Opinion The City and I: From Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi, the journey that taught me to witness

I grew up believing that this stillness was peace. But peace, I later learned, is not the absence of friction, but the invisibility of it.

Thiruvananthapuram raised me on inherited ideals: Literacy, social equity, and political awareness. Yet, it was also a city where politics was a cultural comfort, not a confrontation. Everyone had an opinion, but few were strangers to the same ideology. I didn’t realise then that this harmony was built on a long history of struggle, that my calm was somebody else’s hard-earned inheritance. It took me someplace else to break all those bubbles.

When I first left home, I thought distance would be temporary. But leaving has a way of multiplying itself.

Puducherry, the half-city where I went for my Master’s, was my first true departure. I lived there for a year — until the Covid pandemic hit us all — in a campus tucked between trees and sea wind, where every path led either to the ocean or to quiet thought.

Puducherry was also where I first began to sense the quiet architecture of privilege.

The calm I loved had a cost I didn’t yet have the language for. The serene university campus had the stories of hundreds of displaced families. Behind the charm of the sparse but gigantic buildings were workers who never looked up or never used the same toilets, or even gates, as others. It was the first time I noticed how comfort could be unevenly distributed.

That awareness took shape as anger, with its roots in a slow, unsettling curiosity. I began to see how beauty could distract from inequality, how gentleness itself could become a form of exclusion.

Later, post pandemic, came Chennai, where that anger got its language.

If Puducherry hid inequality behind beauty, Chennai displayed it without apology. Power was visible in accents, in choice of words, in music and in art. The city didn’t offer metaphors; it offered evidence.

To report there meant to stand amid noise and catch what the noise tried to drown. Journalism, as the city taught it, was not a craft of words but of endurance. Stories were not waiting to be found; they had to be earned in sweat, in waiting, in learning when to listen and when to walk away.

Yet, amid its exhaust fumes and chaos, Chennai carried an honesty that other cities diluted. It was a city that made friction visible. Between privilege and poverty, language and silence, tradition and its undoing, it didn’t promise belonging. It made you aware of what belonging costs. But Chennai was still gentle. Perhaps in a way Delhi never is. It doesn’t invite you in; it measures how much you can endure before you begin to see it. Where Chennai tested my patience, Delhi tested my distance from comfort, certainty, and from the idea that effort guarantees fairness.

The air thickens with smog, yet the outlines of struggle are sharper in Delhi. We see it in the guard’s muffler pulled tight through another winter night, in the bargaining that never sounds desperate but always is.

In Delhi, survival itself feels like politics. Every small negotiation with a landlord, an auto driver or an indifferent official becomes a reminder of how power hides in plain sight. You learn to modulate your tone, to measure your words, to read a room before you speak. Dignity becomes something you rehearse daily. The ones who can stay soft here are either rich or lying.

The city has no patience for innocence. It turns even the most well-meaning idealism into a question of stamina. Back home, equality was a legacy; here, it’s a line people stand in for hours and still go home without. The Kerala calm I had carried with me began to feel like an inheritance I hadn’t earned, passed down by those who had fought harder, earlier. Delhi demanded that I locate myself within that chain, not as a spectator, but as someone accountable.

And yet, Delhi was not without grace. Its defiance had a rhythm, its people a stubborn warmth. In the middle of its chaos, someone always offers you tea. The co-passenger in the crowded metro gestures to you to take his seat. There’s politics in that too, in the refusal to let indifference win.

From Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi, the journey never made me belong; it made me witness. It stripped away abstraction and left only what was visible, what was real. I stopped waiting for comfort. I learned instead to stay alert to see the world as it is, and still believe it can be better. Perhaps that’s what growing up really is: Learning to live with your bags half-unpacked, while your senses remain sharp.

akhil.pj@expressindia.com