Latest news with #Delhiwale
Hindustan Times
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Delhiwale: The hang-out at Tansen's
Discreet daylight streaming through green vines, music percolating through painting… and Delhi fellows soaked in artistic pursuits. Triveni Kala Sangam marks its 75th jubilee this year. It was established in 1950 by Sundari K. Shridharani, who had launched her career as a dancer in the troupe of the legendary Uday Shankar. Its name, meaning the confluence of three streams, is said to have been coined by artist and musicologist Vijay Raghav Rao. That said, the Triveni Kala Sangam that we know today dates from the 1960s, when the institution was moved from its two-room premises in Connaught Place to its present four-storey locale in the art district of Mandi House, on a road named after the immortal Tansen. Here, the complex slowly built its reputation as the capital's premier cultural destination. Triveni traditionally hosts classes on music, dance, painting and photography. This June, one of the summer courses on offer is 'portraiture workshop,' which purports to teach clay modelling with 'live model.' The centre also houses some of Delhi's landmark art galleries, including Art Heritage, co-founded in 1977 by theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi. However, if Triveni were a cake, its icing would be its architecture. It was the first major structure in the capital designed by modern Delhi's greatest architect. Like most other garden-buildings by Joseph Stein, Triveni's brick-and-mortar concrete imperceptibly unite with trees and grass. Flowers and climbers effortlessly wound about the walls. The walls, in turn, frequently split into lattice screens, which gently let in light from the exterior. Then, there is the core of the place, the Triveni Terrace Cafe. For more than four decades, this shaded but open seating lounge, overlooking a garden amphitheatre, has played a creative role in the lives of artistic citizens. Painter M.F. Husain was a regular. So was Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, who, the then influential journal Seminar noted, would be sighted with 'his small compact figure and square-jawed face furrowed in concentrated silence.' Delhiwale who dated each other decades ago in this cafe—it was earlier unpretentiously referred as 'canteen'— now have their children coming here with their own dating partners. Over the years, much has changed about this eatery, but favourites of those long-ago 'canteen' regulars continue to connect to the 'cafe' gentry of our times, such as the much-loved spiced carrot cake. Sometimes, people snacking in the cafe see their conversations disrupted by the strum of a sitar, or the chhan-chhan of an anklet. Upstairs, one of Triveni's many music or dance classes is in progress. The interruption is always welcomed. PS: The photo shows the winter scene when visitors tend to sun themselves in the amphitheatre.
Hindustan Times
24-04-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Delhiwale: Dante's CP, third circle
Per Dante's Inferno, each of the Hell's nine concentric circles in the epic poem denotes a distinct tier of sin and damnation. Similarly, in Delhi's Connaught Place (CP), each of the colonial-era market's four concentric circles maintains a distinct tier of sights and sounds. The initial two circles were tracked over the previous weeks. The first runs along CP's core: the Central Park. The second is a white colonnade crammed with showrooms and restaurants (To most Delhiwale, this is the circle the mind's eye envisages when thinking of CP). Now, to the strangest part of CP: the Middle Circle. It contains a half of CP's quintessential essence, the half that gives the shopping district its perennially dishevelled appearance, no matter how many renovations it has undergone. The long-looping passage is actually a traffic-heavy road, but equipped with wide paves for aimless strolls. Whatever, despite sprinkled over with shops, restaurants, cafés, chai kiosks and even office complexes, the circle is permeated by a mood of desolation. Discoloured walls, peeling paint, rusting locks, cobwebbed doors, and green plants straying out from concrete crevices. A massive facade is pockmarked with broken windows; one is choked up with bricks. While in another block, a shuttered shopfront is standing profoundly forlorn. The legend on the damaged hoarding calls it I Chan Thim Furniture. Nobody in the vicinity is able to recollect any information on the haunting relic, although a dated bhooli-bhusri story on internet hails the shop's founder as a distinguished cabinet-maker from the 1920s and 30s, his services certified by British administrators. The Middle Circle's most picturesque corner is made of a dense shrubbery of white bougainvillaeas. It is literally a hanging garden, cascading down the roof of a building, all the way down to the iconic Nizam's Kathi Kabab. Steps ahead lurks another Middle Circle icon — the modest Anil Book Corner. It has been selling used books since 1972, valiantly surviving the death of its founder, the much-missed Anil Kumar. Few years ago, a historic Delhi icon quietly shifted its corporate headquarters from the Walled City, settling down anew in M Block, Middle Circle. It is the company that produces Rooh Afza sherbet.
