Everyone who knows me knows how I love new cities and how I fall in love with them. Yet one city which has always repulsed me has been Delhi. I have been ok with Chennai not welcoming me or cheating me in broad daylight through its Auto Drivers but somehow Delhi I could never forgive. Not that it has done anything to me, ever.
Yet as we grow up, things change. Life slowly removes the tinted glasses from your eyes and you begin to just bend down a bit from your lofty moralistic ideas of right or wrong. Over the last 15 odd months, I have begun to see Delhi through a new eye without staying there for more than 24 hours at a stretch. It helps when most new friends I have made at work are from Delhi and while I still am mortally petrified of women from Delhi :) I think given time I can fall in love with the city. After all, I already am in love with Pammiji.
As I sit in the new, swanky Delhi airport, I am trying to figure out Pammiji. Of all the women I love, starting from Sen Kakima to Pavithramma, Pammiji is perhaps the simplest and the most open of them all. Sitting in the heart of Delhi, happy with her life as a housewife, Pammiji is the one lady who can laugh in the face of all adversities. That’s where perhaps the difference is. Sarbajaya epitomized grit, Rojamma epitomized supreme sacrifice, Kamla behn epitomized silent suffering but Pammiji? She laughed her sorrows away.
While the men in her city are often heartless, she is the fussy caring Indian mother, seldom saying anything against her husband, supporting him through his drinking binges and caring for him all along. She loves the chill of Dilli, She loves its sweltering heat, takes the Bong under his wing saying, “Kuch meetha doon? Aaplogon ko toh itni tikha jamta nahin”
And that’s why I think Dilliwallahs can not like my Mumbai. Mumbai is nice to everyone in equal measures. Also Mumbai knows what to say to whom and when. But Pammiji decides at the very first go, if she likes you and then she will open her heart out to you or be extremely possessive about the information she wants to share. Boisterous, noisy, talkative, she can make you her friend for the couple of hours you spend with her, talking about her life, her aspirations. People make fun of her saying she is superficial. But if her exaggerated affection is superficial, so be it. For those moments, it makes you feel cared for.
Dilli ko main dil de na baithoo :)
PS: In other interesting developments, Sayrem has made a masterpiece out of my ramblings. This is a first time in my blog and I am awesomely kicked about it.
Also actually someone I reviewed read my review :) Does make me feel special :)
There are movies that make you think, there are movies that make you wish that you were in it, there are movies that make you wish that you weren’t born to watch such disasters in the name of cinema. And then there are movies that make you wonder why the director did not put in a little more effort? These typically become the movies that will be tagged in the future as “Also ran.”
Delhi 6 is perhaps the classic example of this genre.
Barring the last 10 minutes of the movie where the protagonist becomes the ultimate Bollywood hero, reunites the world, comes back from the dead and also gets the girl, the movie is fantastic. Well, fantastic maybe a little bit over the top but it definitely is good. If you love roaming around cities and if you love exploring the roads less travelled, this movie is perhaps for you. For here, you’ll get a taste of what Delhi is all about. And when I say Delhi, it’s not the Southern parts of our Nation’s Capital. Rather, it is the heart of the old city, the Delhi thatspeaks direct dil se.
This is another ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) bringing his ailing grandmother back to her country story. So things are predictable. We know he’ll fall in love with the people, the place and of course the girl. The movie is about the ‘how’. The people are real in this movie. If you watch it carefully, you might even smell the faint drift from the Parathewali Galli.
There have been better journeys of self discovery, Swades for example. But watching this movie made me realize how the Indian woman is changing. Everyday in the course of my work I come across stories of this change. In the movie, Sonam Kapoor portrayed the duality and therefore the complexity of the modern Indian woman beautifully. Very few people have been able to impress me consecutively over two movies. She does, and does it with élan.
I sometimes wonder why we all can’t be heroes? And then I realize that only does who dare to stand up for what they believe in. Not people who are happy with their day to day existence.
