As if preserved over time in a crystal ball, beautifully kept intact for one single purpose, my home was too familiar to not notice. It was almost as if I had travelled back in time from August 2013 in Bangalore to November 2012 of Delhi, only a little wetter. The negligence of rules, the uncanny resilience of people to not improve, the people from Haryana & Bihar & UP and all the other things that are familiar to all people in Delhi, all of them kept coming at me as if trying to threaten me as to how dare did I even for a remote second hope that Delhi would have changed for the better! I was seriously alarmed, but at the same time relieved that at least its home.
The reason I say coming back to November 2012 is because that was the last time I was in Delhi. I remember it, distinctly, only that it was colder and more beautiful with bright sunshine on chilly mornings. Now, it is grey and damp and almost feels like a gutter. People are still avoiding ditches rather than filling or covering them, still are smoking cigarettes in public places despite the ban, still selling white cotton t-shirts from a folding carefully balanced over bricks in a pool of muddy rain water, still have that cute childish innocence that we had when we got our freedom in 1947. They are not changing; they will be there for a long-long time. Maybe we need them, we need these reminders that we are in Delhi. We need to remember that we are not a city at all; we are a container where people are adding on like oil and filling up the container to the brim. However, the only difference in the analogy is that the container will not spill; instead extra oil will simply occupy the space between the oil and make it denser. I am not saying that we will do that, I am saying that we already have done it and we might already be really thick slurry. We might be thin enough to flow form one container to another but thick enough to stick to the hand which puts a finger in. One day will come when no more oil will be addable and we will overflow then, from the top of the slurry wax.
Bangalore is way better in this regard. There also you get a cosmopolitan culture, more so than Delhi. It does not have the population problems that Delhi faces, at least not yet, but it is full of people with more regard for rules and laws than in Delhi. If you are an educated young person, travelling across Delhi in a bus or a metro and trying to think through something or just wandering around to observe people in your spare time till you reach your destination, you will find tons of people whom you’ll judge by their conversation or appearance and make a mental note that this guy does not belong to a city like Delhi. This guy is clearly delusional if he thinks that he fits in this mix. This guy is not well dressed, is small, weak, probably a laborer who paints around in houses and drinks around at night with all his money and is definitely a native of Bihar, UP or Haryana and this guy is seriously not a type of person Delhi deserves. Then, his phone rings and he takes out his multi-touch android phone, which might be almost as good as or better than yours (it surely will if you have Micromax). You go into shock and denial and think that this guy clearly as priority issues in his life. How could he spend so much on such a phone when he cannot spend a little on his looks or lifestyle or education? He speaks in a cheap dialect (cheap to you) and you turn on the switch in your head where you decide that it is clear that this is the problem with the country, where you give technology to everyone, but not social values. But, have you thought what that guy thinks of you, if at all? He probably thinks that you are a neat clean man who has clearly had enough money all his life to spend on education. What a waste because you don’t need education for making money. You can make whatever you need in life by just enjoying it and making a minimum for survival for yourself, your wife and your kids. However, having spent the money (obviously your father’s), you have somehow given yourself a title of the elite class of the society, who think it is their call to make when it comes to what the country needs and what not! You do not care for the lower class, which by the way is lower only because a higher class exists. You are born-privileged people who have not done anything by yourself, but now have been equipped with power to take decisions for so many people. It is you whom the country does not need, because it is happy with its farmers and laborers and painters, because education makes you think you are better than others and that it itself proves that you are not. All this though takes a split second and you have judged each other perfectly.
However, when you are in Bangalore, you don’t understand a thing the other is saying. South was never a consolidated or united kingdom in any era, let along today and hence, the language barrier there is far stronger than in north. So, if you are in a bus or metro or in any public vehicle, you may see them poorly dressed, but you won’t be able to judge them as you don’t understand a damn word. So, you cannot be completely sure what that guy’s story is. They don’t have fancy phones also in their pockets, which is funny because half the natives there wear lungi. Anyways, it is tough to find out their mentality and you choose to assume that they are in some way aware of the fact that they are not good enough and they need to improve their lives. And that assumption goes a long way to make sure that you don’t judge them and let them be how they are. They do the same to you, because they don’t understand you either. For them, you are a stranger; an alien who is there to do some work, but that does not affect them at all. They are not ambitious and don’t care about you caring. So, it is not a problem. This takes more than a second.
I like Delhi, but there are fewer things here that I find better than from Bangalore and far more that I find better in Bangalore. People like Delhi because it is alive, but people like Bangalore because it is sure. It is sure that it does not have everything, accepts it, and notes it and moves on, taking care of it later. But weather is the least of the differences. People are different and will be different.
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