Yes I’m that Idle…….I visited the Old Fort !!

It’s that time of my life which truly defines what idle means, else it would never have struck me to make a trip to the Old Fort. What makes it absurd is that I did so at 3:00 in the afternoon with temperatures at 42 degrees. So of course it had to be a spontaneous decision. And the fact that I’m still deprived of any indulgence is proven by this act of my trying to Blog the same. So here I was trying to dig up some historical roots of my hometown Delhi or Dilli or Dhillika starting with the most unglamorous of them all. Located in the heart of the city and treated almost always as the cousin of the Red Fort, this “Purana Qila” is a prominent milestone for direction seekers but has never attracted enough attention to make planned visits. Generally people would just passby giving it a glance or a passing glaze to it’s lake which somehow seems a bit more popular than the fort itself.The experience begins at the Ticket counter itself which states:
Rs. 5 for Indians
$ 2 or Rs.100 for any other (guess it’s better to pay in dollars these days with the rupee rising fast….just a thought !!). What at first seemed like a revenue generation model of charging higher to foreign tourists gave way to a rather strange feeling of pride – “yup… we have the first right” Strange but not senseless.
Then came the rather banal Monument Protection Act of 1958 signboard making it a criminal offence to destroy historical monuments. Guess how many ‘Sunil loves Meena’ types have been implicated for the inscriptions which are more prominent than the one’s done on stone by professionals hundreds of years back. Nonetheless, atleast it’s mentioned.
The first step inside and the place seems strikingly devoid of any structures which was rather corroborated later once I took a complete round of the place. The place comes across as well maintained gardens with a “target segment” (just love using that term being a marketing student) of modern lovers. Scorching heat but they still seem to find a corner.But just before settling into that corner everyone seems to pay a visit to a modestly built Archeological Museum. The place is by no means a sea of knowledge about the history of the place but does justify itself as ‘must pay a visit place’ with the display of mostly a few terracotta models (primarily toys, necklaces and pots) from the Black Polishware Period (300 – 200 B.C.), the Mauryan and the Mughal Period. It is here I learnt that the Back Polishware Era was marked by the presence of brick laid drainage systems which emphasized the importance associated to cleanliness and the evolving architectural engineering of that era. This in turn reminded me of my need respond to the call of nature. What followed would have made the original inhabitants of the fort proud and our present day ASI cringe with shame. The place was disaster with a stench that could kill a war elephant. But lets leave it at that.

Moving on, first came the Sher Mandal, the library of Sher Shah Sur and then a Mosque. Both, though not spectacular had their own presence which was also compounded by the fact that these two are the only standing structures inside the complex from that era. The rest of the fort is almost an incongruous boundary of the old remnants of stone walls.
Once I was able to pass through the occasional embarrassment of intruding the privacy of the historically inclined lovers I too did find a corner for myself…..about a 100 feet from the Humanyun Darwaza which gave a 3∏ / 2 view (or a 270˚ view; for those mathematically challenged like me) of Delhi’s scenic beauty stretching in the distance from the DDA building at ITO in the North to the Akshardham temple built on a riverbed to Humanyun’s tomb in the South. It here that one views the greener side of Delhi and realizes the need to keep it that way. Just on the right was the trade centre of Delhi “Pragati Maidan” giving company to the Science Centre, both of which portraying the picture of a tiny architectural model with a tiny railway track adding to their reality of an architects dream. It is here that I sat for an hour wondering if this “Pandava Qila” is the best located to see the merger of Old Delhi with the New one.