Northern exposure

It’s my fourth month in Delhi, and yet the only instance when I felt truly at home was when I watched a Malayalam film at a multiplex crammed with fellow Mallus, laughing my heart out at the corny jokes and Mammootty’s antics on screen. The movie was pure baloney, a watered-down masala version of an old MGR brothers-in-arms movie. Yet I loved it: in fact, I hadn’t laughed like that for months. I grinned at my husband’s puzzled look after we left the hall. After all, I am a fan of serious cinema. I can watch Adoor Gopalakrishnan and T.V. Chandran movies a dozen times, but not a cheesy comedy. That’s when I realised what a horrifying impact Delhi was having on me.

Working in an office surrounded mainly by English-speaking North Indians and Bengalis, writing on Delhi-centric people and events, and lunching on canteen kadi-chawal, I feel lost. I get the same feeling when I haggle with a filthy-mouthed autowalla, ask for more plastic bags from the dour Mother Dairy vegetable vendor, or even while devouring paani-puris from the impatient chaatwalla. Delhiites are always in a tearing hurry, and insufferably rude. I am aghast at their lack of road sense, their in-your-face aggressiveness.

Even at the workplace, it is purely business. There is no hierarchy; no stammering respect when you spot your boss, just a casual nod and a smile that rarely reaches the eyes. Coming from the “boss is in, be quiet” South-Indian set-up, I find it odd.

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Here I am constantly asked to think out of the box. But how can I when I cannot even figure out where Connaught Place is? Ideas come only when you understand a city, its pulse, its people. Even today, despite the marvellous Google, on which I have searched for every possible name associated with Delhi’s art and culture brigade, I am still struggling to make an impression.

No, I wasn’t brought to Delhi at gunpoint. It was that mad rush to experience Delhi journalism that dragged me here. The downside? Having to interview a relatively unknown Delhi starlet over Mammootty, no Carnatic classical, and worst of all, having to glorify Delhi when you would rather talk about the backwaters.