When we were growing up in this city it was derided by others as “dying”. It was a city that was choking with pollution...an urban nightmare with locked factories, active unions, inactive business, slogans, marches, flags, dirty politics, ideological bankruptcies, dwindling opportunities, and a mass exodus of the youth to greener pastures. Dirty opportunism was at play everywhere. But we stayed on.

And not only did we stay, we were courageous or rather very adventurous to think of nurturing our creative identities here...right here amidst everything which was written off a place of no hope. “Hopeless!” was an oft-heard refrain. But we stayed on…saw everything, felt everything… and suffered…but clung to our city.

We suffered because we had grown up with a different value system. Our parents and our schools had brought us up with a linear thought process that was at variance with the reality engulfing us. We had learnt talent and merit were the ultimate truths. Only the talented, the meritorious and the ‘deserving’ were rewarded. Honesty, simplicity, modesty, ‘plain living and high thinking’ were ideas that we had grown up extolling. Good was always rewarded while the bad punished. Alas!  We were ill prepared for the real life! Or were we?

Now when we look back, it seems we were like the tendrils of climbers. Have you ever seen tendrils closely? The spiral filaments that grow out of the shoots apparently look tender, delicate and weak. They are almost straight when they first appear. However, in order to reach sunlight they twine themselves to their surroundings in helical coils to heave themselves upwards taking the plant with them, helping it grow and thrive. The similarity is obvious. Apparently “simple” boys, we developed an artistic outlook (read non-lateral ways of thinking), clung to our familiar surroundings that we loved unconditionally, without ‘fleeing’’ from it and trying to make the world see the city’s true self behind its crumbling façade…the life throbbing within, the unending spirit, the triumphs against odds.

Our journey towards sunlight continues…