I know I have pontificated on this before. But I can't help it. Bombay might leave you crawling like a worm on the ground but at least you are an enlightened worm. Delhi, you can zoom about in a car and yet you will always be the ghetto moghul of your own little world. In Delhi, you find a little posse of people whose necks you don't feel like wringing and clasp to your bosom and crack the same jokes again and again and again with them. The same getting drunk on floor, wishing that you could numb out everything. Bombay will make you react, even if you don't want to. You will sit and talk to people who come from absolutely, diametrically different backgrounds and it is like opening doors to completely different worlds, feeling like Alice in wonderland. Glad you were invited to share completely different world perspectives. Really understand, instead of the superficial classifying them as "that kind". I have been completely safe, cotton balled away in the security of my family. I will always be a little less cynical, a little less world weary because of that. In Delhi, with similarly cotton-balled people, you think every wordless depression is the end of the world. In Bombay, there are people, who slap you and say wake up! It is an unknown world out there, get moving. Instead of spewing the same pseudo-intellectual crap, get up and go, explore, find out. Indifference is not a viable option anymore, because you have to care. The city is so harsh that you seek out people. Battling on your own is not an option. You need people, like water. You drink them in, searching your own way through their experiences, see yourself through their eyes and discover a little more each day. You don't feel your way around, ensconced in a bubble of your own making. You can't maintain it. Someone will come along, pop it and leave you to feel everything, raw and unfiltered. The “observation cap on your head, passing soundless judgments in your head” routine doesn’t work. You are in there getting dirty with the rest of them. And it feels good.