Am anonymous, ageless.
Ok, am in the twenties.I live in Bombay and love this city of hopes and despair, of wet mornings and uneasy summers, and vertical expanse and horizontal optimism.I connect to this city. easily.
It has a new name---Mumbai--- though, since mid-nineties; I arrived here a few years later. Somewhere from North India, someplace .
What are my first memories about the city...The wide Fort roads, flanked by sometimes robust, often crumbling Gothic/Art deco buildings, smelling of acrid sweat but of wet leaves occasionally, lure me enchanted.
The silent silvery beaches along its northern coast draw me to them...
The Xavier's campus transports me to just another world. A world of faces, of ringing laughters and arched eyebrows, from twinkling eyes to smiling ones, of high-pitched calls to low whispers.A world of melting shadows and collapsing voices...
I am at home in Bombay.But a stranger forever in the city's new address, Mumbai.Why does that Mumbai look not mine, but this Bombay looks familiar.Is it about the name . Or is about the world that changes with it. Instantly. Imperceptibly, yet clearly.
A world am a part of; another world where am only an outsider.Am caught in the coalescing of the two worlds. As i travel, grope, and find my way through, the journey will become the destination itself. Perhaps.I move amid people and places of different sorts that look similar at some points, some time.
I find new meanings in them along the way, while loose a few old meanings.
Let's go..
2 comments:
Well even i feel i am talkin about a different city altogether when i call it Mumbai. This despite callin it Mumbai for the last so many years in all official communications and stuff. BOmbay had a different feel to it. maybe cos it's the city of my childhood. Well I don't think all the ills in the city are due to the name change. but I derive some satisfcation in thinking so. From international to plain local, the city has degenerated.
the name is not the root of all that ails the city..it is perhaps just the sign of changing times and attitudes.
a mindset.
a sign of a time when the city is less tolerant, quite cramped, unclean and more an urban chaos than the world-class metro our generation knew of when we first heard of bombay.
but worst of all, the city was known for having a generous heart and an innocent soul. with the corruption and chauvinism that's here now, is it still the same?
i wud hear abt bombay as a kid during a game of monopoly...i wud always giv my right hand to buy the ticket, hehe.
yea at some level its about the world that a name conjures. when especially that world seems far away.
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