There are two routes to my office. One road that’s fast losing its identity, passing through an area that no one acknowledges is a slum. And the other through a miniature Malgudi.
I took the Malgudi road today. It’s a colony with houses whose sizes are directly proportional to their distance from the railway track, narrow cement roads and little shops. Lower middle class more like.
A facinating place that everytime I drive through, I want to blog about. And I finally am.
There are the usual things, nursing homes, small shrines, kirana stores, phone booths, cows, cycles, schoolchildren, puddles, roadside eateries, “traders”, tiny supermarkets in the main lanes, old people dressed and sitting on the road at 8 in the morning, shops with names like “Disco Tailors” and the like. Facinating. But familiar.
But today’s sight, the one that made me finally overcome inertia and actually blog, was special. I saw a “gangireddu”. For non andhrites, it’s a trained bull that’s decorated with bells, flowers and other assorted finery that does basic tricks on the bidding of its master. Shakes its head, rubs its nose against the person it’s ordered to and goes down on its knees and the like. A typically telugu apparition that I have only seen in Sankranti (pongal for the uneducated who think tamil = telugu). And that too more and more infrequently with each passing year. So today’s was a huge surprise.
And somehow, whenever I see one, I feel an infinite sadness. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but somehow, I feel a hollowness that we don’t recognize traditions anymore. What saddened me even more was the truth in what my dad said. “When I was a kid, all movies had some of these things shown in them. But today, even if we were to show these things in cinema, they would be laughed at. But how do we know for sure? We never really try to start with”.
What have we become? That we prefer malls and multiplexes to home on festivals and let our artists and artistes die hungry?
And what’s sadder that there’s nothing to write, really, without turning this piece into a long rueful rant.
We are the way we are, and it upsets me. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say and I will leave it at that…
