New Delhi vs. Chandigarh

January 10, 2011 in Social

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This is one of the more debatable topics that I really find myself in a good position to talk about. Since everyone may have different opinions about the same things, I shall try not to be biased in my description. I’ll try my best not to make one of the towns seem like a small village in comparison to the other (if you know what I mean, you’ll probably realise what a hypocrite I really am!!).

Chandigarh is a “new” town in comparison to Delhi (or even New Delhi for that matter). It was built in the 1950′s and is one of the very few planned townships in a country where people essentially believe in chaos. If you talk about the kind of people who live in both these cities, they are pretty much the regular urban Indian crowd. By that I mean the kind of people who have enough money to really do something with it but they never have either the courage or the energy to actually do anything with it. They just eat and drink and sleep away their anonymous existence. So far, Chandigarh and Delhi seem to be quite the same. but at the place that they differ, the rift is quite pronounced. Take the classic example of parenting. While most parents in Chandigarh are quite conservative, New Delhi, on the other hand, has a whole new set of parenting principles. I know this for a fact because now I do know people who couldn’t possibly have been conceived by the regular breed of parents we have in Chandigarh. Exceptions are always there, but I am talking about the people in general.

Take the teenage scene for example. In Chandigarh, you will find “shoals of teenagers” at various hang-out joints across the city. But mind you, these shoals are almost always unisex. They are mostly college students or the ones who are in the higher secondary level, but it is very rare to see a group which is made up of both the sexes. There aren’t many unmarried “couples” either. Whatever little there are, are mostly stared at by some bunch of snickering thirteen year olds. But in Delhi, no matter where you go, you will never find any kind of groups, or as I said, “shoals of teenagers”. There are only couples. Most of them holding hands and leaning against each other as if incapable of standing without support. And the surprising part is that there is no one else (other than me, perhaps), who finds it odd. There is no one else staring at these “love birds” (though I like to call them as emotionally immature attention seekers), except for people from Chandigarh, perhaps.