Pritam's Blog
Goodbye, Bangalore
Every time I go back home with an intention of never coming back, the heart-wrenching pain of parting with this place makes me feel a tremendous distance between me and everything else…
Bangalore, you see, is not just a city for me. It has a soul… And I have heard its heart beating in the silence of night… Like literally…
I still remember my first day in Bangalore - I had to hold my dad’s hand to cross the busy roads. I was then an 18 years old guy from a small town in the North Eastern state- Tripura (Yeah, Tripura is in India). I was scared yet hopeful… I didn’t know if I could survive here eating idli and sambar and I didn’t know how to deal with people who speak a language so different from any North Indian language. Would I make friends? The other part of me was full of dreams… ‘Yaay, I am gonna become an engineer.’ ‘And then I am gonna leave this damn place forever.’
But life had its own plans for me…
It is this place where I discovered the distance between the ‘real me’ and the ‘idea of me as propagated by the middle-class environment I was brought up into’. And thus, the rebel in me was born… Alas! I am still hanging somewhere in between. You see, in a country like ours, where parents and society decide everything about how your life is going to be, it is very tough to free yourself from the firm grip of all these factors. But that I know where I want to be, how I want to live and… die is itself a big deal, thanks to life in Bangalore and I know I will reach there someday…
As for ‘surviving’ in this ‘damn’ place, I realized all my life in my hometown, I had just been breathing, living like a goldfish circling ceaselessly inside a fish bowl…
And with all these realizations came the intense desire to do what I have always wanted to do -see and express… I started writing, painting, composing and singing. With more passion.
I made friends, lots of them, some of them in the truest sense of the word, I have fallen in love with dosa and sambar and lemon rice (I still don’t like idli); I still can’t speak Kannada, but I have learnt to communicate with those who don’t speak anything but Kannada… It’s this place where I got published (Ok, my writings suck but yeah, it happened); it’s here I worked as an illustrator! And yeah, I made my first girlfriend in this city…
It is in this city I got high for the first time, puked all over, made my juniors clean it (I know, it’s disgusting, ‘yuck’), smoked weed. It’s here the non-violent me learnt it to become violent, and it’s here I got a black eye…
Engineering was not my cup of tea or coffee or whatever, but I finished it. I got my first job here (it’s there I smoked weed and ran out of office at 2 am).
And the best part - it’s here I met the love of my life - the girl I knew from my school days…
Life in Bangalore has had lots of ups and downs. But I still enjoyed every bit of it for it made me the way I am today…
It’s here I worked as a waiter in a hotel and it’s here I made honest money, lived a king-sized life…
But life demands us to be stable… And that’s why, I need to leave it again… Yes, I had given posts like this before, but I couldn’t live anywhere else; I came back…
I hope I come back here again…soon…