Professor Michael Bradley
English 101
8 November 2017
Home Away from Home
'Dilwaalon ki Dilli' (The city of 'Heart'-izans) is how the inhabitants would call it. The capital of India, holds together the threads of the traditional and of the colonial. As a child, visiting Delhi was a yearly ritual (I come from Chandigarh, north of Delhi) - a pitstop, along the visit to my grandmother. My view of Delhi was a cognitive effect of the media. I knew only two things - 'Delhi is unsafe for women,' and that it meant visiting our beautiful grandmother. It was after her death, that when I visited Delhi, I realised why she loved the city - why she chose to stay there no matter how much we told her otherwise.
A truly cosmopolitan city, it …show more content…
Here, for the first time in my country, I felt like an outsider. Call it vanity, but it's not easy to be someplace you don't look like the majority. Initially, I felt uncomfortable and out of place. It was strange at first - the stares and glares followed me around, but slowly it became better; maybe it was just a case of judging a book by its cover, the people I met later were definitely warmer and friendlier. The culture was new, it was welcoming. It was the people, they walked almost charmed by each other - I wondered, if that's how I felt like to someone considering themselves …show more content…
I read about the horrible practices that were performed on Tibetan nationals when the Chinese took over the country. According to the museum’s testimonials, Tibetans have been electrocuted, harassed and tortured for the past 60 years. Golog Jigme Gyatso, a Tibetan torture survivor said, “I was hung by my shackles from an iron chair without any clothes and they tried all sorts of tortures while I was there, like beating my back with tiny metal sticks, kicking me and giving electric shocks to my mouth. The pain the chair caused was too extreme to feel any of the pain caused by the metal sticks and kicking. When they gave me electric shocks, I could feel nothing. I only smelt the burning of my own flesh.” There were over hundreds of testimonials similar to this one. I would be lying if I said that this was not one of the rare times in my life that I actually shed a tear upon reading a block of