{D} 147: What fills the hole?

pics + links + the Mahabharata // photos are gateways // questions are invitations

Hello from out here on the Yamuna flood plains of New Delhi, where it is 35 degrees centigrade in the shade of the jamun tree. I am here for work.

Rajesh picked me up yesterday, outside my bungalow, put-puttering to a stop in his auto-rickshaw. I'd wanted to see Lutyen's Delhi before my first interview. You only have hour sir? he asked. Ok we drive around.

Careening around, more like it. You could film an action movie simply by affixing a camera to the front of an auto. They give the feel of county fair tin cup rides, poised as you are on the edge of your seat while all around is the honk and clang of amusing calamity—Mr. Toad’s Wild Dilliwala Ride.

But no dust, no heat. All shaded, green and cool. We slalomed around Lutyen's roundabouts, under the hissing water misters and along straight avenues of eucalyptus and casuarina, past yellow-painted police barricades, past peepals and banyan and shami trees, past camouflaged soldiers with automatic rifles guarding the mansions of the Bungalow zone, until we arrived at India Gate, that butter-colored Arc de Triomphe.

This is the Raj’s built legacy, a DC-like great lawn—”with all its ostentation and wasteful extravagance”, per Pandit Nehru—that gives on to fountains and chattris. Pink agra sandstone, at turns creamy and crimson, is what I was told to expect. But the entire area is under redevelopment. Everywhere was tall blue aluminum walls and tractors and the mud of construction.

So instead we puttered further along and stopped on a side street next to a cart selling half-warm Pepsi Zero.

It was then that Rajesh pointed me toward a path in a crumbling brick wall. This is very interesting place sir. You will not expect the hole you will see.

Imagine a red brick fort of the Mahabharata, but built downwards into a concavity of earth, the parapets and windows facing into the soil. The inverse of a fort, really. This was Agrasen ki baoli, a 13th-century stepwell, a cistern for the rain many centuries ago.

It is a surprising hole, is it not sir.

Later, down south in Gurgaon, I sat in a coffee shop with a contact, explaining my research into Indian living spaces. You know, I said: Homes and the like. How people live. How they will live.

She thought for a moment.

Do not be fooled by the furniture, she finally said, taking a sip of her iced mango matcha. They are having a bed in the living room, say, or maybe there's a cot in the hallway for grandmother, or a TV there. Why? What a room technically is does not matter. Maybe that's just where grandmother likes the TV because it's close to the bathroom, who knows?

She flagged the server down.

Anyway in Indian homes it is the space that serves the people, not the other way around.

I told her about my father's house in the Virginia suburbs and its living room, a large space with a thick oriental rug, two couches, and a grand piano which nobody knew how to play.

It was a cold room. Occupied only on Christmas Day. To step into it on any other occasion felt like being in church on any day but Sunday. Maybe that was the point. A hushed room of only occasional ceremony.

Exactly, she said. That is people serving space, and what for?

It is a surprising hole, is it not.

-s.

We're on an alternate schedule this week as I travel for work in India. Fewer links, more stories. Regular weekly posts will resume in September when I'm back in Mexico.

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Interviews at Subhash Camp, South Delhi

Tomb of Isa Khan

Humayan’s Tomb

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• Michael Caine on approaching any creative challenge: “use the difficulty”

• Memes are the new comics // yes though at the end of the day, I prefer the Hofstadter conjecture: memes are rapidly replicating analogies, and analogies are the root of all cognition [Ars Technica]

• Copyright your faults. On turning your errors into advantages. On embracing your unique constraints. [Matt Webb]

• I would like to recommend to you this tiktok series on weird ass 80s animated cartoons which, I agree with the creator, were disturbing af [It’s Just Cinema]

• Rainn Wilson challenges Brian Cranston to act like he’s about to murder his wife and it’s wonderful

• LLms tend to reason in English, no matter what culture they’re applied to. Which, you know, not great! [Tay Bannerman]

• Bot, cyronoid, echoborg, wireborn: A glossary for artificial intelligence [8 Ball]

• “are you the protector of this world?”

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I draw things

Auto-rickshaws are everywhere in Delhi, but this one’s actually from Antigua. Went there in April for my birthday. Got covid three hours after landing. Great trip, don’t remember a thing. Did snap a few pics of Bajaj RE rickshaws though. Here’s one of them.

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Delightful is a 100% organic, free-range, desktop-to-inbox newsletter with links and things, usually. Your host is Steve Bryant, friendly neighborhood insights and content strategist. Let’s work together or go on a hike or something. steve@thisisdelightful.com

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{ 🔒 archive }

Creativity, illustration, language, stuff like that

• What did you learn about yourself today?
  Notes on picking up drawing 30 years later

• 26 things I've learned while learning a language
  Notes from someone who’s working at it

• How to write
  On moving and watching and paying attention

• Curiosity and Research 101
  On finding out about things

• A map of what you meant to say
  On the 3D space of language

• The A.I. isn't a moron. She's your wife.
  On making ads with AI

Brand strategy, content strategy, etc

• Observational and Culture Study Cheat Sheet
  A template and tools for researching people and communities

• My content strategy toolkit
  14 tools for organizing, measuring, and creating content

• My concept diagram template
  A Figjam for diagramming the complex relationships between concepts

• Product Content Strategy 101
  For anybody who’s creating a product that requires editorial content

• The Bento Box Method for developing topical content
  A cute and useful way to structure your content topics

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Thanks for reading. Be seeing you.

Myself, I don't believe in evolution, like a long string hooked on to a First Cause, and being slowly twisted in unbroken continuity through the ages. I prefer to believe in what the Aztecs called Suns: that is, Worlds successively created and destroyed. The sun itself convulses, and the worlds go out like so many candles when somebody coughs in the middle of them. Then subtly, mysteriously, the sun convulses again, and a new set of worlds begins to flicker alight.

―Dh Lawrence, from Mornings in Mexico