Shrinking Nehru, Cricket and an Inauguration

Teen Murti House at Lutyens Delhi was once the residence of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It was converted into a Museum and Library after Nehru’s death primarily to promote research in Modern Indian History with special focus on what could essentially be termed as Nehru’s era. At a later date the Centre for Contemporary Studies was set up here as was the Nehru Planetarium. Since Nehru is not too popular with the current dispensation at the Centre and the mighty are seen navigating through their self-knitted myths often ignoring history (no, even Ramachandra Guha won’t do!) – it is proposed that Teen Murti House be converted in to a Prime Ministers of India Museum. So Nehru will now share space with all other PMs of India and perhaps this will allow some people to re-calibrate his tall stature (or so they presume). Delhi, unfortunately, will see yet another of its iconic spaces fade in to oblivion.

History and Guha brings our focus to yet another thing and that’s cricket (let Nehru’s soul rest). Delhi has won the Ranji Trophy seven times and has featured in fifteen finals – the last of which was way back in 2008. That the Delhi Team (or is it the DDCA Team – well that’s another debate and is best left for a future blog) entered the finals this season and that too without the services of one Virat Kohli – is surely a thing to rejoice. Up against first-timers Vidarbha, Delhi stands a good chance to bag their eighth Ranji title. The highlight of Delhi cricket team’s campaign, however, was a WagonR incident. And no, thankfully it wasn’t that WagonR! The Delhi team was playing against Uttar Pradesh in one of the league matches at Palam when a guy thought it wise to take his WagonR for a pitch inspection and drove the vehicle right up to the pitch while the match was on! UP was batting at the time of the incident and went on to lose the match by four wickets.

Apparently this WagonR incident, more than rattling the UP cricket team, hurt the people in power in Uttar Pradesh so much that they decided to get even with the WagonR-driving-CM of Delhi. Metro’s Magenta Line connecting Noida to South Delhi was inaugurated early this week by the PM and the UP CM at Noida with much fanfare but they decided to keep Arvind Kejriwal out. The cricket incident involving the WagonR seems to be the only plausible reason for not inviting a legitimately elected CM of Delhi for a service that’s called ‘Delhi’ Metro and will have more than seventy percent of its spread in the state of Delhi. This obviously left AK red-faced (or should that be magenta-faced!) and fuming (Delhi’s pollution levels reportedly breached ‘severe’ immediately after that inauguration) and for once there is sympathy for the man.

StateOfDelhi Suggests: Dilliwalahs get to Teen Murti Bhawan and check out the Nehru Museum before they bring it down. The museum is in the building where Nehru lived and you get a sense of that era going through the stuff that’s on display here. Behind the living quarters are the large, lush green lawns with the winter sun adding to the over all charm of the place. If you time your visit well, you could be in for an engaging panel discussion or an interesting exhibition at the adjoining facility within the same campus. There is ample parking space in front of the library but one has to be cautious while driving within the campus as there are chances that you may have to suddenly apply your brakes to let a muster of peacocks pass through.