Thursday, April 26, 2007

whats it about a new place..?

You love a new place when you are there just as a visitor and the picture just swivels around on its hinge when you are tehre for a longer stay..that is not quite on a vacation. You like it at first, then you hate it and then if you can just bring yourself to love it again then theres something special about teh city.
Delhi has to be undoubtedly teh city to which i have got used to the fastest. Till a few months ago my memories of this grand capital city was a weeks visit in which we cramped in memories of all the famous monuments this city had to offer and nothing more. But this time ive so far given a skip to the monuments, well apart from teh qutub minar which is just about a stones throw away from where i stay.
This time it was more about people, shopping, commotion, the metro, work, college and what else. everything except a vacation i guess.
in sharp contrast to what i had got used to calcutta, delhi never seems to sleep. even if at two in teh night you wake up hearing a grumble in your tummy you know there is more than a chance you would find a tea shop open somehwere. Whereas in calcutta i would have got myself a drink of water and tried to knock myself unconcious or something.
Even in Bangalore which had all nonsensical rhetoric of compulsory shutting down of restaurants after 11 a couple of years back, i knew of several places where i could easily grab an early morning/late night bite.
but more than such triflings the things that more than anything affect your inclination towards a place is the people there, teh people around you and to a lesser extent the weather too if you really want to come up with a third factor.
There is somehitng about a human being, that overbearing instinct to be social. even the most introvert of us at some moments desires company. Human beings are strange animals. Potent enough to kill you, charming enough to make you fall in love with, loud enough to make you feel like tearing your ears, soothing enough to listen to a voice for hours at stretch.
What i am trying to convey here is that its the people that make the place. i got robbed twice, yelled at thrice, was denied service by shopkeepers because he didnt feel like getting up from his comfortable little stool, how do you expect me to post anything good about teh charm of calcutta. i jsut dotn see it over the mistreating, lethargic swarm of people that cloud my eyes.

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