You never know the worth of anything until you have lost it. Had a chance to go to the place I was born and brought up for my cousin's wedding. The love and affection we received from there made me re-evaluate the kind of life I am leading - far away from most of the people who really know me and whom I know well too.
By the time you pick up some friends and contacts and begin to take root, you find again that it is time to move. And then you leave, leaving behind memories that gradually fade into dull images, occasionally refreshed when you go visiting them - for real, or now virtually, on FB or other networking sites. But mostly it is 'out of sight, out of mind'.
Of course, time smoothens out the rough edges. You tend to forget the little fights and grudges seem to pointless when you are so far away. What remains are sweet memories that smell of roses; forgotten garbage doesn't stink.
So back we are to the city, where our days are ruled by the digital clocks and watches, where our time is at least as precious as money and where anonymity is the norm. I do not know my neighbours. Why get to know them when I know they will be gone by next week? Peripheral attachments are the least painful ones when being removed.
Of course, we love the anonymity. It gives us freedom to do what we want without having people around us worrying themselves to death about our 'deviant behaviour'. It makes us all instrumentalists, rational men and women who choose their goals and means rationally rather than emotionally.
And as the politician from Britain said, Gandhi was wrong about villages. The future of this country is in its towns and cities. How much ever you romanticise it, there is not much charm in living in a rural area that kills freedom of thought and action in the name of culture and tradition.
Still water stinks in the long run.
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