Determined brooding

My ways of looking at the world have changed after moving to big cities. Well, big Indian cities. I find small cities stifling, incomplete and temporary.  

Growing up, all of us friends knew that one day we’d all have to leave Ranchi, go to various bigger cities, study and start earning. This process could take a long time but that was the plan. We knew it because we had seen others do it. 

The academically brighter among us continued living in Ranchi for a little longer, earning their education, and left only when it was time to start earning. The really hopeless ones were sent away by their dads in the hope that life had other plans, which they could not see. But leave we all did, one after another.

The essence of a small city is in its seamless, if at times sluggish continuity. The near-freakish steady pace with which life moves on there (as if on sedatives) is pleasing but rarely exciting. Everything exciting happened only in the big city, or on TV. Now the internet has replaced television. The internet has also democratized what TV had discriminated against.   

By itself, a small city can offer you little except the cozy cocoon of familiarity, which is still better than the cocoon of cocksurety that a big city will burden you with, making you an insufferable, ignorant bore (boor?).

After having lived in big cities for the past 12 year, I wonder where I belong. My parents come to visit me and I am amazed and exasperated in turns by the calm they exude. I mourn the loss of an easy sense of dignity that they possess, which I seem to have forsaken to make room for myself in a big city.

I’m engaged in an impossible task of dreaming of a future but trying desperately hard to connect it to my past. For some reason it is my belief that this future can only be found in a big city and nothing I see around me points to the contrary.  

Then what stops me from approaching this dream by going at it hard?

Is it a sense of loss, brought about by this (at times painful) transition; a loss, that in the beginning was being overlooked by me and was easy to reconcile with, because in the beginning, this loss did not even make me less of something. In fact, this loss made me richer, like shedding skin.    

Perhaps, it’s in the nature of all true losses, that before staking their complete claim, they will offer you one last shot at redemption. It leaves you with the choice of action or inaction, of letting things drift away, an eternal stab of indecision. Loss doesn’t make us better or worse, it just makes us different. Being better or worse is relative to the people around us, or those far away, not always literally.       

The pain that loss begets is hidden, till you get a chance recognize your past self. This pain is exacerbated by whiny lament, unfairly blurred by a rosy nostalgia.

The real value of loss is not what we get in return (that’s part of the bargain, one would suppose), but in the realization of it. Reflecting and acting upon this realization, is where one gets to mitigate the pain of loss, and its only true worth.

But what if this realization leads me back to the stifling, incomplete and temporary small city? What if a step back is the way forward?