I'm in Bhopal these days. Yesterday, I accompanied my father and younger brother on a short trip to Vidisha, one and a half hours away from Bhopal. I had lived in Vidisha from 1998 to 2000. Quite a long time back, then. It was therefore an opportunity to compare the image of Vidisha that I had in my memory from childhood with the actual. This was first such opportunity, because although I have stayed at many places in Madhya Pradesh (about 9), this was the first time I was going back to a place long time after I left it.
Right after we entered Vidisha, I was expecting to come across the railway over-bridge, the single most identifiable structure in the town (I would have almost considered calling it a city before yesterday). As we came round to it, it turned out to be much narrower than I thought. We were then on the road (the one in front of the SP and Collector residence) that I used everyday to go to school from my house. I often rode a bicycle to the school and was hoping to remember it the best. But the road that I was on right now was, again, much narrower, much more congested, and had less trees on both of its sides. I asked my father whether the roads didn't use to be better. He said they were almost the same.
Now there is no doubt that there would have been an increase in the population of the town in these 12 years. But the level of crowding on the streets was still surprising. While I was expecting a broad highway-sort of road through which I used to speed on my bicycle, I found a rather narrow street through which you couldn't drive without stopping every couple of feet.
In short, it was quite a perplexing experience. I wondered how much sanitized and idealized were my memories, in general, from my childhood. They were surely quite a lot more sanitized than I would have expected them to be, if at all. Another reason why the level of development in Vidisha appeared to be of tehsil-level is probably that I had rarely been to any big cities in my childhood, and the perception of the size of the over-bridge and the roads of the town in my memory didn't alter even after I did visit some cities a few years after leaving Vidisha.
Of course, the biggest horror of the experience was to wonder if the girls I had a crush on, in my class, were not as cute as I remember them to be.
Right after we entered Vidisha, I was expecting to come across the railway over-bridge, the single most identifiable structure in the town (I would have almost considered calling it a city before yesterday). As we came round to it, it turned out to be much narrower than I thought. We were then on the road (the one in front of the SP and Collector residence) that I used everyday to go to school from my house. I often rode a bicycle to the school and was hoping to remember it the best. But the road that I was on right now was, again, much narrower, much more congested, and had less trees on both of its sides. I asked my father whether the roads didn't use to be better. He said they were almost the same.
Now there is no doubt that there would have been an increase in the population of the town in these 12 years. But the level of crowding on the streets was still surprising. While I was expecting a broad highway-sort of road through which I used to speed on my bicycle, I found a rather narrow street through which you couldn't drive without stopping every couple of feet.
In short, it was quite a perplexing experience. I wondered how much sanitized and idealized were my memories, in general, from my childhood. They were surely quite a lot more sanitized than I would have expected them to be, if at all. Another reason why the level of development in Vidisha appeared to be of tehsil-level is probably that I had rarely been to any big cities in my childhood, and the perception of the size of the over-bridge and the roads of the town in my memory didn't alter even after I did visit some cities a few years after leaving Vidisha.
Of course, the biggest horror of the experience was to wonder if the girls I had a crush on, in my class, were not as cute as I remember them to be.