When people tell me about the spirit of Mumbai and how it turns back after every setback, I like to respond saying that Mumbai has no other choice. It has to bounce back, if it needs to send money to the villages of UP and Bihar. Rishi Kapoor says the same thing to AB’s Baby. “We do not have money in our purse, so we try to make do with happiness. We do not have space in our houses, so we claim to have a large heart.”
Watch the movie. But be prepared to feel, bored, restless and maybe disappointed with the ‘flimi ishtyle’ ending. That’s a price you should be willing to pay to spend a couple of hours soaking in the beauty of Delhi 6.
It’s a cold night at Delhi and as usual I am at the airport. I perhaps could have stayed back for the night and met a few friends but that just didn’t feel right. Somehow, winters have always been Calcuttan to me. Even during my Pilani days, Christmas and New Year would be in Cal. Not that I would do much there but still it felt so very Christmas-y if you know what I mean. Even in Bangalore it was chilly. And I was the Santa. Mumbai just doesn’t have it in terms of a lovely winter.
I think I have this extremely sad habit of falling in love with cities. I dislike Delhi as a city, there’s no doubt about that. But today as I stopped under the Moolchand Flyover to have the most delicious Aloo paranthas in the evening chill, I could not but help love the weather, the aroma and of course the food of Delhi. It has its beauty in other areas too. The way consumers tell me “Haanji Beta”, it feels so much at home. That typical sing song of the Delhi tongue enthrals me.
Just a few more hour before another year comes to an end. This year too the 31st will be just like any other 31st. At office till evening and then a nice cosy bed and a good book or maybe very close friends. But as I look back, I see how different the situations in reality are. Last December, as a trainee I was fighting for survival. Fighting to pick up the broken pieces of my ego and build a collage out of them. I was worried about what the New Year would bring.
It’s not that I know what 2009 will bring for me. But I feel more confident about facing it. I don’t know if I have got any better at what I do. Maybe the academic in me is swooning under corporate delivery pressure and the professional in me is loving the adrenalin rush of it all. However, what I do know is that I have become less of an intellectual snob. In 2007, fresh out of college, I considered myself one of the best in terms of laddering techniques. I stand humbled by Ms. Pammi of Pant Nagar, Rinadi of Bagha Jatin, Urvashi Ben of Ahmedabad and Santhi Amma of Mylapore. When I know what they actually want, I might get a little snobbish again. But that day is far far away.
My wardrobe slowly is seeing a shift. Pathetically boring shirts and T shirts are coming in. My Spiderman T shirts are on their way out. Women I meet actually pass sniggering comments on them. If only they knew, how tough it is to find a Floyd T shirt, a customized Spiderman T shirt or even a Calvin one. The campus clothes also are on the back foot. I really wish I had R again to help me choose clothes just like she did before Placements. But hers being one of the many weddings I missed this year, I am too afraid to ask her. The number of my unmarried friends is dwindling drastically. It may soon be the case that V and I remain the sole bachelors amongst all the people I know.
As I step into 2009, I realize once again that I love my work. Yes I sell Oil, soaps, soups to earn some money (and blow them up by being a regular customer of legally printed copies of books and a regular at movie theatres) but as long as I feel nice I really don’t care. The problem happens when I try to explain to people what I do for a living. My grand mom got extremely suspicious when she heard that my company actually pays for my flight tickets so that I can go and speak to middle aged Indian homemakers. I am sure she still doesn’t believe me. After all she never liked the census guys getting into her kitchen and taking a tally of the number of LPG cylinders she had.
So 2008 is almost up. And surprisingly the flight is just a little delayed. The fog’s kind on me. In the misty mornings of Delhi, I suddenly realized that sometimes, however much we try; the old times never come back. The misty mornings (and evenings when the train was even more delayed) in Delhi once marked the beginning of a new term in college and the frantic search for a cab to deliver us and our luggage at the campus. Today, the misty mornings in Delhi just means delayed flights and flayed tempers.
But then Life goes on. And I must find a song for the New Year.
