Life demands at sometime that a common man must move out from his home, work and stay elsewhere. This is what I am just doing fulfilling the demand, serving my time at Rajkot. Yes, prisoner I am stuck in this place unable to relocate elsewhere due to the absence of favorable employee policy at the organization where I work. Thus I was forced to stick around in Rajkot and I naturally started observing the city (it is just a town for me). Rajkot is supposed to be a developing urban city, but the people as such are not catching up at the rate.
The people here are mostly entrepreneurial and around 90% run their own business. They don’t want to be defined by any rules of employment in think. This characteristic is also displayed in their outside behaviour. They do not wear helmets and their road sense is bad aggravated with the lack of traffic signals. PAAN shops are sprawled everywhere around the city, assisting people to color the roads red. Newcomers must be careful while walking in roads, as they might be shot with a discharge of paan. Next to paan shops, come the milk booths/diaries which contribute to the swarming population of flies. One can never feel lonely here, as these flies will keep company wherever we go. This may be a small problem compared to the big cattle population out here. The cows perform the role of medians out in the road, regulating traffic and even proving to be lord Yama’s ride rather than Lord Shiva (few girls got killed due to accident with cow). One can see the roads of Rajkot as a battlefield of landmines (from cows) and blood (paan). Even malls are not left out. They are also painted red here and there.
Gujarat being a dry state, it’s difficult to obtain liquor and also non-veg are not available so easily. So on the whole here I am living in a rehab, finding aaloo in every dish with oil floating and served the same day after day and waiting for my parole. Hope some other company bails me out from here….
