Eternal City

Secret Delhi had begun as a community in the social networking site Facebook,where those who had a passion for locating magic in the mundane posted their photographs. In February this year,an online competition was launched and from among the 1,800 odd entries,around 35 photographers—mostly amateurs,living in or passing through Delhi—were chosen to display their works at the exhibition.

A visitor might have a difficult time locating the cultural hub that houses the gallery,its quaint cobbled path and stairs and overhanging vegetation tucked away behind the menacing ugliness of construction sites,but the blend of tradition and modernity that the photos offer is worth the effort.

The glitz and glamour of a 21st century city are left behind,as the photographers focus their gaze on the majestic splendour of medieval tombs and minarets,to the odd individual waging his daily struggle with life,to all the colour and sheen that we usually take for granted. Rohan Rao,a 33-year-old consultant dabbling in amateur photography,captures all-too familiar structures like Humayun’s Tomb,the emperor’s grave swathed in the soft afternoon light flooding in through the trellised windows,or the Jama Masjid,its dome silhouetted by the setting sun. “Photography involves a lot of walking and I carry my camera wherever I go,” he says. The city’s walls,barely visible beneath layers of graffiti,attract Fahad Moti Khan,a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur,who had taken up the camera seven months ago at the insistence of his photojournalist wife. One of his frames is called ‘Multilingual’—a depiction of a wall with posters peeling off,representing,according to Khan,the “dynamism of change”. “Every layer peeling off manages to leave its mark and the picture shows that it is possible to say much within a small canvas,” he says.

Hashmeet Singh,a 21-year-old who has just completed college,is perhaps the youngest member of the group. His early morning sojourns in Paharganj as well as the Old City have resulted in interesting frames—an intricately decorated archaic door that is also a gateway to a polling booth or the dilapidated South India Club at Kalibari Marg,eerily lit up by the headlights of bikes that Singh and his friends were riding. In Anshika Verma’s ‘Spazio Lotte’,the individuals impress with their dignity,contrasted with the larger than life mural of a commando that occupies much of the frame.

In the end,in this city of forgotten tombs and derelict monuments,what lingers are not the images of sovereign glory,but these individuals seemingly untouched by the passage of time,the organic brick and mortar that any city is built on.