Time to breathe! It has been such a hectic time of late. Moving back to India not only involves a lot of logistics stuff, but also a mental shift in viewing the things. I could understand why people said, “Who had stayed outside India for some time and heard a lot of development tom-tom about her, often are left disappointed and rueful on confronting the reality. Their bloated sense of hassle-free world as present abroad, so craved by them, comes crashing down.”
I am not that alienated to have felt such extremes. But having lived in Delhi about 10 years back, there was nostalgia pouring all the time I looked at the roads and buildings from the windows of my taxi. Traffic was the same, so unnerving and riling. The northern Delhi seemed to have been left untouched by the Commonwealth Games renovation. Things had changed, but only in time. What else could I say?
The thought lingered with me for the first 2-3 days, but surprisingly, the environ started seeping into me. Soon I was back to childhood days of buying groceries from kirana store haggling over the prices, dodging the darting bikes and autos to find my way, stuffing myself through the crowd to take a seat in metro or bus keeping a conscious attention on my purse etc I had been though this before on my vacations, but the thought of these all going to be my daily chores had a different casing on mind. And how easily I passed. You can’t take the genes out of a body, they say.
And to tell you the truth, it feels fantastic now. Eating samosas on the roadways; seeing children play on the open streets; hearing people’s gossips on the bylanes; propitiating before God on my way- these all are truly Indian flavoured. I don’t know how long the euphoria will last, but it seems, the magic of the same contrast of despair and hope, so discerned by me always, will probably keep me rooted to my motherland for ever.
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