Allow me to ask you a question
Who are you, oh city? You go by the name Vadodara but are known as
Baroda, but really if you ask me, I don’t know who you are. We stayed together
for 22 years and yet I fail to recognize who you have become. So allow me to
ask you these questions.
Hooked to the Noir genre, I recently
finished the latest – Mumbai Noir. Have already bought the latest book on
Chennai, Tamarind City by Biswanath Gosh. Cities don’t fascinate me as much as the inquiries
that certain authors make into the heart of the city’s existence. Present
existence. Nine Lives by William Dalrymple
rests on my table and silently beckons me to delve into the rustic moorings of
the sacred. But that has to wait, because of this relentless throng of
questions in my heart.
I move about the city and find
myself staring at people, staring at the roads and the buildings. Strangely they
neither stare back at me nor do they dismiss my presence. There is this disquiet
I feel within me and maybe within them. The city looks back at me. Asking me
something. While I stare back thinking who and how should I answer. But is there an answer really that I can
give?
Allow me to ask you a question
Do I belong here? Why do I not
feel at home beyond the walls of my home?
Let me explain.
When I talk to people here, I do
not find the same sensitivities as in me.
This is no way means that they lack a sympathetic heart; on the contrary
there are far more sensitive ‘societal goodness perpetrators’ in this city than
in the other parts probably. There are so many institutions and associations,
but I still cannot spot the intellectual outpouring as expected. I am unable to
figure out where the socio-cultural debates are happening, where the agents of
change are hard at work trying to figure out better and different ways of
looking at the world.
I find obedience. That is what I find
in this city and maybe across the state.
There is no thinking beyond the diktat of the various groups –
traditional businessmen, Govt. bodies, Univ professors, Mahila samities (Ladies
associations), Swaminarayan guys, Hindutva groups etc. The city seems steeped in stereotypes and
strangely the more stereotyped you are, the more you are appreciated and
accepted. Maybe that is why I have a problem here. No, I am not ‘different’ or
a rebel or some sort of a progressive thinker. No. I am just a person who
believes in assimilation of thoughts – different thoughts, different styles,
broader strokes, finer outlines, wider canvas, thinner borders . Getting my
point?
Allow me to ask you a question
There are hordes of boys and
girls swarming the city’s streets on their bikes and scootys respectively. They
all are coming or going to their classes – school or coaching. Then there are
university students who are from various walks of life but are strangely
similar in their thoughts. There are students who are traditionally
dressed in unbranded clothes going around a bit apprehensively in the city that
displays money and the goodies money can but at every step. There are wealthy
kids in branded stylish clothing strutting around in their vehicles looking
down upon creation of a lesser kind but unable to have a still moment within their
head. These both sets of students, who
are supposed to be well educated and torch-bearers of the society, lack the sensitivities
that I have seen in the college students of Bangalore or Chennai or Mumbai or
Pune. Somehow I don’t get the feeling
that these students think beyond what is taught and what is shown to them.
There is hardly any sense of enquiry and any attempt at asserting a slightly
refined yet radical form of behavior.
There are no books shops worth
going to in Baroda. There are no
theatres or music gatherings worth going to in Baroda. There are no workshops
worth attending that discuss present and future issues beyond the industrial or
business centric issues. There are no groups that take up issues like
pollution, global warming, child rights, freedom of expression, gay rights,
capital punishment, displacement of indigeneous people due to construction of
innumerable dams, women’s liberation etc. Am I measuring with the stereotyped
measurement glass? Maybe yes, but then I feel if the populace needs a channel
to show their progressive and broad-minded thinking, then these are them. If there are such gatherings, such groups of
youngsters or wise men, then I feel they are not coming out as much as I would
like them to. Shouting anti-Modi slogans or doing a dharna like the NBA is just
rhetoric.
That brings me to the other
disturbing aspect – overt enthusiasm. People
are sometimes too enthusiastic about things like Ganesh Utsav, Rath Yatra,
Sadbhavna Sammelan, community get-togethers, etc. There is a sense of intolerance to anything
or anyone who voices concerns surrounding such events. So much so that all including the women and
young children go shrill in their vehement disapproval of anything slightly in
variance to their set norms of thinking and doing.
I roam around the streets, eating
at the road side shops, exulting in their easy friendliness. I look at the
attractively dressed young women who look appealing till they open their
mouths. Just like the elegant looking women in the Crossword Bookshop. I went
there to find some solace from the burning sun and found a few people browsing
through the books. This lady got a phone call and at the top of her voice
started gossiping and chit-chatting about the villainous aunts in their family,
unmindful of the disturbance she was creating with her loud mouthed ‘ummm and
ohooos’. Then there was this pretty yet
simple girl in a pair of jeans and shirt, leafing through the fiction section,
a girl of normal intellect but impeccable sensitivies – again as per my
perception. Then there was this chap who was probably there for the first time
and was shouting under his breath the common shout-out of gujaratis – ‘Yuuussss’,
each time he found something. Or was it that he was trying to show to me that
he indeed landed upon the treasures of knowledge just by spending ten minutes
in a bookshop.
There is so much in this city and
yet I am unable to find it. For a person with my experience in roaming and
analyzing cities, I find it hard to figure out my own home town. Roaming through Varanasi, I found the squalor
and dirt accumulated in the mask of religious endings that the city wore each
day. Delhi I found the heart which was lost in amorous eyes of the men. In
Chennai I found the wet hair of the hard working women churning out dreams. In Cochin,
Kanpur, Calicut, Lucknow, Madurai, Cuttack, Coimbatore, Salem, Bhubaneswar,
Behrampur, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Pune, Mumbai, Bhopal, Malda, Siliguri, Indore,
Jhansi, Hyderabad, Karimnagar, Kannur, Mangalore, Belgaum, Dharwad, Hubli etc
etc etc…. I have found the pulse of the city.
And after all that hoo-haa, I find myself unable to comprehend my own
city. What a shame !
I go the shopping malls, the
railways station, the airport, the city bazaars, the general hospital, the
cinema halls, the roadside food vendors, the sports clubs, the upscale and the
downmarket residences. I go everywhere from morning to noon and from evening to
night. I roam like a man possessed, a man trying hard to figure out the missing
pieces in the puzzle that has became his city.
Who do I meet, that I might get some knowledge, some hint into the ways
of this city? Who do I seek, that I might
get a peek beyond the bosom of the society that surrounds me? How do I get to
the end of this tunnel that is neither dark nor illuminated?
Allow me to ask you these
questions!!!
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