Listen

Honestly, Marine Drive is not the same. It’s not the place I once went to. Why? There are just way too many people. Not that I have some special patented right over the promenade, but still. Have you even tired going there on a Sunday evening? It’s insane!!

However, thanks to the crowd, it is so much easier to overhear people’s conversations, to get a slice of someone else’s life, something which doesn’t happen ‘that’ easily in trains. In trains, you only hear people’s phone conversations, ‘Yeh maal yahan dena hai’, ‘Dinesh bhai ka parcel aaya ki nahi?’, ‘Tata Power ke sau share bech do’, dada dada. But on marine drive, it is about people’s lives – girlfriends, friends, extra-marital affairs, break-ups, babies, ill people, healthy people, people jogging, walking with sticks, cute dogs, foreign bred dogs, everything! And their conservations are about THEM.

If possible, try and listen in sometime cause there’s a little bit of you in each one of them. I saw myself in that guy who was blabbering non-stop trying so freaking hard to impress the girl with him that it was almost funny (in a good way). I saw myself in that child counting the Trident floors, and then running to tell his dad. I saw myself among a bunch of teens, loud, irritating ones, who laugh over almost everything. And I also saw myself in that guy, sitting alone, clearly dealing with a hajaar issues in his head.

So next time time, try, and listen in. There’s a little bit of us, in almost everyone of us.