some reason I've always found that a very heartening thought. And it has given me particular comfort this week, when the British Council contacted me to invite me to India, and I wholeheartedly accepted. Bear with me. Read the rest of this entry »
Burgess, Lewis join Lit Sutra
Melvin Burgess, and Robert Lewis have joined the Lit Sutra programme for mid February.
More details to follow!
