The city and the winds of change

Was just reminiscing on the life I’ve led. Well I finally found time to do that, as I said in my last post its been a frenzied atmosphere at work. It’s a lovely Saturday afternoon and there’ll be a lovely Saturday evening and same ways a lovely Sunday but yours truly is gonna be in office trying to get his Project out of the red. Same old story, the firefighting continues.

Coming back to the point , I was just thinking about the city I decided to make my home 3 yrs back. It’s a good city to be honest, my parents are happy and my better half happier. What about me? Well I’m ok with it. It’s a good city, its given me my bread and butter. So I can safely discount the morons that control the place and get along well. Guys like komodo , AHAK , GAG, Watson, The wise one come like a whiff of fresh air in a place that reeks of coercion. That reminds me , the coming week is gonna be AHAK’s last in the city, he’s moving back home.

Coming back to the city, the locals call themselves “Punekars” and for me that’s worse than an expletive. The main thing that ails the locals here is that they insist on living in their “Glorious” past. Glorious no doubt it was but Resistance to change isn’t an asset these days and localites here consider it as a positive attribute. If that’s nothing to go by, they fall short by miles as far as adapting is concerned. Warming up to people around you is not an attribute you’ll attribute to a “Punekar”. They’re an intelligent crowd no doubt about that (quite a few of them at least) but then according to the average “Punekar” there can not be anyone else other than them or for that matter they all say “There’s no world outside Pune”. It’s this frog in the well attitude that I disagree with.

With all due respect to the city and its heritage, there are quite a few places of natural , man made and historical importance and beauty alike where you can go and unwind. These are a few places that actually grow on you and you feel at peace with yourself. You don’t need an OSHO for that.

Was just talking to a colleague the other day regarding the BRT system implemented here on some road. For purisits the BRT is a bus service that runs point to point. That isn’t harmful right?. Trouble is it runs halfway thru the road creating bottlenecks for the already congested traffic and the ever irreverent motorists find their way onto the BRT lanes and create an unholy mess. The civic administration has really come up with a novel way to reduce the population as daily almost half a dozen people perish in some accident on those routes. Slow , but effective. Now the civic admin is considering screwing other routes with their BRighT idea. They had a news item on that in the paper the other day. Now here’s the difference. If this was Mumbai or any other city such a lousy idea would’ve irked people no end and they would’ve taken on the administration forcing them to withdraw such a looney idea. Now this being pune, they’ll let the administration carry it out and then start shouting. That’s the way of the people here.

The “Punekar” is of the opinion that the city should be closed to all coming from outside , another aspect of the coercive attitude I mentioned at the start. Once such person happened to come across me and mentioned in exactly the same words and this is the conversation that ensued.

Him : People coming from outside have screwed up the city. They should be stopped.
Me : Sez who? Indian laws never say anything of that sort.
Him : They should make a law which bars people from entering and settling in Pune.
Me : And what would that solve?
Him : at least we’ll save our culture.
Me : culture? Where? What’s that? Where do I see it? And how are you gonna save it?
Him : don’t talk like that , you say it coz you don’t belong here.
Me : I pay my taxes to this cities Municipal Corp. So I belong here as much as you do.
And moreover I think its time you changed. You better learn to adjust to other people. You wont be able to withstand the wave then you’ll be swept away.

The gist of that conversation was probably what I intended to say. No matter how glorious your past was or whatever , lets leave it and set aside petty issues. With the kinda global village we’re developing into , its time we learnt to accept change. Coz the wave that’s coming if we don’t learn to surf then we’ll be swept off into oblivion with nothing but the vestiges of a glorious past to savour.

-Antya