Continuing with the ‘opposite of Baudelaire’ – looking into
a cache of memories that reveal letting go – searching to see if inherent traces
still exist…
This memory is adventure filled; though not always positive. It is the time my friend and I became crime journalists in
Mumbai (Bombay) – young, green, guileless, with little knowledge of the city,
we travelled alone into its dangerous corners – a city so alive, so crazy, so
beautiful, so ugly – and for the first time we noticed it’s every avatar. Like any large
metropole, Mumbai has corners that are best avoided. Corners that we traipsed
into - blithely unaware, clueless and careless.
How did we land into this situation? A very eminent and
impressive journalist was guest speaker and introduced us to his “young and
vibrant” newspaper that was “making waves” and was “shaking conventional
journalism”.
Star-eyed, star-struck, we believed that we could be part of
this dynamic energy changing the face of journalism. And we decided to do an
internship with this newspaper in Mumbai. The crime reporter resigned the very
day we landed. And of course, who else to fill his shoes than two naïve and clueless
journalism students?
We worked from morning till late at night; hopped onto buses
and local trains; ventured into areas that folks who had lived in the city all
their lives would not dream of going near; wandered into volatile areas of communal
strife and disharmony; drove into dusty locales on the photographer’s rickety
motorcycle. The heady fervor of youth knows no danger (or maybe the lack of guile
doesn’t see danger).
It was a letting go. Letting go of expectations, letting go
of thinking ahead, letting go of fear, letting go of (ahem…) wisdom (??) We were
given an assignment and we took off – stopping only to figure out the address and mode of
public transportation. Little worry, little hesitation, little need to find out if it was
a safe part of town. We focused on the story and let go of the rest. We
would reconvene in the evening and share our crazy stories. Even if our eyes became
wide with disbelief and confusion at all that had transpired, we shook everything off with laughter. Could this be anything else but
letting go? Was it us? Or was it our
youth? No matter the situation, we never felt stuck; we simply kept moving or
perhaps plodding out of one sticky situation into another.
If it was a letting go for me, it was many times more for my
friend. Her mother had actually travelled with us to Mumbai for she didn’t want
her daughter travelling alone (or ahem… with her unreliable friend…sigh). Just glad
her poor mother never saw the areas we ventured into.
Now my friend was so lovely that most everyone wanted to go
in and rescue her… from whatever…not that she wanted or needed anyone to… So I
wasn’t too surprised to hear some friends say to her: “That was pretty dangerous. What if you had
got hurt or kidnapped or something?” I looked indignantly at my friends, “What
about me? I could have been hurt or
kidnapped too. ” Sigh… Oh well… But I was so proud of her. I was so proud of
us. And our friends were proud of us – of both of us.
Perhaps our accomplishment or madness or naiveté’ stemmed out
of our letting go. A letting go that I now find hard to believe… A letting go that
seemed reckless but freeing … A letting go that knew no limitations, no hurdles…
Again, I don’t know if it was letting go or just plain youth… And a part of me
hopes it is the former, for the later is long gone… but hints of the former may
still exist… and it would be fun to rediscover those traces…Wouldn’t it? 
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