Bye Bye Moti Nagar
Every Diwali brings with it holidays and for a workaholic like myself, I find myself lost during the break. But this Diwali was different, I had a lot of work to be taken care of. My family and I moved to a new location from Moti Nagar after spending close to 40 years in Moti Nagar.
I have many memories of growing up in Moti Nagar — most of them filled with happiness but some with disappointment and a few completely heart breaking. They say that goodbyes should be sweet and short, so barring one heart breaking memory, I will keep this post about happiness and bewilderment.
I have vivid memories of being a four year old riding my Hero Bicycle roaming around the streets of Moti Nagar alone thinking that one day these streets will be mine when we moved to our house in the F Block.
I have had a great vantage point to see how the cultural milieu of India changed while spending these forty years in Moti Nagar.
It was late eighties (when we moved to F Block in Delhi), the happiness and its devices for most part were mostly of pre liberalisation era. The cars were either Ambassador or Fiat, the houses were mostly single floors and the parties, clothes and everything was dominated by something made in India or made at home only. The park in front of our house offered us everything — a cricket pitch, a badminton court, a ground for Janmashtami procession (which was funded, organised and managed by the children of the neighbourhood). The childhood was of the children, by the children and for the children (my partners in crime were Raghav Khanna, Harsh Madan and Sunny/Munny — I don’t even know their real names).
Early 90’s was also manageable — we had cricket teams formed out of neighbourhood teams, Holi celebration would be a “toli” based affair. I remember watching the 91 World cup match at Baba’s house (younger son of Pardesi Uncle). Who can forget the Kiran More incident with Javed Miandad in one of those matches:
While I spent a good chunk of 90’s preparing for examinations and going to college and working, my most memorable moment was to visit my friend’s house in Rohini on a bicycle with a whole bunch of friends.
Then came to 2000’s with it the rampant growth and like any other unplanned colony in Delhi, Moti Nagar witnessed the builder culture, single story houses were razed and four story buildings were made, parking became a mess and for a change we did not know who was our neighbour.
Moti Nagar was always a BJP bastion and mostly because of the good work done by former CM Madan Lal Khurana. Since we had almost zero to negligible Muslim population so never saw the ugly face of BJP rule in our neighbourhood.
While one can crib about the lackadaisical approach of many counsellors or local politicians due to the overflowing garbage bins at every entry point of Moti Nagar, I would not talk about that. The only grudge against this neighbourhood is how it treated us during COVID.
My family went through COVID in mid May last year and the colony treated us like a pariah and I literally got threat calls about not going out to attend to my parents. This when we had voluntarily told people that my family and I were impacted. I know people were scared and this was a response out of insecurity but video shooting us and circulating an ailing family’s pic in whatsapp groups just demonstrated the indifference the neighbourhood practiced. I would not name those who showed us their ugly colours but the good samaritans need to be celebrated. We got some tremendous support from Vicky Thukral bhaiya right from providing us vegetables, milk and food when nobody was ready to come few yards of our house. He was there every day enquiring about my father’s health. My uncle (Mr. Girish Kapoor) who lives nearby was there to provide us bread, medicines and emotional support when we were most vulnerable.
It was clear to me that I did not want my children to grow in such environments where fear was abundant but empathy was in short supply. So after looking at close to 60 houses, my family has moved to a new home and hopefully we will be able to plant new seeds of happiness and bring love, joy and empathy to the new surroundings.
I will may be sometime do a post on the design adventures I had with building the new house and I think it has come out well for us so far.
Till then bye bye Moti Nagar, someday get a heart from somewhere :(.
