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07/12/2012

So? Are you going to stay in India?

The hundred rupee question...

Question that can be legitimately ask me after five and half years but that annoys me no less. Since I don’t have the answer.

 

However, what I can say is that despite all the warnings of Mumbaite friends, Delhi is a city fairly "easy" to live in.

Cleaner, more spacious, more fluid, more cultural than Mumbai.

Less accessible (nothing can be reached on foot), less dynamic (everything closes early), less populated (even if the numbers are equivalent, there is not the same feeling of overcrowding), less open on the horizon (obviously the sea is not there), less secure at night... To cut it short two completely different cities...

 

Finally, as I am used to say, it is not the location that makes the place but rather the people you meet... And so far the Delhiites I met are rather cool!

 

When I moved to Mumbai, I thought I would never get used to the moisture. Feeling sticky all the time was not really my cup of tea, having bed sheets smelling of mushrooms either. And finally? I looked at my household tools get rusted one after the other. I learned to eat moldy bread. In short I did get used to it.

 

And in Delhi I feel hot. I feel very hot. I feel very very hot. I get up with nausea because I feel so hot. I hardly eat because I feel so hot. I'm tired because I feel so hot. Enough complaining let us talk about this next summer!!

 

And I am not kidding, see what happened to my candles!!

 

 

India,Delhi,Mumbai,difference,city

India,Delhi,Mumbai,difference,city

 

03/18/2011

The Indian city

The other day I went back from work walking, to ease off my bad mood…

Great idea.

Thankfully no one asked me that day “hey, what is an Indian city like”?

I would have answered:

Well, an Indian city? It’s ugly. It’s even very very very ugly.

If by chance you see a nice looking building, take a good look because after one or two monsoons, it will be as ugly as the others. Why painting??

If only it was just ugly…

No it is also extremely difficult to walk. When you look at the pavements, you feel like you are in Sarajevo during war time. But even then, you are lucky there are pavements because most lanes don’t have. I have stopped judging Indians for never walking; it might not be only laziness after all… ;)

The height of it, it’s the noise. It is plain hell. Honking that make you deaf for sometime, drillers, engines, you just don’t see the end of it.

And it also smells. It smells so much that when you walk by a fruit stall, you feel like in heaven. For instance, on my way home, it smelled of the sea (which somehow regularly smells of a dead rat, god knows why), and then the river which seems the most convenient place to throw garbage (you cry when your rickshaw is stuck by this river waiting for a line to clear), and petrol. It smells, it smells, it smells.

This walk home finished me off.

 

No need to tell me, like my Hindi teacher did, that no one is asking me to stay. Here I am and here I stay. I am just not staying for the Indian cities. For what then? I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

And if someone can show me that actually Indian cities are not so bad, I’m waiting! I still remember going for a walk in Raipur. Plainly depressing…