A friend who is moving mentioned that she was glad in a way for her city had started becoming too familiar. I have never really known the feeling of calling a city my own. I lived in a small hamlet of a town called Purnea till I was 9. My parents still live there, it is the single place I have had a connection to my entire life and by the conventional definition, it should qualify as my town. But my years there were spent in a protective household providing little contact with the world outside home and school. There wasn’t much to do apart from playing cricket and getting bullied by girls in a convent school, the place must have its charms but it wasn't really Narayan’s Malgudi to me. I did meet my best friend here, so that’s something, I guess.
At the age of 9, I moved to Patna. This was a place largely synonymous with family for me, it comprised cousins, uncles, grandmothers, all of which both pampered and suffocated me. Families are at their best when they are an assembly of diverse characters – flawed, quirky, opinionated, performing largely the function of adding color to your life, sometimes in excess. Here again, I was an outsider looking inwards.
When I moved to Delhi, I hated it, pretty much for the same reasons anyone hates Delhi. But I continue to feel a strong connection to it. Though I wouldn’t want to live there, I never miss an opportunity to visit Delhi. Delhi was where I grew up, this was the place I started becoming the person I was to become. Yet, so strongly we disagreed, it would be laughable to call Delhi my own, in any way.
Bangalore is the city I moved to for college and where I currently, work. Bangalore has been kind to me, Bangalore agrees with me, the weather (despite the absence of a real winter), the rust in the Bangalore sky late at night, the conduciveness to a late night walk, and even though I am not really one of them I like Bangaloreans, it is not a mere coincidence that this city has produced Dravid and Kumble. I fell in love for the first time in Bangalore. There are things about the city I like to file in my head categorized as 'my Bangalore'. Yet, I don’t know if a North Indian can ever really call Bangalore his own.
At the age of 9, I moved to Patna. This was a place largely synonymous with family for me, it comprised cousins, uncles, grandmothers, all of which both pampered and suffocated me. Families are at their best when they are an assembly of diverse characters – flawed, quirky, opinionated, performing largely the function of adding color to your life, sometimes in excess. Here again, I was an outsider looking inwards.
When I moved to Delhi, I hated it, pretty much for the same reasons anyone hates Delhi. But I continue to feel a strong connection to it. Though I wouldn’t want to live there, I never miss an opportunity to visit Delhi. Delhi was where I grew up, this was the place I started becoming the person I was to become. Yet, so strongly we disagreed, it would be laughable to call Delhi my own, in any way.
Bangalore is the city I moved to for college and where I currently, work. Bangalore has been kind to me, Bangalore agrees with me, the weather (despite the absence of a real winter), the rust in the Bangalore sky late at night, the conduciveness to a late night walk, and even though I am not really one of them I like Bangaloreans, it is not a mere coincidence that this city has produced Dravid and Kumble. I fell in love for the first time in Bangalore. There are things about the city I like to file in my head categorized as 'my Bangalore'. Yet, I don’t know if a North Indian can ever really call Bangalore his own.
