It was around the beginning of 2020 when I felt this sudden ‘urge to belong’ by walking through the bylanes of Delhi, discovering new neighbourhoods for myself having lived in and around the city for a while. Originally trained as an Architect, by this time I had worked as a Cultural programmer with Arts organisations in the UK and India which is also when I spent quite a bit of time restitching unfamiliar territories in the form of personal mental maps.

Although being related to the field, more than creating new built forms, I was always fascinated by the undiscovered potential of existing hidden (physically or in plain sight) spaces around the city and the stories they hold. I soon realised that a lot of these spaces both public and private, belonged to a particular time period (with some of them mentioning the year above their entrances) and are relatively more modern than the usually flocked monumental sites of Delhi.

In the absence of the right term or category to put these findings under, I began to self-learn about various kinds of architectural styles and art movements, which is when I came across the existence of the ‘Art Deco’ style. Something shifted in me, I could visualise the puzzling pieces of certain buildings, elements, stories starting to fall into place bit by bit.







This day remains etched in my memory, for after a long time, momentarily, I vicariously lived through the lives of generations of these occupants, imagining myself standing in the balcony of one of these once thriving Art Deco residences filled with ornamental details, going to those fancy shopping complexes drawing me in with their grand swirling staircases or simply walking to my neighbourhood cinema to catch an afternoon show with a choice between Delite and Golcha.





Soon after the world was hit by the pandemic, leaving my colleague and I with a few photographs we took of these unassuming buildings, awaiting to come alive with their untold stories, some that we discovered in the year that followed. The first couple of months of the lockdown, I was unable to go back again and explore more such lanes but was lucky enough to find an online blog by Varun Shiv Kapur showcasing a plethora of neighbourhoods in Old Delhi, home to many more undiscovered Art Deco buildings. This became the beginning of an

exploration to untap the other side of Delhi which took shape in the form of an Instagram page opening it up to the world, one discovery at a time.









Oscillating between multiple lockdowns, the exploration became a full fledged research project documenting Delhi’s Art Deco style, seeing more and more as and when there was a chance.



Each walk came with its own flavour as one could find myself and fellow discoverers time-travelling to the lives of Indian princes and their flamboyant lifestyles spotting Deco style palatial residences on Man Singh Road or reliving college days navigating the streets of North Campus adorned with Art Deco

influenced towers in exposed brick.









Oh what time it must have been, I thought to myself, for I had found a slice of life – a place where I could belong within the city’s other past!