`Welcome to the City Beautiful,' reads the sign as you drive into the city. As you drive further, you almost start believing that the city is beautiful. But after you have driven on the roads for miles and miles,you realise that organised and beautiful are not synonyms. Nice, (relatively) clean roads, lots of greenery and even pavements; definitely a nice change from the streets of other cities.And you nod in satisfaction at having become a part of an organized city in this country of anarchy. Every sector is demarcated, has a market of it's own. Convenient. And every sector looks pretty much the same. The people also. The same hair styles and the same expressions..After four weeks in the city, I would have given anything to see a variation, an anomaly! All of us who have detested India for it`s squalor and desiness are all smiles, for this is a breath of the Occident in the Orient. But if only buildings and names could change psyche. If only wearing a pair of jeans and a trendy T-shirt make us more open-minded. And the veneer thickens. For an outsider, the city becomes a paradox. And a lonely place. The city and it's teenagers live in a world of their own. Whether from the backwaters of the neighbouring states or residents of Chandigarh itself, the influence of the media seems stronger than that of Mom and Dad.Caught between two cultures; and theirs' is a unique culture too. One that has nothing to do with India on the exterior and another, that has nothing to do with the West, in the interior. Could be a case of mass schizophrenia! You get a lost feeling sometimes, perhaps because the city too, in a way, is lost. Planned and built, with people coming from various places, 1956 saw the birth of an experiment. In a country where the dialect changes after a drive of every 100 km, people were suddenly having `strangers' as neighbours.. It was the city of an architect and a prime minister`s dream.It was the post '47 dream of India; to go from the rural to the urban, become industrialised and Western. One city had to succeed - a nation`s dream stood by it. You look at the city so intently because you want to touch it, feel it's heart somewhere. You search for the soul. I guess when you run into a new person, the first thing that strikes you is the physical aspect. But after a few meetings, when you touch the soul, your outlook at the physicality also changes.Cities, too, can be defined that way.,with a character - a pulse - that you can lay your hand on. A few weeks in `The City Beautiful' and the hollowness resounds loud. Stagnated to a point where you could physically put your hands on it. What you feel like doing is to hold its shoulder and try and shake it - hard. Shake off the stupor.A city which has not the fast pulse of Bombay, where everyone runs because walking would take too long. A city unlike Delhi, which is coming to terms with what the new India has started looking (inexplicably confused). This is perhaps a city trying to be something it really is not. Maybe it is a microcosm of the way we all have been caught in this crossfire of `globalisation' and `internet making the world a village.' Statements that were thrown about casually, but never studied with regard to the individuals who are always the final product of any mass-media campaign. A city you can perhaps grow to love, a city which is a reflection of our inner struggles: to cross over to the new beckoning cultures, or to stay home. A city of questions and perhaps, one fine day, of our answers.The writer is a sub-editor with The Indian Express.
