Ewew

It has exactly been a month since I set out to travel across the horizon, to the west from the east, from the ‘city of joy’ to the ‘city of undying spirit’. People in Mumbai and Kolkata are so apart from each other as is the west from the east.

In Kolkata I have witnessed the laid back attitude of the people and in Mumbai the dynamic lifestyle. Do people ever sleep in this city?

I grew up learning Kolkata as the city of garbage unlike the epithet given by Dominique Lapierre. To my surprise I found the part of Kolkata where I was residing to be pretty neat!! . Then came my curious mind into functioning or rather it started malfunctioning , I came with a theory which explained why the Bengalis take so much delight in using the word ‘crap’. That has been imbibed into their system, I reckon after seeing the streets of the city. The reason being the average number of dustbins per street in the city is way less than half my CGPA. There is a friend of mine who takes great delight in collecting others’ litter and throwing it into the dustbin himself. The dustbins were so few in the city that he would end up walking miles with bulging pockets!! My company , which likes to believe that it is one of the world’s top companies, doesn’t have a dustbin on the entire ground floor.

The laidback attitude of the people there is pretty damn infectious, you virtually end up having a ball of a time when in fact the script suggests otherwise. I was there when there was a bomb scare in the city and the people were so nonchalant about it and played the threat down with ease, some were even anticipating it to happen like my cook in the guest house where I was staying. You just end up appreciating that kind of an attitude.

 

When I just started to enjoy the city courtesy to the new friends I made over there, I was handed a ticket to Mumbai by my employers. The transition from the slow paced life of Kolkata to the ever running life of Mumbai was quite an ordeal for the first few days. But this city has that buzzing enthu about it that you start to love the place. Of course I have been helped all the way by a few incidents.

Vignettes from the West:

 

In Mumbai, so far I have been like a two faced guy, much like Harvey Dent in the Dark Knight. I have a ball of a time after my office hours but when in office I’m as bored as a child in the 2^nd grade who is being told about Einstein’s relativity as part of his story telling class. I had to break away from the shackles of ennui and hence I decided to take a few days off, in other words decided to bunk. So firstly I zeroed in on the ‘bunk days’ quite prudently considering my ‘Nirvana sessions’. I call my sessions of watching Manchester United play during the weekends as the ‘Nirvana sessions’ for the joy that they bestow upon me. Then I decided to not wear a tie until I’m up and running and handling a project all by my self.

1.Then quite smartly I decided to do something which gave me great joy for the first few days though I regret it now. I started to come to the company when the sun is in the overhead position. That meant I could sleep for an extra couple of hours and I had my room mates green eyed. After all the boredom in the office I would leave the premises even before the sun thinks about setting. This joy of making my selves more useless to the company went on for over a week and then a sharp thought struck me. I realized then that I was actually living a life of a homemaker for all that week, a house wife who would first send away her husband and kids and then get herself ready for the gruesome day that’s in store for her, a house wife who would go to the market to get some vegetables, a house wife who would find her maid as the only person whom she can talk to. Now I have to unlock my self from this situation and then go through my post house wife rehabilitation programme.