| The crime, the Covid, the politics and the potholes: Capital Letters — Keeping track of Delhi's week, one beat at a time, through the eyes and words of HT's My Delhi section, with all the perspective, context and analysis you need. Good morning! There’s a good possibility that you’ve walked or driven down Vijay Chowk in New Delhi at some point in your life. There’s also a good possibility that you’ve possibility that you’ve noticed that all the trees planted along the roads and in the lawns that surround Vijay Chowk are planted in a similar pattern, which even to this day follow the designs laid out by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker - the architects of New Delhi. There’s an extremely high possibility, however, that you haven’t noticed one thing - 12 trees, Bistendus, at Vijay Chowk are out of sync with the rest of the general alignment of the Central Vista avenue (now known as Kartavya Path). There’s an extremely high possibility you’d get up and leave the conversation if somebody told you these 12 Bistendus were arranged in a symbol of the Freemasons - a low-key marker nod to the fraternal organisation left behind by the two men who designed the Avenue. Yes, those Freemasons. The group you’ve read about in that Dan Brown book. The innocuous pattern came to light quite by chance, when a team of experts were at work to figure out the contours of the Central Vista revamp, writes HT’s Soumya Pillai. When the plantations of the area were being studied, they found that a bunch of topiarised Bistendu trees were out of sync with the formations in the rest of the area, said Pradip Krishen, an author, environmentalist and an adviser with the design committee of the Central Vista revamp project. “The group of trees initially seemed to have been planted randomly but later it was found that it represented the shape of a truncated hexagon, like the tip of a dovetail,” he told Pillai. It was then unearthed that the trees were a hat-tip to the symbol of the Freemasons - the square and compass. It also turns out that Lutyens and Baker were Freemasons themselves. And there have been quite some famous Freemasons over the years (so many, in fact, that there’s an entire Wikipedia page called ‘List of presidents of the United States who were Freemasons’). The organisation, for years misunderstood and mischaracterised as a secret society by literature and cinema, prides itself on “virtue and wisdom” - the two qualities that the square and compass symbol represent. The symbol is, to be sure, found in buildings and monuments across the world, whether cleverly disguised like the trees at Vijay Chowk or not. Who knows if there are more symbols like this tucked away in Delhi? STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED From Kartavya Path to kartavya patra Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal last week, in a tweet dripping with snark – the kind that rarely comes from usually stoic senior politicians – compared his association with the state’s lieutenant governor VK Saxena with his relationship with his wife. “Even my wife does not scold me as much as LG sahib scolds me every day. In the last six months, my wife has not written me as many love letters as LG Sahib has written to me. LG sahib, chill a bit. And also tell your super boss, chill a little,” Kejriwal tweeted in Hindi. Who knew the day would come when a CM would tell an LG to “chill”? What a great time to be alive. Kejriwal’s tweet was a likely reference to a series of probes that Saxena has ordered against Delhi’s ruling dispensation. These include ordering (or assenting to) investigations into: the 2021-22 liquor policy, the construction of government school classrooms, the purchase of DTC buses, water bill payments, and so on. Saxena didn’t back down from Kejriwal’s tweet without a fight. On Saturday, he said the letters were ‘kartavya patra’ (letters of duty) not ‘prem patra’, from the ‘Constitutional guardian’ of the city. He also accused Kejriwal and his colleagues of “running away from Constitutional duties” and “crossing all boundaries of propriety”. Kejriwal responded succinctly. “Another love letter has arrived today…” he tweeted. But seriously, working relations between the LG’s office and the state government seemed to have soured immeasurably, with the former issuing frequent investigations against the latter, and the latter accusing the former of mala fide intent. The LG has, of his own count, issued 11 interventions or probes into the working of Delhi’s AAP government. It need not be said that the national capital could do without the two groups continuously at loggerheads, given that governance and public services will inevitably be affected, no matter which side pips which. In graphic detail No rain like abnormal rain Strong winds on Wednesday evening and the day after gave Delhi its cleanest post-Dussehra air since at least 2015, when the air quality index was introduced as a measure to gauge pollution levels. But that’s not the only story. Delhi’s weekend was rained in, with continuous showers keeping the Capital firmly indoors for yet another weekend (the penultimate week of September was quite similar) and giving the city its coldest October day since 2015. The mercury dipped to a cool 23.4°C, 10 degrees below normal. The story doesn’t stop there. In the 24 hours between Friday and Saturday evenings, Delhi received 74mm rain. That’s more than five times the city’s rain quota for all of October (just 15.1mm). The absurdity of this all is that it comes right after the withdrawal of Delhi’s driest monsoon in three years, with the city seeing a rain deficit of 19% during the wet season. According to experts, the rain was down to a trough that is currently stretching from the cyclonic circulation over coastal Andhra Pradesh to Uttarakhand, across Telangana, western Madhya Pradesh and western Uttar Pradesh in lower tropospheric levels. But – and this follows on from the erratic nature of the monsoon – the weather’s compounding vagaries mean that the Met department should rethink how it tracks the wet season, as HT pointed out in this editorial. | 
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