A week into the new year, I am trying to put 2011 in perspective. And turns out I did not do a bunch of the things I had set out to do. On the whole, a not-so-great year.

Did not complete my Spanish lessons, let the blog go to rot (yeah, this one!), took a lot of photographs but hardly printed any… The list goes on. The most galling aspect of 2011 though was the lack of work-life balance (too much work) and the one-dimensional nature of socialising (dinners, drinks, parties). The latter, especially, makes for a very boring ‘life’ in the work-life equation.

There were some high points – watched a test match in Mumbai, in which SRT almost did the unthinkable, and traveled a bit. Of the travels, the highlight was the time spent at Koh Phi Phi, reached after almost 7 hours of travel from Bangkok. Phi Phi (’Koh’ means ‘island’ in the local language) is a tranquil blue-water island in the middle of the West Andaman Sea, with great food and marine life. Good ’twas.

So much for 2011. What does the new year hold in store? Although a very hypothetical question, it is still an interesting one. As Winston Churchill said ‘The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.’.

Here are some of the things I will do in 2012.
1. Travel around India, around local and musical events. Do more travel-blogging, put up pictures more regularly. Spend 4-5 hours each week on keeping this site updated.
2. Spend more time with family and friends. In more productive ways.
3. Pay more attention to my health. Being on the other side of 30, need to start doing that.
4. Read more books. Take the 52-book challenge, and see what comes of it.
5. Be more positive. Change situations rather than complain.

There it is. Now that I have blurted it all out, will get to work on keeping these promises to myself.

But is that enough to tie in with my identity to a city? If it is just about being correct then why not ‘BengaliMan’ or ‘ManinPowai’?

Fact is that I love this city, through all the monsoonal deluges, bomb blasts, disturbances, and have loved it for a long time. Not in an unconditional, perfect way – I rant against the many seeming warts of Bombay – but I can never get myself to stay away from it. The closest analogy is the love felt for Delhi by the protagonist of Khushwant Singh’s ‘Delhi’, who keeps returning to Delhi like he keeps going back to his mistress. But I do not think of Bombay as my mistress, it is rather like the adolescent love from which there is no going away, and whose very thought brings back other sepia memories of the past, and the seeming fullness of those days.

I came to Bombay for the first time when I was 18 , to join college. There was no reason for me to come to Bombay – I had no family in the city (even of the twice removed kinds), it was a 26 hour train journey from where I had grown up, and I was not even getting a good branch to study. But even then, there was an infatuation that drew me to Bombay. The lure of the ‘big city life’, the ’sone ki chidiya’ was too strong for me, having grown up with images of the city immortalized by Bollywood and cricket magazines, and photographs of relatives who had spent some years in Bombay.
(As a result, even today, I call this city ‘Bombay’. In spite of the political incorrectness. Bombay was the city I came to, and Bombay is the city I live in.)

It has been 12 years since that rainy July morning when I came here, and since then I have always come ‘back’ to Bombay. When I came back to the country after 4 years, Bombay it was again. Leading the life of the typical urban nomad (5 cities in the last 8 years, parents moving base twice in the last 4 years), this is the only place I call home, the only place I have roots in.

Bombay is where I took my first tottering steps into adulthood, fell in love for the first time, had my first heartbreak, got my first paycheck, met the woman who would later become my wife, did experiments with hairstyles, music and food, discovered the joys of alcohol, made the best of friends, and encountered despair and death for the first time. We have shared experiences of all kinds, and by those experiences, our identities have mingled together – Bombay is a part of my identity, a common thread that runs through large parts of my life, even the parts when I did not live in this city.

There is another reason. Yes, Bombay is home for me. But Bombay is also a city which is very welcoming of immigrants, of outsiders, of people who were not born here. In my admittedly limited experience, I have not seen any other city which is as welcoming of outsiders. Everyday, at railway stations, ports, airports, bus terminals, it lets in millions of people for the first time, with just one piece of advice – work hard, follow your dreams, do your ‘dhanda’ and you are welcome here. And the new initiates take that advice to heart. I am also one among them, and ply my trade here.

I call myself an ‘un-rooted’ person, everytime I grow roots someplace, it is time to up and go away. Except Bombay. Here the roots stay. In the city of immigrants.

What better name than ‘Man in Bombay’?