The Geography Of Growing Up (Alternate Version)

Calcutta birthed me;

cradled not in silk but in

lazy afternoons thick with politics

and perspiring nights where every ceiling fan

sounded like a revolution too tired to speak.

The people? Laid back.

Their anger sipped slowly like red tea in clay cups, 

never burnt, just brewed.

Even childhood felt like a nap with dreams too socialist

to be sold in capitalist bedtime stories.

Adolescence came with its predictable rebellion —

except, I wasn’t rebelling against Calcutta,

I was rebelling with it.

The DNA of dissent was already coded into my chromosomes.

Authority wasn’t a villain.

It was just a terribly written protagonist

we were all forced to applaud.

Literature. Cinema. Communism.

The unholy trinity.

The Bermuda Triangle where optimism goes to drown, 

and boy, did I drown with style.

Reading Neruda while hating capitalism

and secretly wishing my poems sold like toothpaste ads.

Watching Satyajit Ray films

and refusing to admit my real fear wasn’t poverty,

but mediocrity.

Then came Bangalore.

More than a decade now.

New language, new food, new traffic.

Same old self-loathing wrapped in quarter-life promises.

Machh bhaat (rice & fish curry) made way for ghee pudi dosa,

and one fine hungover afternoon,

I discovered puliyogare like it was a Godard film

no one warned me I’d fall in love with.

I hated veg biryani at first

(because some ideologies are harder to let go than exes),

but now I even recommend it

to lost souls in office cafeterias.

Growing up is strange.

You leave behind parents

you never really chose, 

only to choose partners

who carry the same red flags

in better fonts.

Cheap whiskey with peanuts at shady MG Road pubs

morphed into single malts shared in overpriced 2BHKs

where conversations felt like therapy

but weren’t covered by insurance.

You call neither place home.

But you can’t not call both, home.

From Leftist propaganda to right-swiped matches,

from believing mutton biryani was sacred,

to devouring paneer with conviction, 

I’ve changed.

Not entirely.

Just enough to notice

that forgetting to change my net banking password

bothers me more now

than failing to change the world once did.

I still carry Calcutta.

But not like nostalgia likes to pretend.

I carry it

like a language I’m fluent in

but embarrassed to speak loudly

in rooms where ambition wears accents.

I carry it

like a politics I once believed in

until belief started asking

for EMIs.

I unfold it less now.

Not because it hurts, 

but because it reminds me

how easily conviction ages

into inconvenience.

Bangalore didn’t change me.

It didn’t have to.

It just rewarded the parts of me

that learned when to shut up,

when to laugh professionally,

when to convert outrage

into LinkedIn vocabulary.

The cities didn’t fight.

I did.

One taught me how to resist.

The other taught me

how resistance gets tired.

And somewhere between

puliyogare and performance reviews,

between cackling laughs and scheduled selfies,

I didn’t grow up —

I settled.

Not into betrayal.

Not into surrender.

Into something worse.

Competence.

And that’s the geography of growing up:

not where you come from,

not where you land, 

but the exact point

where your younger self

not only stops recognising you

but politely pretends

to never even notice.