The Delhi Dilemma

It doesn’t happen very often, but whenever I am faced with the question, “so where are you from”, I am a little dumbfounded. I don’t know why, but I want to avoid this question. Not because I am ashamed of the place I belong to, but to put it simply, I am not sure where I belong.

Born to a Punjabi father and a Gujrati mother, I am somewhere in between. So that must mean, geographically I am from Madhya Pradesh, but generally speaking I belong nowhere. I am at home whether I am in Gujarat or Punjab, but at the same time equally lost.
Maybe I belong to a different breed called - the Delhite. We delhite’s have nothing to call our own. Put more brutally, we are like parasites sucking on the city as a host. Our territory begins in Rohini and ends with the M.G. road. We cling on to nothing but our forefathers’ long left land long and long forgotten culture. So, what is it that we delhite’s represent culturally? What do we stand for?

To a girl, a delhite stands for a lecherous creature that has no respect for women on the streets. To a south Indian we are those superior bastards who look down upon everything that is a shade darker. To a mumbaikar we are more like competition. To a Bengali we are inhabitants of a state that has no soul, no history.

But to a regular normal punju-gujju boy who now proudly wears the tag of a delhite, we are a bunch of misfits who are basically misunderstood. We have a false image that always sticks like a shadow behind us.

There is a reason a Bengali director makes movies only about Delhi. There is a reason Delhi is called Dil walon ki dilli. There is a reason that even without anything to call our own, we are attributed a lot of things.

As a song puts it perfectly – Yeh dilli hai mere yaar, bus ishq mohobbat pyaar. That’s all we stand for, that’s all we want to be known for. Nothing else.

In the end, this is for a friend who almost puked at the mention of a delhite.