I grew up in a very small town in India and, except for few later years before I came to west, I mostly lived/studied in small towns only. Actually if you go by the standards of rest of India, in terms of population and size, most of those towns were perhaps not bigger than big villages in many parts of India.
I vividly remember many things from my small town childhood. Most of my present day necessities were laughable audacious dreams then. I remember once (I must be around 10) I was travelling with my family in a bus in the interiors of Himachal Pradesh. Those days, we didnt have television in our home yet, as it was considered luxury by my father and so I had to satiate my love of watching movies by sneaking into those rare neighbors’ homes who not only had TV but were also gracious enough to let in a terribly shy kid. Or, if I was really fortunate, I was permitted to watch a movie in a video hall once in while (yes you heard right..there were no cinema halls there). Anyways, so I was in this bus, staring at the blue colored tin in front of me, the tin which was also the back of the next seat. Suddenly, my imaginative mind thought that what if this blue tin in front of me turns into a screen where some Amitabh Bachhan movie is playing. I was a kid, but even my kiddish mind immediately reasoned that how audacious this dream is and can never come true. Years later, I was on my way to London in a British Airways flight and was watching an AB film on the TV screen just in front of me. And suddenly, I remembered that bus and that dream of mine; I smiled at life.
