Dreaming by the yamuna

Khosla explains how the city “turned its back on the river”. “During Mughal times,the Yamuna lapped at the high walls of the Red Fort. Then,when Lord Hardinge arrived,he chose Raisina Hill as the site of the Viceregal Lodge so that it would stand higher than the minarets of the Jama Masjid. And thus,the settlement moved away from the river,” says the economics graduate from Cambridge who once worked as a chartered accountant with PriceWaterhouse in London but soon tired of the “immensely boring problems of people who were making money”. Khosla is now working on,among other things,building a series of villages for BPL families in Kerala and constructing a polyclinic for addicts and the HIV-infected in the heart of Old Delhi,next to the railway line at Lahori Gate—to be unveiled later this year.

He notes the ironic symbolism of Nizamuddin Bridge. The bridge,which divides the city across the river from its southward sprawl,is in the heart of Delhi,and yet,it is at odds with the image of the modern,Commonwealth Games-driven metropolis that Delhi strives to be. “Delhi today is a city of apartheid. Half its population are felons who live in illegal accommodation. For a Capital city that is spread across two states and has three administrative bodies—DDA,MCD and NDMC—Delhi is a miserable failure,” says Khosla,who has edited The Idea of Delhi (Marg,2006).

Khosla recalls the day Rajiv Gandhi’s secretary requested him to take up chairmanship of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission and he declined. “It is just an advisory body without any teeth. The limbs of Delhi are in other people’s hands,” he says. He is vexed by the element of coercion in urban governance today and by the growing culture of living in gated communities—“We’re taking pieces of the city and removing them from their urban context,in a sense returning to medieval times,” he says.

Combining contemporary aesthetics with urban planning is important to Khosla,whose designs in Delhi include the School for Spastic Children next to the Khel Gaon auditorium,a new café at Jamia Millia Islamia and a dharamsala at Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital.

Tourism planning consultant for the UN,Khosla also travelled extensively to Bulgaria,Kosovo and Romania in the ’90s as UNDP’s principal consultant for urban revitalisation of places in conflict—an experience he recounts in his book,The Loneliness of a Long Distant Future: Dilemmas of Contemporary Architecture (2003). It might get lonely dreaming of Delhi’s future,but as long as a river runs through it,Khosla doesn’t care.