Living in a city all this long, 23 years to be precise and never spending a day outside the city a person like me forgets the true value of it. Yes we may call a city a modern version, a metropolitan creation. even something that has been born out of the post modernization of humanity.
Yet a city is not that different from what it was a hundred or even a millenia ago.
The hub of an area, where politics, economics and humans mix in an ungodly concoction of lust, power and corruption. The city was always doomed from the start. It was always about the price here, never about the worth.
I remember living in Bombay. Old as it was, the people were from such disconnected corners that it amazed us all. We were lost, forgotten and yet alive in a city where we came for our dreams and for people like me, we were born into our dreams. It was Bombay then. A place that gave you more than it took from you. Yes it took who you were but it gave you a part of it in return.
Bombay made you not who you wanted to be but who you should be.
It is Mumbai now. a cosmopolitan, a metropolitan or as i see it, a Hellhole.
The people are different, the values are lost. The worth has been replaced with its cost. Now when i walk there i feel lost. I see new buildings where i never hoped to see them. I see people walk in looking like they own the city. When we walked down those hallowed streets we walked like we belonged there, yet it was not ours to own.
They walk where we wouldn't. They drive where we couldn't.
I saw as my city was taken over. Helpless i sat and even helped them see what my city truly was, hoping they would leave it as pristine as it was.
Yet cities cannot escape their fate. They will be invaded. Our city, so beautiful and perfect, was invaded and over crowded by those who did not understand it. Like we once did, they inadvertently changed it.
There was a time i called it her...
That time has now long gone. I walk the same streets now yet they feel empty and forgotten. The people who walk are strangers, the heretic to me.
They have desecrated the holy ground.
Yet i must accept it. What was once my home is no longer so.
Like the homeless I walk this world, looking for what i once lost. Through it all only once thought was there in my mind. I lost my home to a city. Someday this city will be lost....
Afterall...
Cities are not built,
They are destroyed.
I will await the day I can reclaim my home from that city.
Someday They will return what was lost.
