It’s more than 2 weeks into our trip now and a few of us decided to go out and explore our neighbourhood a little bit more, to get to know the area better. We were walking around, surrounded by the usual sights; small stalls selling fruit, waste everywhere and countless stray dogs sleeping on the roofs of abandoned cars. We turned a corner and the skyline was taken over by ‘Select Citywalk’ mall. It had been mentioned to us in passing that there was a mall nearby but this was not at all what we expected. This huge complex looked like it should be in the centre of a large city in America, not surrounded by wasteland in Delhi. As soon as we stepped inside we instantly realised how dirty and scruffy we were. It genuinely felt like a different world! Compared to where we were living this felt like pure luxury, for a moment we forgot where we were living and that we were visiting on a development programme. It was very surreal to say the least.
“I feel like I could eat my dinner off this floor, it’s probably cleaner than our plates back home”
We stepped outside and were back to ‘normality’, surrounded by street kids trying to put their hands in our pockets and clambering over piles of waste to get back to our apartments. To many, this is considered a symbol of ‘the real India’; the closeness of the ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ areas, they are literally on each other’s doorstep.
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