The Delhi Walla traveled for nine days in Pakistan. I consider it my own country in a way that’s difficult to understand by those whose comprehension of a land and its people is defined by passports and territories. Read more

Pakistanis love reading Chick Lit as much as Delhiites. The Delhi Walla discovered it while attending the two-day Karachi Literature Festival. Held on on March 21-21, it was organised by Pakistan’s Oxford University Press (OUP) in collaboration with the British Council. Read more

Mazar-e-Qaid. Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah lies buried here. The Delhi Walla is accompanied by Asim Ghani, a Delhi-born Karachiwalla.

On the eve of Pakistan’s first Independence Day anniversary (August 14th, 1948), the founder of Pakistan, weighed only eighty pounds. Read more

I’m standing outside McDonald’s at Park Towers shopping mall. The sea wind is breezy. The evening traffic is moving at a snail’s pace. Suddenly, a bearded man comes running from Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Park, just across the road. A blinding flash of light. A huge bang. Bum phatt gaya. All is black. Am I dead? Read more

It’s a Dickensian sight. The driveway through the entrance gate is rutty. The clock on the clock tower doesn’t work. Men pee on the boundary wall. Mechanics drill holes into steel. Laborers haul cargoes in hand-pulled carts. All around are arranged thousands of air coolers, electric geysers, washing machines, water pumps, sandwich toasters and steel trunks, sometimes packed in colorful cardboard boxes. Read more

The first day of the fifth Jaipur Literary Festival rocked. Held in Hotel Diggi Palace, there was a Nobel laureate from Africa, two Pulitzer-prize winning authors from the US, a bestselling novelist from Scotland, a young writer from Pakistan, a lyricist from Bombay, a poet from Allahabad. Read more

The celebrated Delhi-based author Khushwant Singh loves Pakistan, a nation often looked at with suspicion, and sometimes even with hatred, by a majority of Indians.

One winter evening in 2009 at a rare public appearance, the 94-year-old novelist, facing a select audience that included the Indian prime minister’s wife, said, “I wish more Indians realise that most Pakistanis are nice people.” Read more

Islam is in the news for all the wrong reasons. I know quite a few non-Muslims who are liberal, reasonable and have Muslim friends. But sometimes even they have their moments of doubt about Indian Muslims. How patriotic are they? Do they really have sympathies for Islamic terrorists? Do they really clap for Pakistan in the ODIs? What do they think about Kashmir? Why are they so backward? And why are their women exiled behind the burqas? To find out the answers to these questions, I went to Gaffar Manzil, a Muslim ghetto in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar, knocked at a door and get set talking to Falak Khan, a young wife with two children. Read more

There are two kinds of Delhiwallas.  Those who have been to Khushwant Singh’s living room and those who have not. I have been to Apartment 49-E, Sujan Singh Park.

However, the author of Train to Pakistan hardly registered my presence. Only once, when I refused an offer of whiskey, did he turn to ‘check me out’.  Read more