Dillwaalon Ki Dilli???

Ha! The phrase seems such a passé! Come and live here for a week and you’ll know it. This over populated and over polluted place can be compared to an obese man’s heart, trying its best to carry the load, but at an inevitable and never too far risk of failure.

‘Of course Delhi is overcrowded. Why wouldn’t it be? Everyone wants to come and live here’, a native friend told me. Well yes, everyone wants to live here. You have far better options of earning here, in whichever field you work than at any other place. You are an engineer? And oh, you’re from north India too? Where else will you go? Do you like even have any other options?

You can clean and do other chores? Oh, the offices, the metro stations and the houses of those working couples here can always accommodate a few more!

You are a teacher? Do you think you can find better options than here?

You are a student? Name a genre, please. Oh yes, this is the best you can get.

Plus, the exposure. People come here for the much coveted exposure, which this place offers more than perhaps any other in our entire country.

Why wouldn’t it, after all???  The people who come here and then eventually settle here, lose in this excruciatingly tedious process a characteristic this place was once known for, their hearts.

They say once you come here, you fall in love with it. Personally, I would never want to live in a place like this. This is a place where everyone is so damn convinced that their life is the most struggle-some, that they forget the basic human factor which is capable of making them think about anybody else, capable of that emotion called empathy.

Almost everyone’s conscience has already died, this place has that effect on you.

People spot entrants in the field, see them as an opportunity, to make some more money. Well. Why shouldn’t they, of course? They have their households to run in ‘this place’. Shop keepers sell empty refilled pens, and whosoever trusts them and doesn’t check it is a fool himself, there is nothing wrong on their part in this, not at all.  

And so, eventually everyone here learns the way to survive. It’s not that they intentionally cut other people’s throats and step on them. They just don’t care, which in fact makes it all the more worse. They can’t think about it. They don’t have the time, they cannot afford it, dude!

So when they see a boy in a pitiable condition lying in CP and crying, ‘please give me some money, I’ve to get my brother’s medicine’, they don’t even give it a second thought. Their minds are programmed to see him as a liar, which he probably even is.

They rarely get up to offer a seat to the elder ones. Why should they? Their life is not easy! Perhaps they think, that the elder person will go home and lie down, but they have many errands to run once back, they deserve the rest more.

They don’t talk. Its not even safe to talk to a stranger.

Why smile? There’s nothing more important than holding your ‘self respect’.

Or offer help? There are already too may pains in life to be able to afford helping others too.

They just work. They just struggle. They just survive.

They say the place teaches you how to live. Well, yes. The place teaches you the age old Darwin’s principle, just survive, ANYHOW. But then his theory treats us as a specie, as merely organisms.

That’s what the place does to you. It tells you to survive, at whatever cost it may come.

The dillwaaon ki Dilli is bound to do that too you, take away your dil…