Life In A Metro

Every person is emotionally attached to the place they grow up in or had spent a chunky majority of their lives at, be it a small hamlet or a cosmopolitan city, but the hometown always and forever remains the closest to one's heart. And then there comes a place that embraces one and all (the native people, the expats, the migrants and the people  from other cities) like a warm cosy hug on a cold day.

Seeing a friend of mine posting a picture on Instagram with a cute caption for marking his one year at Bangalore aka Bengaluru, prompted me to pen this down to give the city and acknowledgement for being the city that showed me joy of being independent, dreamy and content and obviously the luxury of round the year balmy climate. 

Of what I could remember from my memory, I started visiting Bangalore as kid. I guess I was ten or so! I remember me being in awe looking at the city with josh and amusement seeing the city look like a dream, like an illusion with amazing roads with trails of giant trees that shed yellow pink and lavender flowers in spring, what's fondly known as our very own Bengaluru cherry blossom, the few malls that were there looked so neat and polished, the quaint little cafes and their melt in the mouth cakes (i had my first black forest at Bangalore), the sparking  enormous high rise buildings of the IT companies ( IT sector was emerging, slowly starting to flourish back then), huge spaces of greenery that got the city the title of "garden city", the very Indian cafe coffee day that were found in nooks and corners of every area, the Victorian architecture and what not, that would entice you to enjoy the beautiful facades of the city. 

I had not known anyone that has lived in Bangalore and has not had a secret affair with the lovely dovey extremely cheesy weather that makes you gulp down cups of garama garam chai, eat pakode curling up into a ball inside the blanket!

In the beginning, the city looked pretty like a dream on earth, I saw no misery, no pain. I wondered and wandered in admiration for I had never seen lives this perfect! While visiting Bangalore was an occasion of sorts for us back then, I started coming to the city more often right when my sister got her first job offer at Hewlett-Packard at Electronic City. I also had the privilege of staying at Bangalore for a phase of my life for professional purposes/ reasons.

 That's when I truly could get closer to the soul of the city, and boom! The darker side unraveled itself. I saw a cluster of cheerful faces, residing in a concrete jungle among the crowd, bearing balked souls and deserted minds. I could well relate it to the Bollywood movies "Fashion" and "Life In A Metro". There are extremely determined youth population struggling to discover themselves in a crowd, as a portion of innumerable corporate commercial giants, that fill you with perks and foreign money.People were equipped themselves with the latest technology, formulating new devices and achieving at it, giving it the title of "the start-up capital".The city appreciates food like no other place,  right from the traditional donne biriyani from Shivaji Military Hotel, thatte idly with Udupi chutney with filter coffee in CTR to the latest Bo Tai, Soda bottle Openerwala to Magnolia, this city is ever open to new experiences, experiments and a diversity of tastes, and has been the most welcoming to almost all cuisines, sweeping the title of "the food capital"... While I could draw my conclusion, I feel this adoration and obsession for anything food is the lack of other comfort zones like Beaches and the stress that makes you want to find respite through culinary options. The fundamental fact here being, everybody wants to feel good in comfort but fail to explore their path to what true happiness is. In the attempt to unearthing it, most of us end up conquering even the littlest of things that supplies us with comfort and richness, nevertheless, there still are certain luxuries in this whole wide blue world that cannot be procured with all money, like togetherness, love and mental peace. I saw souls with yearning eyes that were always in a hurry, I saw shattered smiles that never hesitated to smile back, I saw lonely crowds with empty hearts.