Cities and character

Have you ever felt a sting of nostalgia when you leave a city and head for another. It wont come immediately but only after some time when you look back at the old times, nostalgia creeps in. Its as if you have left back a certain portion of your personality and have evolved in to soemone else.

The smells, the corners, the colours all remind you of those days, a yearning to be once again in that city.

I have travelled to all the major Metros barring Delhi and every stint of time that I spent at each city, I used to longingly look back at the time spent in the other cities. When I was in Mumbai, excerpts from my life in Calcutta used to stream through, the very roads, the hustle and the bustle, the old tan-tan trams, the assortment of fruits on the pavement, the old rickshaw puller, the larger than life Durga idols against the backdrop of the October rains, the imagery of childhood, the adolesence and innocence, the angst the pain -of a lifetime lost, of a personality captured in the still images of time.

More often photographs have the desired effect of taking one back through the time. But then what is it that we see - our past lives, good or bad, our past personalities ?? Our personality after a certain amount of time is cast in concrete- irreversible, unchangeable. The basic outlook can never be changed under normal circumstance but the approach is always constantly dictated by the necessities of everyday existence, our socio-cultural environment.

So is this what we shed when we change from city to city. Then why are some people called cosmopolites - someone who has been to many parts of the world.

Essentially the way I see it is once you are brought up in a city, you accept the ways of the city and stretch it to the larger universe of the way the world workks. That means for you thats how the world works. This would involve the work culture, the habits, the general lifestyle - you become one with the city. One develops his or her own world view - the image of world seen through his or her lens.

Having inculcated this , when you move on to another city its a different ball game altogether. This is a totally different place where things happen probably at a much more rapid pace.

So the individual attunes himself to the changed environment and he fine tunes himself to the wave length of the city. This was so true when I came to Mumbai from Calcutta. Mumbai worked probably at 50 times the pace of Calcutta and I needed to adjust to its pace. The leisurely pace of old world Calcutta was suddenly replaced with the frantic energy so typical of Mumbai life. Each has its own consequeences - that could perhaps form a separate blog itself.

Multiply this by the number of cities one travels to and in essence , the personality gets refined and distilled to the extent that he or she becomes all together immune to the changes of lifestyle, work location, Her world view is much more adapted to and acceptable to the changes in his immediate environmnet. Therein comes the word cosmopolite - one who has seen many places n worlds.