I left Dilli six months ago, and with it sadly, I had to leave behind this account of my time there. And though I'll really miss that space, the title of my diary this time lends itself to multiple locations/interpretations/spaces, seeing as I really don't know where these legs will carry me.
I cannot wait to begin my journey again, this time in the city of Bangalore.
Excited, scared, apprehensive. Ready. Or not?
My colleague/friend/mentor inscribed the words below into a book she gave me as I was preparing to leave the shores of Dilli behind me. They are the words of her favourite author, Italo Calvino, and I really couldn't have put it any better (apart from the fact that I would have used 'she' as the pronoun):
"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. At times the mirror increases a thing's value, and at times denies it. The inferno of the living is not something that will be, if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many, accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what , in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space....you take delight in not a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer perhaps, it gives to a question of yours."
You see, this fellow has hit the nail on the head. My journey to uncover the secrets and the hidden moments in the cities that have embraced and spoken back to me, is how I've always felt alive. And I hope to escape suffering my next city, by making little spaces for those 'non-inferno' moments.
Bangalore. Take One.
I cannot wait to begin my journey again, this time in the city of Bangalore.
Excited, scared, apprehensive. Ready. Or not?
My colleague/friend/mentor inscribed the words below into a book she gave me as I was preparing to leave the shores of Dilli behind me. They are the words of her favourite author, Italo Calvino, and I really couldn't have put it any better (apart from the fact that I would have used 'she' as the pronoun):
"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. At times the mirror increases a thing's value, and at times denies it. The inferno of the living is not something that will be, if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many, accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what , in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space....you take delight in not a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer perhaps, it gives to a question of yours."
You see, this fellow has hit the nail on the head. My journey to uncover the secrets and the hidden moments in the cities that have embraced and spoken back to me, is how I've always felt alive. And I hope to escape suffering my next city, by making little spaces for those 'non-inferno' moments.
Bangalore. Take One.
