By Shareen Sharma:

The first thing that crosses your mind when asked to ponder about the “unnoticed things in Delhi’’ are probably the beggars spread over all the streets of Delhi, the garbage and litter in huge stockpiles all over and perhaps the slum areas like the Sanjay Basati located in Chankyapuri. But processing it gradually, you wonder “Was I the only one that noticed these?”  The truth is no, almost everyone who crosses these places do notice it but there are still no changes because they are ignored rather than unnoticed. Ignored or perhaps ‘looked away from’  by the majority or maybe they have become so used to it being a part of our life that we do not pay any attention to it anymore.

Coming to the things that I noticed, yesterday, while going home in the metro, I saw this lady seated very comfortably looking back at the crowded compartment behind ours and smiling, I was bewildered. Then I realised her smile reflected the fact that in a metro full of hundreds of people she could get herself a seat. This is probably the attitude of a lot of women travelling in the metro. But the thing is that on one side, women want equal rights and power but yet they enjoy their separate compartment. And not only compartment but also colleges. It is very difficult to get admission in Delhi University for any student but there are so many colleges offering their courses only to girls. Not only there are reservations for girls but also for other different categories. If Delhi is the capital of the diverse nation and everyone has an equal right then why do the people themselves make distinctions between each other every now and then?

The other group of people that I noticed in the metro were two foreigners with camera equipment getting on from Qutab Minar. This got me thinking too. The monotonous nature of our life has made us so busy that we are forgetting to value our deep enriched culture. The foreigners come from all over the world to visit our monuments, to get a sense of our heritage And on the other side the people of India have lost their interest in their own heritage. In most of the monuments in Delhi, either we see kids in uniforms lined up behind each other or we happen to see the couples with their hands in hands like some old movie. Only a few of us would know the stories behind the monuments and the rest won’t bother.

A strange conflicting mentality is what I noticed in Delhi.