Book review: 'Delirious Delhi: Inside India’s Incredible Capital'

Delirious Delhi: Inside India’s Incredible Capital
Author: Dave Prager
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 387
Price: Rs399

‘Eat more butter chicken’, author Dave Prager inscribes on the first page of everyone’s copy of Delirious Delhi. ‘Everyone’, of course, means book lovers queued-up and waiting for Dave to address this good-humoured heart-attack mantra to them. (One earnest fellow says, ‘but I’m a vegetarian!’ Oh, Dave says, and makes a quick edit. ‘More’ crossed out, his mantra now reads: eat less butter chicken).

Expat blogger Dave Prager is a funny guy. That he’s into advertising should surprise nobody. He also comes across as a down-to-earth sort, not afraid to direct a few punches at himself. This is perhaps both apparent and endearing in the passage where he talks about his dabba, or as he calls it, ‘canister’.
“Every morning, I’d load up the four metal canisters of my electric tiffin...with what was probably a pound and a half of food. There was so much food that I’d have to plug in the tiffin an hour before lunchtime because it would take that long to heat up. One day, my tiffin short-circuited and melted under my desk, which was a blessing for my waistline because I actually had the self discipline to replace it with a smaller one,” he writes.

There is a lot about food. How Dave and his wife Jenny, Americans who’ve spent 18 months in New Delhi, love everything — chhola bhaturas, dosas, the rolls at Nizams, Roshan di kulfi at Karol Bagh, and their maid Ganga’s divine cooking: baingan ka bhartha and palak paneer. Typically though, and yet seemingly to their credit, all they remain wary of are gol gappas/pani puris —
because of the water! the water!

Besides food, and canisters, there are quirky-ish takes on much else: traffic — “nothing I hated more than MG Road”, “forget walking, Gurgaon is a city designed for valet parking”; India Gate — “a compliment to the Indian nuclear family”; and jugaad — “duct-tape arrangement”. More serious are his takes on how inaccessible to the common people Lutyens Delhi is, and how “wasting this huge and vastly underutilised belt of land on political vanity is a crime”. About old Delhi, Prager says: “For both Jenny and me, Old Delhi became our favourite part of the city... Old Delhi can’t be remembered linearly, but only as sensory bursts, as a mosaic of fleeting thrills that disappeared before they could be focused upon.”

Prager writes with comic warmth. It’s impressive how much he’s gotten beyond the surface of Delhi as it may appear to foreigners, and sunk into the city’s marrow. There’s humour, curiosity, and an eagerness to learn more, experience more, live Delhi more. Prager ties up ends beautifully. Every criticism is offset by a tip of the hat to something else. For the mention of every dead crow on his commute, he puts in a bit about a striking blue kingfisher. And to a Delhi-local, though what he writes is familiar, that equals a smile a page.