Shalimar Cinema

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After my Old Delhi cinema halls post I remembered a theater that lay along my usual commute in Delhi when I was younger. The cinema hall was called Shalimar, located the Siddharth Enclave area near Ashram Chowk, and in my memory resembled a large shed with sloping asbestos (?) sheet roofing. I used to notice it often when passing over the flyover between Ashram Chowk and Bhogal/Jangpura. That flyover is still part of my usual commute, but I haven’t seen the theater since sometime in the 1980s or 90s. Continue reading →

Badarpur Sarai

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Badarpur sarai, around which the urban village of Badarpur grew, was a rest-stop on the road between Delhi and Agra. All that visibly remains today of the 18th c. sarai are three gateways, remnants of the enclosing wall and a mosque, which has been much altered since. Till a couple of years ago, Delhiites may have spotted the southern gateway while stranded in the frequent traffic jams on Mathura Road here, but since the large elevated intersection was built at Badarpur, this sighting has been given a bypass. Continue reading →

Pulbangash Flyover

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There is a flyover coming up in the Pulbangash/Bara Hindu Rao area of central Delhi, north of the Sadar Bazaar area and west of Old Delhi, that’s going to cut into some parts of Delhi that date back to the late-19th/early-20th c. Most of the buildings have been “updated” since then and much of the landscape has changed, but this is an outlying part of the “core” area of Delhi that constituted Delhi before 1947. It might not even have been considered “outlying” if one added the growth around Old Sabzi Mandi and Karol Bagh areas in the early 20th c. Continue reading →

Old Delhi’s Old Cinema Halls

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While exploring Old Delhi and adjoining areas like Sadar Bazaar and Pahar Ganj, I’ve come across some deliciously intriguing decades-old cinema halls. Some are doing fine, some just getting along, while some seem to have shut shop or might be under litigation. This post is a visual exploration of those theaters – I haven’t gone into their histories, though I’m sure each and every one would reveal interesting stories with a little digging into. I’m assuming that these cinema halls all came up between the 1950s and 80s, though dates would have to be confirmed. Continue reading →

Fatehpuri Chowk Teardown

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Fatehpuri Chowk was covered in my first post on Shahjahanabad, covering the Khari Baoli and Katra Neel areas. That was back in 2009, when I had visited Fatehpuri Chowk for the very first time. On turning off Chandni Chowk and experiencing Fatehpuri Chowk the first few times (before the place became familiar to me), I very clearly remember feeling that this was what a bustling town in India would have looked/felt like in the 1940s, 50s, 60s Continue reading →