While Delhi was Busy Being Important

The streets of Delhi are a stroll into oxymorons, with warped combinations unfurling evermore. A Porsche screeching past pavements full of empty stomachs and calloused hands. A small nursery across a butcher's shop. On today's news, it's the collapse of a building and the building of a geopolitical strategy.

**A Home in Satya Niketan:**

Some 4 years ago, I made a home for myself amidst the beautiful cacophony of Satya square, through the sutta lane with its trail of smokes clouding the sky above our head, the infamous park, our friends from ARSD and Motilal. What an excruciatingly lovely tale. The recent news of the collapse of a PG numbed the hearts and souls of many like me who have ever lived in Satya Niketan or in any student hub for that matter.

The incident can easily be translated into the collapse of dreams and severing of hopes that thousands of students arrive with from different pockets of the nation. Eyes that twinkle with teenage smiles and a suitcase of excitement, crumbled into ruins in the flick of fingers. This took me back to the everyday ordeal of a side ceiling collapsing, electric wires casually hanging on a busy street, the joy of life one electrocution away from being snuffed out.

**A City In Its Best Suit:**

And while all this was happening, barely a few kilometres away, another Delhi was busy putting on its best suit.

The BRICS Summit rolled into the capital with its usual pageantry, motorcades gliding down freshly swept roads, flags of five, now more, nations fluttering above roads that had, for the occasion, forgotten every pothole they usually wear like a birthmark. Delhi knows how to dress up. It has been doing this since the Non-Aligned Movement days, since Nehru decided embassies should double as architectural flexes. Give this city forty-eight hours notice of an important guest and it will find the paint, find the flowers, find the traffic diversions. It has never once, in the same window of time, found the will to check if a fifty-year-old building housing eighteen-year-olds could survive a season of rain.

**The Cruelty Hiding Under the Poetry:**

That's the cruelty hiding under the poetry. It's not that Delhi can't fix things. It's that Delhi only fixes things when the cameras are already rolling. Give this city a state visit and suddenly there's manpower to spare, machines to spare, urgency to spare. Give it a hostel full of sleeping students and a monsoon that's been quietly eating away at a basement for weeks, and somehow nobody has the manpower to spare at all.

Somewhere in a conference hall, men in good suits were talking about resilient infrastructure, about global partnerships, about the kind of nation-building vocabulary that sounds impressive in a press release. And somewhere else, students who had come to this city with a duffel bag of ambition and maybe four hundred rupees of pocket money were being pulled out of rubble by their neighbours, by strangers, by boys from the PG next door who used whatever their bare hands could manage because the official help, as it so often does here, arrived late.

**What Held Those Buildings Together:**

I think about my own four years in Satya Niketan more than I probably should these days. The chai stall that opened at 8 AM sharp because Rajesh bhaiya somehow never overslept even though none of us understood how. The landlord who raised the rent every June like it was a religious obligation. The particular smell of matar paneer wafting out of three different dhabas at once, competing for the same hungry, broke, homesick crowd. It wasn't glamorous. It was never meant to be glamorous. It was cheap and cramped and held together, quite literally in some buildings, by hope and a few extra iron rods that nobody had inspected in decades.

And that's exactly the point nobody wants to sit with. These buildings were never really built for the number of people crammed into them. They were old houses, family homes from another era, sliced into rooms and re-sliced into smaller rooms, floor after floor stacked on foundations that were laid for a completely different, much lighter life. Every landlord in Satya Niketan knows this. Every PG owner knows this. The MCD, presumably, knows this too, somewhere in a file that nobody has opened since it was created. Everybody knows, and everybody keeps renting, and everybody keeps moving in, because rent in this city rises faster than accountability ever does.

**The Version of Them I Used To Be:**

There's a peculiar kind of numbness that settles over you when you read the news of a collapse and recognise the lane in the photo. I didn't know the students who died. I probably walked past their PG a hundred times without registering it, the way you walk past hundreds of identical buildings that all promise "AC rooms, WiFi included, home-cooked food" on hand-painted signboards. But I knew the version of them that I used to be. Twenty years old, freshly arrived, convinced that this chaotic, overpriced, faintly dangerous corner of the city was somehow also the beginning of everything good in my life. Because it was. That's what makes this so unbearable. It genuinely was the beginning of something good, for most of us who lived to tell the story.

**After The Flags Come Down:**

The BRICS Summit will end, as summits do, with a joint statement, a group photograph, and several vague paragraphs about shared prosperity. The roads will go back to being potholed. The flags will come down. Delhi will exhale and return to its usual self, magnificent and neglectful in the same breath, capable of hosting the world's most powerful people and incapable, apparently, of hosting its own students safely.

I don't know what the fix looks like, not really. Structural audits, probably. Actual enforcement of the four-floor rule that keeps getting mentioned only after something has already fallen down. Rent control that doesn't force landlords to squeeze one more floor, one more room, one more paying tenant, out of buildings that were tired decades ago. None of this is poetic. None of this will make it into a summit's closing remarks. It will not trend for more than three days. Some new outrage will replace it, the way outrage always does in a city with this much happening at once, and the scaffolding of "we will conduct a thorough inquiry" will quietly gather dust the way it always has.

But maybe the least we owe those students, the ones who didn't make it out and the thousands more still living in buildings just as old, just as unchecked, is to say it plainly, without dressing it up the way this city dresses up everything else for company. We built a summit this week. We buried students the week before. Both were choices, in their own way, about what this nation decides is worth the effort of building properly.

Delhi will always have its oxymorons, the Porsche and the empty stomach, the nursery and the butcher's knife next door. Most days, that contrast is just texture, the strange, jarring poetry of a city too big and too old to make sense all at once. This week, it stopped being poetry. It just became a question nobody in a good suit seemed in a hurry to answer.