Hashtag Delhi

In our daily lives we often get so caught up in the mundane that we forget to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Living in the capital city of India has its own charms but we tend to overlook the beauty around us. But thanks to some city based Instagrammers, who stop time and freeze bits of it; one can catch the many moods of Delhi like never before.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t appreciate the neighborhood I had here. I always wanted to leave the city and live somewhere posh. But, once I shifted to Chandigarh to study engineering, I started missing Delhi,” recalls Abu Sufiyan, the man behind the Instagram account ‘puranidilliwaley’ which has a whopping 12.3k followers. Abu, who is a Digital Marketing Strategist by profession, hails from Shahjahanabad and tries to regularly document his love for this part of the city through his posts. “When I was away from home, I would record my telephonic conversations with my mother. She speaks in beghmati zabani. (the dialect spoken by those from well-heeled families) And that’s how I came up with the idea of creating a blog called ‘Purani Dilli Walo Ki Baatein’,” explains Sufiyan.

Instagram post by Tarun anand giri (@photogiirii)

 Shubham Mathur, another Instagrammer, focuses on portraying Delhi using just his smart phone. “I am a lover of patterns and frames. Delhi is full of heritage sites and other places which entice me to capture these hidden patterns and perspectives,” says Mathur whose Instagram handle is @mr_mathur19. Mathur’s account serves a plethora of glimpses from every day Delhi. Be it a photo of the Delhi Metro or just a subway staircase, Shubham loves to play around with textures and colours.

 Self-taught visual artist and photographer, Shweta Malhotra is another Delhi-ite who is in love with the inconspicuous lanes of Old Delhi. According to Malhotra, “Delhi has decades of stories imbibed in its aura of dust and walls and that’s why most of my pictures are from Delhi” On her Instagram account (shweta.malhotra03), she focuses on street photography filled with candid moments, festival shots, cultural references and so on.  

 Several other Instagram accounts like ‘Delhigram’, ‘aiise_kaiise’ and ‘sabbyy.sg’ are also utilising the medium to capture the essence of the city through its people and places.

Even though these Instagrammers face many challenges like the complex Instagram algorithm or the fear of getting lost in a sea of online content, most of them plan to carry on their storytelling without getting lured by the greed of monetizing their
content.