Feb 04, 2012
“Somehow the milk here seems to have too much water” said my Swami’s mother, while serving us tea. Having spent most of her life in Mumbai, she had come over to my Swami’s place in Bangalore for a few days. Her identity, for all practical purposes, was not just linked to being from Mumbai, but went further to being from the suburb of Matunga, and she often underscored that.
Her son (and my friend Swami) had moved to Bangalore many years back. His wife, also a Mumbai-ite, having never lived outside, used to have similar complaints back then.
“You don’t even get decent Vada-pav here. And they put carrot in the chaat here. Amazing!” I remember her saying that a few years back. She used to complain to another friend’s wife, a Bangalore-ite, who argued “That is how it tastes best”. Finally, she had found solace in a third friend’s wife, a Delhi-ite, who complained, “Yeah – you have no idea how bad the Alu Tikki is.”
I was sure Jigneshbhai had a theory about whether these kinds of preferences were familiarity or genuine liking. Or just pure habit. On stocks, he used to often say “Don’t fall in love with your stocks” but people habitually did.
Somehow what one holds seems good till it becomes bad. The same may hold for where one lives perhaps, I thought. Just as I was about to ask Jigneshbhai, he spoke up. “Most people who live in a place for long enough seem to take a liking to things associated with it. And this is not limited to countries or cities. It extends to suburbs, areas, even neighbourhoods.”
“I just cannot imagine living anywhere else as the people here are so friendly” one starts hearing almost anyone who has lived at one place for long, he explained.
He was right, I thought. I used to have friends in Mumbai who liked where they lived for all kinds of reasons. A friend was proud of living in Borivali because “all fast trains stopped here.” Another one loved Thane because “it had an identity of its own.” Those living on the Western Line boasted about it to those on Central Line. If you lived in Andheri (East), you could never live in Andheri (West) and vice versa.
“Familiarity with one place meant discomfort with another” Jigneshbhai declared to me and Swami as we sipped the tea that Swami’s mother served us. “So be aware of it, but don’t argue with familiarity” he warned.
I remembered a colleague of many years back, who was extremely fond of his work desk. He was so possessive about it that he had tied his chair to the desk with locked wire. Nobody dared to ask him to move elsewhere.
A rearrangement in workplace allocations is a nightmare that many people are not prepared for. Complaints abound from “being on the 1st floor is so convenient, I save time that others spend in the lift” to “this desk faces the window, so it hits me when the sun sets” to “the canteen in my earlier building was so much better.”
Swami and his wife, used to shopping at a place in his neighbourhood, accompanied me and my wife to a store in the area that we live in. “The vegetables here don’t look that fresh” his wife had remarked.
But the best was when we left Swami’s house and went with him to the garden below. “Quite a lot of grass here” he remarked. “Yeah” Jigneshbhai and I agreed. Then with a cheeky smile, Jigneshbhai said, “But the grass here is not the same as the grass in our park.”
