Skip to main content

Trade Fair Entertainment

Is Delhi starved of entertainment?  The number of people who gathered today, a weekday, at Pragati Maidan to visit the India International Trade Fair (IITF) would make one think so.  The number ran to thousands.

A fraction of the visitors at IITF

If you were to observe for some time you would easily notice that most visitors never bought anything much from any stall.  The only stalls that did good trade were those dealing in food items.

I was also a casual visitor who had no serious intention of buying anything.  I was merely curious and today  being a holiday for me I decided to indulge my curiosity.  The realisation that there are too many people like me in Delhi who visit the IITF merely out of curiosity or just for the heck of it did amuse me.  And people are ready to undergo much inconvenience for the sake of such an insubstantial entertainment.

It was entertaining to watch other people, however.  The way they examine certain things which they may have no intention of buying, the way some people bargain with the traders who have come from other countries such as Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam and South Africa...  I was particularly amused by the way a middle-aged woman managed to get a synthetic flower free from a Thai stall by flattering the charms of the young lady who was managing the sales.

A view of the foreign stalls
Some of the state pavilions are beautifully decorated.

At the entrance to the Kerala pavilion

The Gujarat pavilion
I was also struck by the number of boys who went around scrounging waste bins for plastic bottles and other things which they could sell for a pittance.

A woman collecting plastic from a garbage tank
I found very few things at the IITF that I needed.  Of course, I hadn't gone there to buy anything really.  I learnt much, however.  The greatest lesson, perhaps, is that I was fortunate enough to be blessed with the need for nothing. 
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 21, 2012 at 11:17 PM

    Hello Sir! I was aware about the trade fair but couldn't make to visit it. Can you please tell me is it still on or not? I really want to go there and capture some beautiful stuffs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 22, 2012 at 10:47 AM

      Yes, Priti, you still have time till Sunday next. You can expect a huge crowd on weekend, so huge that it will be oppressive.

      Delete
  2. umashankarNovember 22, 2012 at 8:22 AM

    But then poor Indians are starved of entertainment, what with the authorities hanging a petty rag-doll in a secrecy befitting the end of an Osama!

    Great coverage. I liked the photos of the stalls and State counters. My favourite is the one of the Indian state, the last one, of the industrious woman fishing out plastic water bottles from the trash cart. It's a wonder that with such industry and perseverance we are still at the bottoms of the development chart.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 22, 2012 at 10:55 AM

      That secret hanging had made the security check at the Fair very strict. I had to empty my pockets entirely before the security personnel. Even my camera was examined by an expert before it was returned to me. Of course, security is vital in a place where thousands of people gather...

      Development is on a narrow track in India. Very few people have been lucky enough to get on to that.

      Delete
  3. AmitAagNovember 22, 2012 at 11:34 AM

    My first one to 'Asia72' when I was a kid started this chain of harassing and harrowing visits comprising some 20 of them on some pretext or the other(I had to go in business hours too when it is comparatively quiet)until I stubbornly said no a few years back!
    Delhites do have time, money and energy no doubt:):)
    I loved every bit of your post, Matheikal!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 22, 2012 at 12:50 PM

      Unless you have something specific to do there, the Fair is quite a pain, Amit. I made this visit after a gap of many years and was encouraged not to visit it again for another few years.

      Delete
  4. PanchaliNovember 23, 2012 at 12:44 AM

    I haven't been to Pragati Maidan for many years....all these fairs are basically useless. The foodie counters do well, as you said!
    But, the garbage part made me sad...!
    Thanks for sharing, matheikal.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 23, 2012 at 8:01 PM

      Panchali, I learnt that the waste plastic they collect fetches them Rs25 per kg. I also learnt that they collect quite a lot of it from such gatherings with all mineral water bottles and soft drink bottles. So, such fairs enhance the life of many unfortunate people!

      Delete
  5. VetirmagalNovember 23, 2012 at 5:37 PM

    Most of the fairs tell the same story. Food counters doing a good business.

    The rag picker looking for scrap is a good example. Delhi it seems has thousands of rag pickers who help to recycle plastic items, which are piling up. The govt. sponsored ones are not able to cope with the work!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 23, 2012 at 8:02 PM

      Indeed, Pattu, these poor ragpickers do a great service. You'll see them at every garbage gathering place in the morning every day. They do a lot of scavenging in the modern sense - recycling plastic! Kudos to them.

      Delete
  6. mandakolathurNovember 26, 2012 at 12:02 PM

    In what way the fair is different than, say, temple festivals? Do you think people go to such festivals to pray? Do you know the percentage of people who go to the featured concerts at the various venues during the "Music Season" in Chennai during December to enjoy what is on offer? Minuscule. People go there to be seen! This, of course, everyone going to these concerts knows and therefore being seen by other people who came there only to be seen does not fetch any social premium. So sad ...

    The carnival atmosphere is what is entertainment. There need be no particular purpose. No different than window shopping.

    The photo showing someone digging into the trash bin is best illustrated by showing how it is done in Disney Land / Disney World! That contrast is worth a thousand, "Oh, how sad ..." sighs.

    RE

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
14 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
11 comments
Read more