India Calling.

It’s time to start planning my annual trip to India. I'm so dreading calling my travel agent just knowing that a) there won't be any tickets left and b) they will cost me an arm and a leg. What is going on with December travel to India? Can some people please go in the summer or during Diwali so the rest of us can actually enjoy the journey? Oh the many Air India horror stories I could share with you! I know we all have some. I won't go there right now because it will only further deter me from calling the travel agent. And I'm done procrastinating.
The one thing I fear more than the air fare right now is the one thing that drives most of us humans crazy. Change.
You know how when you and a younger sibling have grown up in separate countries and you miss them growing up (this will resonate for those of us with younger siblings who have moved to foreign shores while the little ones are still in school). If you don't have a younger sibling, think of the little cousins or nieces and nephews you see like once a year or even a long-distance friend. Every time you see them, you just can't fathom how much they have grown up or changed. It's not the fact that they have changed, change is good and healthy and wonderful, but it's the process of change that you have missed out on and that's the part that is difficult to grasp. It's those little moments and experiences that have had a major implication on this person's character, personality and/or outlook that you have not been part of. And by the time you get the memory of the person the way they were the last time you saw them out of your head and understand and embrace the new and changed person they have now become and you finally realize how they are as cute or cool as ever, it's time to say goodbye again! And so the cycle continues...
This is how I feel about India in general and Pune, my hometown specifically. So much change! More so than Bombay or Delhi which too have progressed dramatically but Pune was always my sleepy little town nestled behind the western ghaats (mountain range) where the hills were green, the people in no rush to get anywhere or do anything and life was never complicated. The last bit of course has nothing to do with Pune as it does with the fact that I was younger and therefore life was less complicated...anyway I digress. I just feel so overwhelmed by the change that has hit my little hometown. Each time I drive into the city after a 30 hour cross-global haul, I don't even recognize it at first. And while family and friends proudly point out all the progress, I’m thinking why does everything have to get so freakin' modernized and westernized? Why have the little shack hang-out joints been replaced by Starbucks imitators? Why can't I buy a movie ticket for 40 rupees anymore? Why are all the kids lined up outside KFC...do they have any idea how bad fried chicken is for you? And why has the local tailor been replaced by a Lacoste store? On second thoughts I love Lacoste and it’s much cheaper in India so I won't complain. But I love my tailor too. I just wish we could have a bit of both, you know.
Each time I visit Pune, it’s less Pune and more something else. Something I don’t want it to be. Something I have enough of here in New York. But I look around me and see that the Pune kids are happy. This is what they want. It’s their Pune now and not so much the sleepy town I remember. And just as I get settled in and finally start to recognize and accept Pune for the place it always was and what it is poised to be, its time to leave again. All in all an emotional rollercoaster ride or rather I should say a bumpy rickshaw-ride!
I think I’m ready to call my travel agent now.