The Bhopali Vs the Mumbaikar , 20th June 6 PM

Off late I have been in the skies very often and I like those times as they are completely mine. I sit back, relax and enjoy the good times. My thoughts meandering, creating a hundred images all at the same time…
It was no different that day as I let my thoughts flow while I was landing at the Indore airport and my reverie broke as I spotted the cube like houses and the checker board fields and my mind went … ‘ Aaaaaaaa!!! What a gross wastage of space! Just imagine how many apartments could have come up here to accommodate millions!’
That was the moment I realized I had become a true Mumbaikar. Having lived in small cities till five years back I was in love with the wide fields, big houses and spaces around. Brought up in Bhopal, known as the city of lakes, I remember getting nauseated in the pit of my stomach as I was thrown out of the local train with the tide of people who got down at Sion station. That was my first landing at Mumbai and I hated it!

Forward it five years hence from then, and here I was at the Indore airport, impatient and uncomfortable with the slowness of life that existed around me. I spent my time, checking out the guards, studying them as seriously as they were studying my boarding pass. Asking each person to remove the laptops from the bags, frisking for minutes with a purposeful look… I wondered what would happen if the guards at Mumbai Airport started taking so much time with each person?!
‘ Work expands to fill up time’ , I mentally ridiculed not knowing how seriously I had started liking everything that was fast paced and deriding everything that was not.!
The next thing I remember is my travel back from Indore to Mumbai. Needless to say I had to undergo the same slow motion check up all over again.
Just I settled my self comfortably at the window seat, glad that I was back in the flight again and headed towards amchi Mumbai, I heard a lot of huffing and puffing right next to my seat. I turned to find this large lady, in her mid forties , dressed in white, holding a huge bulky jute bag ( The kinds you get in the Kirana stores), trying to push herself between the handles of the seat. I offered to help to keep her bag up but she declined and held it as if she didn’t want to part with it. Another man, a complete stranger, also in his mid forties took the aisle seat. Both had boarded from Indore and were complete strangers to each other.
When the food was served, this lady asked the man and me if she could keep the food which was being served inside her bag and have it later. I answered her but maintained a restrained expression as if she were doing something outrageous and that my paying any more attention to her would somehow make me a party to it!

The man however told her very coolly that she could keep the food inside and eat later. From there on, there conversations started. The drift that I got suggested that they spoke of Ayurveda, Vedanta, naturopathy, books and yoga. I was amazed to hear the lady say ‘ Aap kabhi us side aayein toh mere ghar zaroor aayiega ( if ever you come to that side of the city, do drop in)’!! I could not help smiling. All the while that I was putting up my fast-paced-high-handed-city-face, these two people had found friends in each other!

I wondered if these things ever happened in big cities. If people in big cities like Mumbai ever had the time to indulge in such conversations on trains and busses and find others who share so many common interests? And even of they have the time, do they consider it too LS to show concern and empathy. I write this at the cost of sounding harsh but the incidence of such incidents is higher in places like Bhopal than in Mumbai.

As my thoughts were playing pendulum with Mumbai and Bhopal I saw Mumbai from the clouds. Brightly lit in the night, I thought only the milky way can look like thisJ
the python like queens neck lace, the sprawling high rises, accommodating millions by the day, cars lined up and following each other like ant trails on the marine drive… life on the fast track…
I rationalized, that in this city, people may not have the time to make friends on the way but if you ask them the way, they will leave their jobs to show you the way… that’s all that matters isn’t it..
Besides I had grown so used to the crowded roads, the jostling on the trains, the hours on the road where the traffic cops consider it blasphemous if your car is not bumper-to-bumper with the car ahead(!), all that I could see from up there..

Going back to the ‘life at its own pace’ was more than a little difficult.
As the airplane hit the tarmac at the Mumbai airport, I knew I had arrived home…