By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

There is a particular moment that every South Indian experiences within the first week of arriving in Delhi. It is the moment you confidently order something in Hindi or when the autorickshaw driver stares at you with the kind of pity usually reserved for the terminally confused and then responds in English — just to spare everyone further suffering. That moment, I have discovered, does not get easier. It simply becomes a recurring ritual of humility.

I came to Delhi five years ago, carrying the quiet confidence of someone who had spent decades working in the forests of Karnataka, building institutions, writing books, talking to governments. I imagined I understood India reasonably well. Delhi, in its infinite and slightly cruel wisdom, immediately set about correcting this assumption.

Delhi is not a city. It is an argument — loud, layered, historically unresolved and entirely convinced of its own centrality to everything that matters. Within days of arriving, I realised that Delhi does not ask who you are. It asks who you know, which Ministry you can access and whether your visiting card has enough designations to merit a second glance. Mine, listing a University and a few civil society organisations, was received with the polite disinterest one reserves for a menu in a language one cannot read.

The people though are extraordinary. I have sat across the table from bureaucrats who quoted Kabir while simultaneously explaining why nothing could be done. I have met activists who have been fighting the same battle for thirty years and have somehow retained both their fury and their laughter.

I have shared meals with journalists who know everything and can publish almost nothing and with academics who have theorised exhaustively about problems that people I know in Dharwad are quietly solving every other day. Delhi, I discovered, is where India’s complexity comes to perform itself.

My Hindi, meanwhile, has been a source of enormous entertainment for those around me. I arrived with what I believed was a functional working knowledge of the language. This belief lasted approximately one autorickshaw ride. The problem is not grammar; I can manage grammar. The problem is tone, register and the inexhaustible variety of things that the word yaar can mean depending on the pause before it. My Hindi is technically correct in the way that a formally dressed person at a beach party is technically dressed. Nobody is objecting. But everyone notices.

Over five years, I have polished it to what I would call acceptable with caveats. People understand me. They occasionally even respond in Hindi, which I take as a sign of respect or optimism. My colleagues have been kind. “Sir, your Hindi has improved a lot,” one of them told me recently, in the careful tone of someone complimenting a child’s drawing. Some have called my Hindi as ‘cute’, while a few others have mentioned the word ‘sweet’.  I am hoping both these descriptions are positive and appreciative.

Then, there is the small matter of power. Delhi runs on it, breathes it, organises its social life entirely around it. Who is in, who is out, who was in but is now peripheral, who appears peripheral but is actually essential — navigating this requires a kind of political cartography that I confess I was not trained for. In the places I come from, power tends to reveal itself through proximity to people and problems. In Delhi, it often reveals itself through carefully managed distance from both.

I have sat in meetings where fifteen people spent two hours agreeing on the importance of urgency without arriving at anything urgent. I have watched ideas that communities had lived and breathed for decades get repackaged, re-presented and re-circulated as fresh insights from people who had visited those communities once, on a good day, in an air-conditioned vehicle.

And yet. And yet, there is something that Delhi does to you if you stay long enough and resist the temptation to become it. It sharpens you. The noise forces clarity. The intimidation — architectural, emotional, political — eventually teaches you that the most subversive thing you can do in a city obsessed with power is to quietly, stubbornly, remain yourself.

The Lutyens bungalows are beautiful and designed to make you feel small. Parliament is magnificent and built to inspire awe in those who approach it and deference in those who enter it. The wide roads seem engineered not for traffic but for processions of the important.

I have learnt to walk through all of this with the quiet amusement of someone who knows that the most enduring work in this country has never once originated in a building meant to intimidate.

Five years in, I have found my space — not by conquering Delhi’s grammar of power, but by accepting that I was never meant to. My Hindi is passable. My patience is considerable. My sense of humour has, if anything, deepened.

Delhi has been my most demanding teacher. And like all demanding teachers, I suspect I will only fully understand what it taught me once I have left.

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement. ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]