Last weekend, as we sped through the road from Chirag Dilli to Panchsheel, leaves were coming off the trees in a torrent. The road shimmered with bright golden yellow leaves, noon sun lighting them up like fluorescent bulbs lined up to welcome us. With a cold breeze washing up my face and wiping off some of the pain and tiredness that I had felt all through the week, I grew into a marvellous and delicate mood.
This mood was subsequently destroyed quite abruptly when I read the news about the battering to death of an auto rickshaw driver by couple of drunken youth in the early hours of the morning. All because the driver scraped past their Innova, which they had parked alongside the petrol pump, besides which one of them was puking off the excess liquor. So, they stopped the driver, got him out, and then battered his head with bricks to make sure he dies. I felt anger and disgust in equal measure.
These feelings of ecstatic happiness and unmitigated hatred are not uncommon to the denizens of Delhi. In Mumbai, in my limited experience, these feelings are usually muted and absorbed by the sheer madness of the city. You would see fights in the local, even women tearing each other apart, but the inhumanly fights and rages are not seen. It makes Mumbai, without doubt, a more civil, real city, but does it make it happier as well? Where are the spaces to relax or places to see without hounded by a persistent stream of noise? Or, even time outside commuting between home and office, to search for them?
Mumbai provides a living to a lot of Indians, but takes life out from their lives. Delhi is chaotic, cold, violent, almost a strange modern village, but also provides far more moments of sheer joy and ecstasy to those who seek them.
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