aditya kumar's weblog

Why did the police arrest my (north-indian) friend living in this city, at mid-night from his house for no proper reason? Why did the house owner tell the police that the people living in the house were not vacating it, when the rent-agreement stated a month long notice before asking to vacate the premises, and when no such notice had been given?

Why did the police officer ask him if in North India he wasn’t able to get a job? Why did he accuse (north indian people like) him of ‘spoiling the culture’ of Bangalore?

Punish him if he has been a nuisance but why be hostile to all north-indians working in the city?

If the Government has not made it illegal to work in another city within India, at will, then what is the problem?

So Bangalore, let me ask you, is your success, yours alone? Am I, a north-indian by birth, not a part of it? To make the case interesting, I must mention, my project team consists of a Punjabi, a Kannadiga, a Telugu, a Bengali, a couple of them from Orissa and one from Tamil Nadu. We are all programmers and we are good at what we do.

Or do you choose to accuse me and my friends (barring the kannadiga of course), of spoiling your culture.

And why does my house owner, though a very nice person, sarcastically puts forward his case of the high costs of day-today commodities in Bangalore and ends it with, ‘all because of you people’ ?

But why does he fail to say ‘all because of you people’ when I pay him a mind-boggling amount of money for a single room?

I have faced these ‘whys’ before, I think. After spending almost a decade in Bombay and Pune, when I once heard that Maharashtra is for Maharashtrians, why did it hurt me?