Escapism...

“Privacy is a luxury in Mumbai that only money can buy”- Shantaram….

Now I have been brought up in a nuclear family with working parents and no siblings, and I had grown up learning to love my own company and never really complained about it. By the time I was in my teens, privacy was something I treasured deeply and I made sure I had it. Thankfully my parents were the liberal kinds who respected my “space” as long as I was responsible enough and disciplined enough.

When I moved to Bombay, it was suddenly a different story altogether and in the last six years, I have been tossed around from one hostel to another while the number of room mates has only multiplied! Suddenly I had people around me all the time, people who talked about anything, people who expected you to tell them about little detail in your life, people who ate together, went out together, shopped together, studied together and people who never quite understood my need to be alone at times. While I enjoyed this new found “bonding”, it also made me feel a little claustrophobic at times with an aching desire to escape, to just be by myself, away from the madding crowd, when those long lonely walks by the sea were not enough, when you crave for freedom…