While Im sitting at my laptop happily playing work challenege on good ol' facebook, I hear this funny (apparently melodic??!!?) music just outside. It happens to be the new ice cream van that has decided to make its way into our uni campus. I'm about to shut my curtain on it, but behold!... its not any ice cream van... its a Kwality Walls van. Good ol' Kwality vans. Why its so special?- coz it reminds me of home - only back in India we didnt have vans, we had ice cream thelas.
I seem to have become more Indian than I was back in India, and it is perhaps understandable.
I crave chappatis, I crave for home food, I crave for even the weather, and my god do I crave for the prices we had back home. ( GBP... sheesh.. 2 pounds for 1Kg potatoes, thats 160 ruppees, where we get them for 5 Rs back home!!!)
My classmates, glod bless all them angelic souls, have only been too kind to not have shut me up when I go on giving examples and instances and analysis from India one after the other. It was really my flatmate Omer who made me realize that Im 'romanticising' about India just too much. I hated to admit it, but the man was right- I was a walking advertisement flier for India.
It definitely isnt exaggerating if I said that I completely love teh country for all Ive lived of it- to me its home. But home comes with all its flaws too. And I wish I could negate them all, but I just can't!
I never did go out past 9 at night by myself ( or actually even with anyone other than mum and/or dad). I just couldnt. It didnt seem worth it to take the risk. I hated travelling by teh 764 bus, where I didnt even have place to stand, where teh crowd seemed to breathe away all teh air available so that suddenly there seemed no air left for me to breathe, where all those feminist claims of the gendered society and commodifying women arguments suddenly became so real. I hated it when we had curfews, and I hated it when we had those blasts- every single one of them. I hated it when people were reduced to numbers on death toll headlines, and I hated that I knew so well that none of this was going to end any time soon.
I heard President Patil's Republic day speech right after she was sworn in, and I hated that I didnt find even one sentence in teh entire hour long drudgery that inspired me or made me sit up.
I do sound like a pessimist, and in certain respects maybe I am one. Deepali says I take it too far and things arent so bad. maybe they arent. But then if they arent, I hate that they seem to be to me.