A tale of two cities

Guwahati

Road renovation in Dehradun

Readers tend to identify a few cities by the names of some authors. My earliest link to this synonymous relationship was a promo of a movie named ‘London Kills Me’. It was a movie made by a writer of Pakistani origin paying tribute to the city he loved. I never saw the movie because at that time, the information provided in the Newsmakers section of The World This Week was our only window to the outside world. But I was hooked by the taxonomy. Being deeply in love with the only city I knew, I was even tempted to name my first script after it – something like Guwahati kills me.

With time, I realized that this tendency of paying tribute to the city you love and recurrent references by various authors has led many of us to identify a city by some famous author, like Orhan Pamuk with Istanbul or Ruskin Bond with Mussoorie /Dehradun etc. I share my love for the city that I call my own with the kindred feelings of these more famous and talented names. Due to circumstances (personal and professional), I had to be away from my first love for the last ten years. And…. Boy, Oh Boy, this city has changed a hell of a lot in these ten years. It’s no longer the mofussil town I had known over the years. All the things we had heard to be the essence of a big city showed their presence in Guwahati. FM radio, multiplexes, pubs, discos became the city’s new craze. That’s cool, no doubt, but with the arrival of this “globalization” thing, a few inherent symbols of identity of the city vanished without a trace.

The familiar smile of the neighborhood, the cricket field in the backyard, the tendency to obeying traffic rules, and that’s not all, the soaring crime rates…… Yes, Guwahati is still the city of my choice, except with many ifs and buts. 

In 2007, I shifted to another city in Northern India, situated at the foothills of the Himalayas that have an uncanny resemblance to the Guwahati of my childhood. (Minus the occasional fear of CRPF/Bomb blast and the nuisance created out of it)

The landscapes, easy going helping nature of the localites, the hybrid facies of Mongoloid and Aryan nature made me forget many times that I was two thousand miles away from home.  Time passed, five years flew by like a whisker, and circumstances kept the ball rolling, so once again I shifted to another city of contrasting nature.

As I was shifting from Dehradun, I noticed trees being chopped off to make way for a big four lane highway. Then, I visited two multiplexes, I saw the mofussil centre of Dehradun, shops near Ghantaghar being recreated with bulldozers (renovated! ). I told myself ---. Here we go seeing another city changing its nature, may be for good may be for.…. So, will it be a repeat telecast of an experience I already had?

Rational Criminal

While surfing through the channels on TV just the other day, I stopped at one channel watching Alfred Hitchcock speaking. I think at that time, he was talking about violence in movies and what society has become. He was referring to violence in real life. At that moment, he was telling a story that could be chillingly true in real life –that a robber with a gun in his hand is telling the victim ‘I am so sorry that I have to do it, but I am helpless and poor. I will not harm you much except for the money.  Please forgive me for what I have done.’ After telling this, the robber takes all the money from the victim, picks up his gun and then shoots him through his heart. Mr. Hitchcock was saying that in “reel” life, he knew it was an irrational plot for a film as the criminal knew what he was doing and was also talking very rationally until he committed that heinous act. But in modern day society, he knew that (It was an interview in the later part of his life) such an incident could not be ruled out.

Since at that time, I was also going through a similar thought process, his example resonated in my mind very strongly. Hitchcock’s premise was very true. Because in modern times, you don’t say what is true, or what you want to say. You only utter what the lawyer has asked you to. I will not give the example of Netahr iKand or AjmalKasab ,as their crimes are beyond the imagination of all (almost!) living humans.But let us take incidents from day to day life experience where we see people doing exactly the opposite of what they are prophesying. Have all of us transmogrified ourselves into the impossible rational criminal as Hitchcock has narrated in his story?

Also read Nilaknatha  ,Meghe Dhaka Tara