Delirious Delhi by David Prager

Author:David Prager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

If the Sunday book market was Delhi’s Brigadoon, Palika Bazaar was Delhi’s Biltmore Hotel garage: when it came to a little harmless lawbreaking, Palika Bazaar was the spot.

Palika Bazaar is an underground market located between the inner and outer circles of Connaught Place. Descending down its stairs, we’d enter a strange and fetid labyrinth created by hundreds of vendor stalls and far too many people for such a small space. Palika Bazaar defied every other shopping experience in Delhi. Elsewhere, shopkeepers seemed to have some sort of gentlemanly agreement as to how vigorously they’d solicit passers-by. In Palika, it was a free-for-all. Young men would shout at us and pull at our shirts and follow us around to cajole our patronage, and they’d shoot us looks of disgust when we’d decline. Eternal puddles added to the chaos, as did the stained ceilings and the overwhelming essence of sticky corruption. The layout was a confusion of concentric passages and repetitive storefronts, a muddied echo of Connaught Place’s circular layout above, a bewildering maze that seemed purposefully designed to ensure as many people as possible would get trampled should a panicked stampede ever break out.

Palika Bazaar sold, with a thin veneer of subtlety, anything that could be pirated, bootlegged, or frowned upon in the daylight above. This included DVDs, video games, clothes, bags, shoes, electronics and sex toys. We’d walk past T-shirt vendors (“Real Gucci! Real Gucci!”) and porn pushers (“You want sexy Indian movie?”) before stopping at the DVD guys, who would make a cursory effort to interest us in their handful of legitimate shrink-wrapped discs before pulling out spiral notebooks filled with every title we could imagine watching, both Western and Hindi. We learned the wisdom of checking the quality of the disc before we bought it; the copy of Nacho Libre we asked one vendor to test couldn’t have been any worse if it had been thrice dubbed off of a decades-old videotape.

The government has its eyes on Palika Bazaar. Not just in the proclamation they made to redevelop it in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. (Such proclamations must be taken with an ocean of salt, because the “reparation” of this and the “upgradation” of that were proclaimed a dozen times a week by smiling politicians who never seemed available for comment a year later when the newspapers followed up on the total lack of progress.) More tangible proof of government interest in Palika were the raids that were staged with increasing frequency and consequences. On our final visit to the bazaar, which came after a particularly well-publicized police action, every vendor we spoke to glanced around suspiciously when we asked about “cheaper” DVDs and then denied that they had any idea of what we were talking about.

The fact that the police were doing anything at all about piracy surprised us. Intellectual property enforcement seemed to be lower on the police’s priority list than stopping drunk driving. We once bought a bag of mango candies from a sidewalk

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