Nostalgia
Ariza | 14 March 2007, 11:53pmIt will come to you through a song while those lights dance about on the streets and the city reminds you that you have always been here. Then the last few months of living amongst the newcomers evaporate like naphthalene and you are left with the bitter after-taste of irony.
If you remember right, you were going to be the first one to leave: the first one to live abroad and send in jealousy provoking letters to those friends who will ask you to bring in gifts and stories about the world outside the city. Instead you are the one left telling the story of the neighborhood new hotshot Chinese food restaurant starting out as a small bandi (many years ago actually!) and as an annoyance to everyone before it made it so big that now your story lives off it.
It is all wrong when you remember how it was before the hi-tech city came in. Before the potential of Hyderabad was still a promise and it was a beautiful promise. You had a small net parlor close by where your friends gathered and chuckled about the browsing history of someone. It was childish, but you were children. You learned about the world through words and images on the computer screen - a medium that left you in Hyderabad and them in LA. It is all wrong when suddenly you are the only localite in the office and when you have to tell them where "Paradise" is. Oh god! it is worst than that! It is sacrilege.
So you are alone on the road and the city seems to have finally gone to sleep. It never gets to do that now-a-days. It works as hard as you do with no weekends and grueling schedules. You have an excuse - career. What does it have? Potential? So in its tender sleep of a few hours you have become the dream. You have a chat with the city. It speaks with all the poignancy of nostalgia: reminds you of the time you saw "Tezaab" in a second show at Padmavati and missed "Ek Do Teen" and wondered what it was all about while driving back with your father. Those yellow street lights made you feel warm when the night was cold. You shiver now. Someone zooms past in an esteem. You are not to be bothered. The conversation has died out. But the music is still on.
"Kehdo ke tum ho meri varna.....jeena nahi mujhe hai marna."
Current Mood: Preachy
Current Music: Tezaab
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