Originally Posted by Jaideep Sahni
What is wrong with us? Our parents and neighbours don’t talk like they live out of PVR, are they ‘exotic’ small towners? And now even Amritsar is supposed to be a ‘small town.’ By which stretch of imagination a city with a history which goes back a few thousand years, with lakhs of people, teeming with shops, businesses and economic activity, among the three most prosperous cities in one of the most prosperous parts of India a ‘small town?’ It’s bizarre that anything middle class somehow feels ‘small town,’ and anything rich class somehow feels global to us. Without realising it, we are becoming aliens in our own country, trying to find labels and bytes for anything we don’t have the time to get into.
Something is very scary here—if we have decided that people who live in the heart of Delhi are small towners, god save those who live in villages and real small towns from us, because they all must be totally invisible to those of us living in the metros.
All this talk about having some kind of supposed expertise about small town people makes me feel weird, because as far as I was concerned, a lot of them were supposed to be people from Delhi, Mumbai and other fairly large cities of India, many from smaller towns, and many more from rural areas. How did they all get clubbed together in this exotic, celebrated species called ‘small towners?’
Most of us born and brought up in Metros have no clue about small towns and villages than what we see in magazines and travel shows, run by people like ourselves, and decide to adopt them as our own just because they suddenly appear exotic cool. I often wonder if we’ve all got so disconnected from reality around us that we can’t even distinguish between urban middle-class and small town residents, who actually range from very poor to very rich, just because neither of them seem to fit some extremely narrow some definitions of cool-ness.
