Small town girl

"You dont look like someone who belongs to so-and-so city" - I heard this statement once again from someone at work recently.

This is something oft-repeated with me, people not being able to associate a small town with me.

I dont know if its something I should feel happy about, but I surely get irritated at such statements.

People in India dont know so much about their own country, and stay like frogs in a well, in their so called notions about how a city and a human is co-related.

I dont say they are not, but not in the way people usually perceive.

Maybe it has to do with the way I dress, or speak which catches them off-guard.
Maybe people feel that if you belong to so-and-so city, you dress in a certain way and your English is bad. How stupid is that?

These people dont know that the school where I studied, always had someone who was in the top 3 ranks all over India, in boards.They might not be aware of the college I studied, had in a year top 3 IAS women rankers.

When I was 15-16, few cousins from Delhi had come down to my city and they asked me what is the night life like, in my city.
I could not fathom what they meant. We used to wake up by 5.30 for school, came back home, read/danced and then by 9.30-10 we used to be dead tired and sleepy and went off to sleep.
Where is the time for night life? And whats one supposed to do in that life?

Our life was confined to studies, dance rehearsals on weekends and 4 of us were enough for each other to seek anything else.
Sometimes friends came over or we went to their place and had some tea and chatted.
We were content, thats all I remember.

Here when I go to a pub and see these 15 years old smoking a joint, having a drink, making out in public..I thank my stars for the lack of night life we had when w were this young

Yes we dint know much about jim morrison, difference between hard and soft rock or head banging..but we knew lata, hemant and the ageless melody of yesteryears.

I squirm when someone says "My hindi is poor". If you dont know your mother tongue then thats something to be ashamed of, and not flaunt proudly.
Its not like you are a Shakespeare when it comes to english. I can ask them meaning of 10 words in English, which these wanna-bes would not have even heard of.
So basically, you have no command on any language.

If I knew Keats, Hemingway, Nietzsche, Maugham and Maupassant..I also had our Mahadevi verma, Sumitranandan Pant to ruminate
I even read Rabindranath Tagore's translated version in hindi

I also knew Majaaj, Meer Taqi Meer, Iqbal..
And I felt enriched.

Some of these names might be un-heard of, by the youth of today.

When I look back, I like the fact that owing to the lack of a life outside studies and dance, we had no other go but to either take up a career which needed us to study hard, or stay at home(which for us was never a possibility). I am not saying I would not have liked to do something other than what I do now.

I would definitely have wanted to pursue dance, but there are always pros and cons of all paths in our lives. I dont regret not having so many choices.

My only wish unfulfilled is - I wish we did not have such liberal parents. I sometimes wish that we should have had a father who put restrictions and a mother who was finicky about lots of things. I wish I had an elder brother who I could be scared of.Then our brain would not have got so corrupted by notions of love, feminism, freedom and the likes.

Sometimes lack of options keeps things stable.

There is power in simplicity.

Note : And I know guys will acknowledge that we small town girls have somethink called namak..which I cant really find a word for in english :)