Baazigar – Week 15 : Gujarat
A man’s interaction with his native land and the native land’s with him is something that has always intrigued me. For the first 21 years of my life, Bombay was my home and the only place I would claim to belong to after India. That I was a Gujarati didn’t make me feel any affinity for Gujarat and Bombay is anyway as much a part of Gujarat as it is of Maharashtra because of the shared history. It also helped that my ancestors hailed from Karachi and none of them had really lived in Gujarat for the last 150 years. Basically, Gujarat up till 5 years ago was just a state I went to often because many pilgrimage places and not-so-cool relatives happened to be there. The 2 years at MICA, in spite of being in a ghetto which was a far cry from where it was located, made Gujarat too my unwitting second home. Today every trip to Gujarat is like going home. I am less of a tourist and more of a native here. Its one of the many ways a man interacts with his native land. The people all over the country who ask me these days on what topic I have based my stories in their home town is another way. It makes me scared just to look at such people in the eye and tell them what I have written about their home town. I humbly tell them I try my best but I wouldn’t have done full justice just by living there for a week.. And then the native land also interacts in peculiar ways. It interacts in absolute and unequivocal adulation for its favorite sons – the way a Dhoni was received in the new Ranchi stadium yesterday. Or the way ‘Sri Narendrabhai Modi’ is received all over Gujarat.
