What's a "Hauz Khas" Weigh?

The new digs.

What IS this vegetable? It has several red hearts inside--alien-looking, possibly evil.My de facto roommate.

Saturday afternoon, another intern and I went on a "Delhi Heritage Walk" of an area in southern Delhi called Hauz Khas Village. I had been there before and thought it was just a street or two of posh tourist shops. But it turned out that if you went around a corner, you were in the ruins of a 14th century madrasa. People--aka, kids playing soccer and clandestine teenage couples--acted as if it were just a regular old park.


I think I gathered that it was constructed during the the reign of the Lodi rules by a guy named Firuz Shah. The tour guide, a pixie-like history PhD student, said that Firuz had been sucking up to local bigwigs by providing a place for religious study that had a garden and a body of water--apparently two things highly valued in Muslim traditions.

There's a concern of cave-ins for buildings with dome-shaped roofs. So all of the domes had a pattern of polygons at their base--first a ring with 8 sides, then one with 16, then one with 32.
Those buildings are all illegal according to a law that says no buildings within 100 meters of monuments. There was also a deer park with speckled deer.