Word: delhi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...India is the birthplace of three major religions?Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism?while Christianity and Islam arrived with empires that ruled the country for centuries. All left their monumental marks, from temples to palaces. The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, a private NGO based in New Delhi, counts 70,000 historic monuments across the country, and R.P. Pereira in the New Delhi office of UNESCO?whose World Heritage Committee meets this week in Durban, South Africa, to review global conservation efforts?calls India "the world's biggest heritage site." But even conservationists like Thakur admit that...
...bright, bustling 52-year-old known for her uncompromising sense of purpose, Thakur found her calling as a conservationist when she moved from Madras?"not a beautiful city"?to New Delhi in the 1970s to study architecture. Awed by the 2,000 Mughal, Hindu and British buildings in the capital, she considered becoming a tour guide until her professor persuaded her to write a thesis on Nizamuddin, the city's Muslim quarter. She soon realized she was the first to systematically chronicle the area and was effectively "rediscovering a city." After stumbling upon a whole palace complex in the Mehrauli...
...children." Declares Thakur: "If I need inspiration, I just need to look at them and see how inspired they get." Watching these heritage advocates in action, it's easy to see why Thakur hasn't abandoned hope. On a recent day-trip south of New Delhi to check on the Taj Mahal, Saxena tenderly strokes some new cracks she's spotted in its eastern flank. "It's not going to fall down tomorrow," she says, "but this might be a first warning." Then, as if she were re-enacting her teacher's epiphany in Mehrauli nearly 30 years earlier...
...18th and early 19th centuries, there was one thing that astounded all visitors to New Delhi: the ruins. For miles in every direction, half-collapsed and overgrown, robbed and reoccupied, and neglected by all, lay the remains of 600 years of trans-Indian imperium. Hammams (steam baths) and palaces, thousand-pillared halls and mighty tomb towers, empty temples and half-deserted Sufi shrines?there seemed to be no end to the litter of the ages. "The prospect towards Delhi, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with the crumbling remains of gardens, pavilions, and burying places," wrote British...
...late as the early 1960s, you could still take a tonga (a horse-drawn cab) from Connaught Place and pass out of the city in minutes into this ruin-strewn countryside. Today, of course, things are different. In the past century, New Delhi's population has grown from some 200,000 to over 15 million, and the fate of those ruins is most uncertain in a city where one-quarter of the populace live in slums and one-third have no sanitation; city officials, understandably, have other priorities. Already, most of the ruins seen by Franklin have disappeared. Those that...