Yesterday, after having successfully overcome the minimal fatigue of traveling to India, I ventured out into the functioning anarchy that this city (Hyderabad) has become in the last decade. And if "madness" was my constant chant on a short trip a few years ago as I was taken on a short whirlwind shopping trip into the center of the city, "nightmare" is perhaps a more accurate descriptor for the situation I found myself yesterday on my short excursion into the city.

It appears to me that Indian cities, which never were the most functional places on the face of the planet to begin with, are in the process of choking themselves to death as they race up the consumerist ladder. Multiplexes and American style malls won't push the needle far enough on the happiness scale (assuming that stuff sold in these places, in the first place, results in higher levels of "lifestyle satisfaction") when one is slowly asphyxiated caught in a traffic jam, which can, perhaps, be used as a model for the primordial universe after Big Bang.

I admit I was never a big city person, having grown up on what was then the rural fringe of this city (it was three or four times as small two decades ago), and having had the luck to go to a college that was located in the heart of rural Bengal(even if it was heart of darkness in another sense; pure Mahasweta Devi country outside the gated walls where many shiny - and some brilliant - engineers were minted for the "global" economy) , far away from the "temptations of the West" (yet always evoking in one this desire to migrate to the West). And then West, with its relatively higher degree of order, happened. Which is why, I, "the softie" (as my sister labeled me), had to curl up into a ball, and sleep for many hours, when I returned from that excursion in central Hydera-"bada" (Telugu for pain or suffering).

A tropical thunderstorm last night, and happiness on tracking an uptick in the availability of books (I bought four book for which my Jersey garret really doesn't have room - one of these - The Oxford Ghalib - I am planning to read and leave behind here) has put me in a slightly more agreeable frame of mind, towards this childhood city of mine, this morning.

Onto other cyber-excursions into built environment s (sewers & water systems): this post lead me to this great blog (and this post on it), and which lead me to look <a this old New Yorker article up - fascinating.

And oh, this might be one survival strategy if you have the dough in India.

Some might be loyal to the ground they were born on, the flags they might have grown up marching under. But there are others who can only be loyal only to hungers that reside in the blood circulating in their muscles, and the distances they have to traverse chasing routes to satiate them, in these centuries of displacements, uprooting-s, and vanishing rivers (which one can't step into twice even if one so desires).

I am one of these latter tribes, the tribe of migrants, as are these other human beings^[1] (from the makeshift pieces of luggage they carry, coming in from the deserts of Arabia) here in this room before the officers of law waiting to step across a line into a country (I think of countries as door frames with names across the top lintel, planted on empty fields of this planet), which they hope is still home.

[1] Later when I mentioned this to my father, he mentioned a front page article that he had read in "The Hindu", which detailed the travails of a recent wave of "illegal immigrants" - poor people essentially, with minimal education ("Hydrabad" was a common mis-spelling, I noticed, on the labels they had stuck on various items of luggage; some were too poor to own suitcases I suppose since they were carrying blankets converted into sacks), chasing dinar dreams, doing the dirty and dangerous jobs that locals are loathe to do - summarily kicked out from UAE. And the scene this morning did look like this as I deplaned and walked out of the airport here in "Hydrabad".