First trip to Hometown - Part 1

Well.. I have been a bit emotional lately with all the shifting to new city and leaving behind memories and people hustle. And before I could get over that feeling, I am back to the same old lovely green city which has made a mark in my life like no other place. I was extremely happy while shifting to Hyderabad, one main reason of the many being the over whelming feeling of finally moving to my mother land, AP.. (part of which some selfish people are claiming to be Telangana now! ) And "shifting to hometown" was the very same reason that I smartly specified in my exit interview! Though in spite of my infinite efforts to convince myself for the same, a part of me always feared that I was moving away from my hometown! And this fear came to reality when I stepped into Nagpur for the first time after relocating. I told my friend without looking at the station, that it was Nagpur. The recorded sound of "gadi no. 'do saath do ek', hyderabad se nizamuddin jane wali dakshin express, platform no. ek par aa chuki hai..", the kind of people getting down, the stalls visible from the window and it might sound too exaggerated but simply by the air around me I could say I was in Nagpur! When I said the same lines to my friend who kept me a wonderful company throughout the journey with all sorts of serious, funny and emotional stories all night long, he mocked at me! Little did he know, I actually meant it.. (Well, not all but at least a few..)

I am still wondering how the significance of a place changes from person to person.. In my own college I have seen wide variety of opinions about Nagpur. Some think it is just a boring place good enough only to finish engineering and return to their more happening lives at more happening places! Some think it is a calm peaceful place to get settled eventually but not to waste our "jawani ke din". Some do not think of it much, since their world is constrained only inside VNIT campus. While a few like me, give importance to every possible speciality of Nagpur, like the Dinshaws at Sadar that has no substitute in Hyderabad (high quality@low cost) and the delicious Haldirams sweets which make all pure ghee sweets at Hyderabad look OK-OK, and attach emotions with every possible place I have been to, like the college dinshaws (where we used to hang out till 8.29 pm), the Futala lake(whose walls have heard a lot more troubles than even our hostel walls), civil lines ke raaste (where i and a chhotu-motu friend of mine used to love getting lost), the balaji temple (which has relieved me of my tensions whenever i have turned that way), the sitabuldi flyover (which got converted from a phobia to a dream romantic drive), the buldi market (where everything from socks to suits are only a few steps away), the Abhyankar Nagar Square (where in the first half of my stay in Nagpur I used to wait on the signal dreaming about getting admission into VNIT and in the second half I couldn't stop feeling proud for being able to achieve that), and every other restaurant in Nagpur where we have had our mess offs, last lunch, last dinner, birthday parties, farewell parties, job treats and of course the one and only TDS which would not have been renamed top to down sexy if not for our batch.

Oh god.. I have totally drifted from the topic.. Now considering the mood set, it would be impossible for me to get back to the original topic which was supposed to revolve around "Why I was in Nagpur!" where as it revolved and rotated around "How much I missed it!". The original topic would continue soon, keep watching the space..

This one is to Nagpur and to all the Nagpurians I have ever known.. Cheers!!!