10-07-2025
Delhiwale: Bob Dylan's Paharganj place
This muggy afternoon, a profusely sweating man is spray painting a sequence of words on the slats of a bench's backrest. Using large stencils, he is painting in white, ostensibly intending to give the bench a name. The first letter is B. The brown bench is plonked outside Madan Café, here in backpackers' Paharganj. (HT)
The brown bench is plonked outside Madan Café, here in backpackers' Paharganj. The man at work is Aditya. His father had founded the café in the 1970s, just as the Delhi locality was starting to get its first hippies.
Indeed, the café used to be packed with hippies. What a thing it was, per the old timers, to be in the community of those vanished people. Their hair long, unwashed, tangled and often beaded; the arms tattooed and pierced; the ringed fingers stained with cigarette ash. The hippies gave the café a bohemian character that persists to this day. The café, however, acquired this bench much later, in 2018, Aditya says. As he executes rendering the letter O, he recalls Paharganj's golden era. During the 1990s and early 2000s, it teemed with a mix of (ageing) hippies and young foreign backpackers. 'Our streets had more foreigners than Indians.'
Make no mistake! Most of those travellers had zero interest in smoggy crowded Delhi. After landing at the international airport, they would stay in Paharganj's economy lodges for a day or two max, before escaping to getaways in India, boarding their trains at the nearby New Delhi railway station. But for those couple of days, the backpackers would congregate in Paharganj hideouts like Madan. Here, they would exhaust hours chatting with fellow backpackers, exchanging tips on Pushkar, Shatabdi Express and Delhi belly.
Paharganj's appeal among backpackers began to wane around the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, says Aditya, when the accompanying renovations in the hotel district turned it into a dusty zone of dug-up streets. The Covid-19 years inflicted a more profound setback. These days, backpackers are rarely spotted 'because of wars in West Asia and Ukraine, and political tensions across the world.' Painting the letter Y, Aditya says, 'Our café is struggling big time. We are in a bad shape. I miss the old days.'
Back in the old days, one evening at Madan, this reporter met a New York photographer. He showed a book he had authored on the Uttarakhand Himalayas. Another evening in the café, a couple from Zagreb discussed the Balkan situation over glasses of masala chai.
Aditya finally finishes the job. Gazing at 'Bob Dylan's Bench,' he says: 'Bob Dylan's songs used to be much loved by our customers. He represents the hippie generation that we no longer see in Paharganj.' Ah, the times they are a-changin'.
