The Hindu : New Delhi News : Celebrating New Delhi's birthday

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Dec 15, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Celebrating New Delhi's birthday

By Our Staff Reporter

TRIP DOWN THE MEMORY LANE: `Yadgaar' the photo exhibition which opens in New Delhi on Wednesday. Photo: S. Subramanium

NEW DELHI, DEC. 14. This is a date in history that has gone unnoticed by most Delhiites for decades. December 15 might not be a special day in the calendar for most residents of the Capital, but it is probably the most important date for the `youngest' city -- New Delhi's `birthday'. And to celebrate it in style almost a century after King George V and Queen Mary laid the foundation stones of the city at a location in Kingsway Camp in 1911, the Ministry of Home Affairs has decided to take a trip down memory lane. Literally.

Having dug up old archival pictures, drawings and the odd painting of the foundation stone laying ceremony of New Delhi in 1911 with its herd of elephants and velvet umbrellas, the Ministry of Home Affair together with the National Museum has put up an exhibition to remember. Aptly titled "Yadgaar", the exhibition will be inaugurated by the new `rulers' of the North and South Block -- the Minister of Defence, Pranab Mukherjee, and the Union Minister of Home Affairs, Shivraj Patil, on Wednesday. "We have restored the two chambers where the original foundation stones of New Delhi were lodged. The project was handed over to us a month ago. The idea was to restore the chambers to their old glory. The inscriptions on the circular roof of the chambers as well as the foundation stones have been also been cleaned," an official at the Museum explained.

Hidden away behind black iron gates, the first stones of Lutyens' vision will finally be on view for its new inheritors in Independent India. Yellow sandstone blocks that were the beginning of the grand buildings that have now come to symbolise a modern country rooted in tradition, the exhibition brings alive the vast scale of the project Imperial Delhi. Views of just-born Delhi with the King's Way known as the Rajpath today free from traffic and the `lawns' in front of North and South without any "green", the architects looming large over an never-ending skyline on a crane -- these are precious pictures that are an integral part of the city's growing album.

On Tuesday, the gardeners were busy putting finishing touches to the lawns near Vijay Chowk for the ceremony to be held tomorrow morning. Covering up the bald patches of brown with freshly cut grass, the white marble fountains with its lions spouts are no longer dry and are overflowing with water, but more importantly a forgotten date in time has been put back into people's memories.

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