Outside the Window: Delhi in the ’80s

As we were growing up, Delhi was changing too.

Some of those changes were exciting. Some were painful. And some were simply signs that the city, like the rest of India, was slowly moving into a different era.

Looking back, I realize that much of my memory of the 1980s is about watching that change from the places where we lived. Sometimes literally from a window or terrace. Sometimes through a television screen. Sometimes from the street outside. We were growing up inside Delhi, but in many ways we were also watching Delhi grow up around us.

The decade began with a celebration.

In 1982, Delhi hosted the Asian Games. The city seemed to be preparing for a transformation. New stadiums appeared almost overnight—or at least it seemed that way to a schoolboy. There was the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Talkatora Stadium, the Indraprastha Stadium and the Asiad Village.

And then there was Appu Ghar.

Named after the Asian Games mascot, Appu the elephant, it was an outdoor amusement park and, as we understood it, the first of its kind in the country. It even had what was said to be India's first roller coaster.

For me, the Asian Games are inseparable from Appu Ghar.

I remember going there with my school friends on a school outing. The excitement of the rides, the crowds and the sheer novelty of an amusement park in Delhi made it feel like we had temporarily been transported somewhere else.

But there was another window into the Asian Games.

Television.

Color television had just arrived in India, but we didn't have one. In fact, we didn't even have a black-and-white TV.

At the time we were living in the second barsati after Green Park in Safdarjung Enclave, and I remember watching a few Asian Games events at a neighbor's house on their black-and-white television. We would gather around their TV and watch a world that suddenly seemed much bigger and more colorful than our own.

A color TV seemed like something belonging to the future.

Then, shortly after the Games, the future arrived at our house.

We bought our first television.

It was a Konark color TV, shipped from Orissa, where it was manufactured by a state government-owned enterprise. I still remember the arrival of that television because, in our house, it was more than just a new appliance.

It changed our lives.

For the first time, the outside world had a window in our living room.

And then came the World Cup.

The 1983 Cricket World Cup was one of those moments that seemed almost too good to be true. India, against all expectations, won the tournament.

For a generation of Indian children, cricket wasn't a sport we watched. It was a sport we lived.

We played gully cricket wherever we could find enough space. A patch of road, an empty plot, a courtyard—it didn't matter. A bat, a ball and three or four children were enough to create a Test match.

We even had something called book cricket.

You opened a book to a random page and looked at the last digit of the page number. That was your score. If you got a zero, you were out.

This was cricket without a television, without a stadium and occasionally without even a proper bat.

The World Cup was even harder to follow. We still didn't own a TV when the tournament began, and many of the matches were played at inconvenient hours anyway. So we listened to the scores whenever we could.

I remember the match against Zimbabwe and Kapil Dev's extraordinary innings that rescued India from what seemed like certain defeat. Then came the final against the West Indies.

India had scored only 183.

It seemed far too little.

But somehow, we defended it.

When India won, it felt like the greatest sporting achievement imaginable.

First the Asian Games. Then the Cricket World Cup.

Delhi, and perhaps India, seemed to be entering a new era.

For a boy growing up in the city, it was easy to believe that everything outside our window was getting better.

Then came 1984.

The view from the window changed.

Indira Gandhi was assassinated, and what followed in Delhi was one of the darkest periods I remember from my childhood—the horrific violence against the Sikh community.

We lived in Safdarjung Enclave and had several Sikh families as neighbors. As the violence spread, some Hindu families took Sikh neighbors into their homes and hid them from the mobs.

Our parents became watchmen at night.

They would keep an eye on the street, listen for trouble and alert others if they saw anything happening.

As children, we didn't understand the politics behind what was happening. We understood only that something was terribly wrong and that we were afraid.

I remember standing on our terrace and seeing columns of black smoke rising in different parts of the neighborhood.

A Maruti dealership, Classic Motors, about a kilometer from our house was set on fire. A television shop in the neighborhood shopping strip went up in flames.

From our terrace, we couldn't always see what was happening.

We could see the smoke.

And based on where it was coming from, we would try to figure out what had been attacked.

It was frightening.

The same city that had seemed so exciting just a couple of years earlier was suddenly showing us a very different face.

Perhaps what disturbed me most was that the very diversity that made Delhi such an interesting place to grow up in was being turned against people.

The city that had introduced us to different languages, foods, communities and traditions was suddenly being divided along those same lines.

From our terrace, we were watching history unfold without really understanding that it was history.

We were simply children looking out at a city that seemed to have changed overnight.

The next couple of years brought a different kind of pressure.

Board examinations.

And the great career question that every respectable TamBrahm family seemed required to ask:

Engineer or doctor?

Appa, naturally, had already planned my future.

I was going to become an engineer from IIT.

My sister was going to become a doctor.

The fact that neither of us had actually agreed to this plan seemed to be a minor administrative detail.

Those were also the days of correspondence coaching classes. Brilliant Tutorials and Aggarwal Classes were the big names, each promising superior results and, presumably, a path to IIT or medical school.

There were several genuine brainiacs in our class who made it to IIT.

I was not one of them.

The coaching material was probably fine. The problem was that it required something the material could not supply—effort.

I did, however, discover that I actually liked biology.

So while my engineering entrance attempts went nowhere, I joined the Biology section at school and decided to pursue the medical route.

That eventually led me to Delhi University, where I studied biology while preparing for the medical entrance examinations.

How I went from there to Computer Science Engineering is a story in itself.

Probably a story for another chapter.

Meanwhile, life at home was changing too.

By 1985 or 1986, we had moved back to Munirka. I don't remember exactly why. Appa had received a promotion, and we could now afford to rent our own DDA flat rather than live inside someone else's.

Then came another milestone.

Our first vehicle.

A Bajaj scooter.

In those days, you didn't simply walk into a showroom and buy a scooter. You booked one, paid your money and waited.

Sometimes for years.

When ours finally arrived, it felt like we had joined a different class of people.

We were moving up.

A DDA flat of our own even though rented.

A color television.

A Bajaj scooter.

For Appa, who had come from very humble beginnings, these weren't just possessions. They were proof that the sacrifices had meant something.

In roughly ten years, our family had gone from renting a single room and kitchen inside somebody else's DDA flat to renting our own flat, and then, by 1989, owning our own flat.

We moved to Vasant Kunj.

By then, I had already left Delhi in 1987 to study Computer Science Engineering in Karnataka. For the next four years, Delhi became the place I returned to during holidays rather than the place I woke up in every morning.

The window had moved.

I was no longer watching Delhi from inside it every day. I was coming back to it.

But when I think back now, the remarkable thing is how much had changed outside our window during those years.

A city preparing for the Asian Games.

An amusement park called Appu Ghar.

The arrival of color television and, with it, a whole new world entering our living room.

A cricket team that suddenly became world champions.

A city scarred by violence.

A family slowly moving from rented rooms to its own home.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a boy who had arrived in Delhi on a three-day train journey was slowly growing up.

We were watching Delhi change.

And without realizing it, Delhi was watching us change too.