Multiple Levels of Reality

The other day I came back to the center exhausted. I had just returned from France and being in Bangalore just made me tired. I was exposed to the scrutinizing look that is peculiar to Bangalore. Although open-minded in many ways, the city also has a habit of judging people for being prim and proper. While I was walking all around Jayanagar, I realized anew what it felt like to be part of this city. This city that scorns drunkards, this city that doesn't sympathize with those who don't carry themselves upright, with an objective expression on their faces. Its true that its ruthlessness is what made me who I am; made me straighten up in those crucial years of growing up. Yet its middle-classness today hits me hard. Bangalore has of course,  changed a lot. Its a global city now and it has had to accommodate all kinds of people. Its rural areas have expanded enormously, the failures of farmers only adding people to the city, as if there was something here. As if it was the Bombay of the olden days where one could go looking for jobs!

All cities I have been in, London, Paris and others display that gaze that seeks the modernity in you, judges and dismisses or marks you as 'ok'. But Bangalore's idea of it appeared more ruthless to me. It is indeed true that we developed under the influence an "imagined western modern egalitarianism" that doesn't actually exist anywhere and all cities display their own orthodoxies, yet... In the eyes of the people one comes across in the Metros, one gets to see the history that goes on in that city, its television, its news...all carried as a picture in the subjectivity of the people--in their eyes-- whose ideas of what is cool or hep are so dully and directly derived from these exposures to local or global histories.

But when I came back exhausted that day and told my friends about how I was being judged, and more so because I must be looking different after my stay in France for nearly two years, they only thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill. They had shut out these realities and were functioning in deeper realms of their own personalities and private lives.

I realized that the level of reality I seemed to be observant of, was one resonant with something that the Vedas say, "atmanaha pashyanti atmanah". The self sees the self. As crowds of people walk past in the Jayanagar 4th block complex, I can actually see that all of them witness their own faces as if in a mirror and straighten themselves up, while also looking at others to see if they are doing the same.

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