About Pune, in a little bit of meter

There are three ways to look at life in Pune.
One through the eye of the Mumbaikar:
‘It’s dead, it is as rural as hell,
just an extension of our great metro,
where people retire and live retro,
but we do like the trees with unpolluted
leaves, wish we could buy a flat here,
in a safe housing colony and remember to live.’
But who would tell the train-tired Mumbai man,
that a few more like him and we’d have no place
to live, scream, fight and die. And that’s already
happening - at 80 kmph on the Expressway.
The other way is via the eye of the visitor.
They complain and complain,
they say the food is bad, the roads are gone,
rents are high and there’s nothing called money’s worth,
and that the city is average, plagued by sloth,
peopled by people with no real class or taste.
And they do all the complaining while they
walk on cool bylanes of the University or when
they stand in civil queues at our multiplexes.
After the walk or the movie, they have more to complain,
but they keep it for another walk, another film, another day.
The last way is the way of the ‘natural’: people
who drag their lives here and grow roots like
old trees on pathways up Pune deciduous hills.
Or people like me, who escaped to find newer dreams
and brand new failures and willing women.
When these folks (like me) go home to the home they came
from, they feel like orphans without love or music,
and long to return to the city that’s
as rural as hell for the Mumbaikar
and a box of complaint for the visitor.

(Photo of 'rain couple' taken by my colleague Sanjeev Naik)