u/iwantproteinnow

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Okay I need to get this out somewhere before I board my flight tomorrow.

Some context. I moved to Gurgaon in 2021 straight out of college. Got a decent job, packed two bags, left my entire Karol Bagh life behind. I was 22 and thought this was the move.

It was not, immediately, the move.

First week I asked a colleague where the local market was. She looked at me like I had asked her where the nearest river for bathing was. There is no local market here bhai, she said. There's a mall. There's always a mall.

That was my first sign.

Four years of this city and I had a whole list. The roads that end for no reason. The sectors that all look identical so you're never fully sure where you are. The fact that everyone is either in a car or in an office and the footpath exists purely as decoration. The autos that refuse to go anywhere and when they do, the price is a negotiation that requires emotional preparation.

I complained about it constantly. To anyone. Colleagues, family, random people at weddings who made the mistake of asking how Gurgaon was.

Soulless, I'd say. Built for transactions. Nobody actually lives here, they just park themselves here between salaries.

I believed this completely.

Then last week happened.

Long weekend. Most of the city had left for trips. I had one last evening before the packing got serious and I just took my bike out with no particular plan.

Gurgaon was empty. Genuinely empty in a way I had never seen it.

I rode through Sector 29, Sector 30, down toward the old part near Sheetla Mata mandir where the city stops pretending to be a city and just becomes a town for a bit. Stopped at a small dhaba I'd passed a hundred times without entering. Ordered chai and aloo paratha. Sat outside on a plastic chair. No one was around except the dhaba uncle and a dog who had very strong opinions about sitting next to my chair.

It was maybe 7pm. That golden light that October evenings do. A cooler breeze than Gurgaon usually allows. Complete quiet except for some distant azaan and a truck somewhere.

And I just sat there. And it hit me completely out of nowhere.

I was going to miss this.

Not the malls. Not Cyber Hub and its ₹600 cocktails and the constant performance of a certain kind of success. Not the identical glass buildings that you stop seeing after a while because your brain just files them under background.

This. This specific thing. A plastic chair outside a small dhaba in a sector nobody talks about, with decent chai and a dog who had adopted me for the duration of one paratha.

I rode back slowly. Took the long way. Through the empty roads that feel genuinely eerie when there's no traffic on them because you forget they're capable of being quiet.

And I kept thinking about what this city actually was, underneath all my complaints about it.

Gurgaon never tried to be anything warm. It never sold you a story about culture or legacy or soul. Delhi does that constantly. Bombay does it even more. Both cities have a whole mythology about themselves that they expect you to participate in.

Gurgaon doesn't bother. It's just here. Take it or leave it. There's a mall. There's a job. The roads may or may not connect to where you're going. Figure it out.

And I spent four years resenting that. But sitting on that plastic chair I realized something.

There's an honesty to a city that doesn't perform for you.

It never pretended to love me back. And somewhere in that, without noticing, I had actually relaxed into it. Stopped waiting for it to become something. Just lived here.

I'm flying out tomorrow. Bangkok, new job, whole new chapter, very exciting, all of that.

But last night I stood on my balcony in Sector 48 one last time. The Gurgaon skyline at night is objectively absurd. Half finished buildings with cranes frozen mid-construction. Glass towers lit up next to empty plots. A flyover going somewhere that I still, after four years, don't fully know where.

It looks like a city that got halfway through explaining itself and just stopped.

And I stood there and I cried a little. Not a lot. Just enough to be embarrassing if anyone had seen.

Four years of calling this place soulless and it turns out I just wasn't looking for soul in the right places. Or maybe I was wrong about what soul looks like.

Maybe sometimes it looks like a plastic chair, a dog, and one good paratha before you leave.

Anyway. Flight is at 6am.

TL;DR: Hated Gurgaon for four years, had one quiet evening alone on my bike before leaving, cried like an idiot. The city never even tried to be loveable and somehow that got me in the end.

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Okay so this is going to sound like one of those Delhi bad Bengaluru good posts. It's not. Bear with me.

I'm from Rohini. Born and raised. The kind of guy who'd get into stupid arguments at college with south indian kids about which city was real India. My whole thing was that Delhi has soul, yaar.

I meant it. Genuinely.

Then work happened. Three months in Bengaluru, March to June. I packed rajma chawal masala in my bag like I was going to a war zone. Told everyone I'd be back counting days.

The window thing (Week 2)

I was in a PG in Koramangala. Nothing special. One morning I woke up and realized the window had been open all night. Just open. I hadn't thought about it once.

That sounds like nothing. But if you're from Delhi you know. You don't leave windows open. Not in winter, not when the AQI is doing what it does. It's just not a thing you do.

And then I noticed something else. I hadn't cleared my throat that morning. Or the morning before. In Delhi that's just it's part of waking up, you know? Your body's way of saying okay we made it through another night in this city.

I checked AQI out of curiosity 70. I actually laughed out loud 194 in Delhi.

The 11pm thing (Week 5)

Colleague asked if I wanted to grab dinner. 11:15 at night. Walk, he said, it's close.

I said how far, already calculating whether Rapido made more sense.

He just looked at me. "Ten minutes bhai, relax."

We walked. Footpath was lit properly. Restaurants still open. A couple sitting on a bench. Some uncle walking his dog. Normal stuff.

And somewhere halfway there I realized I hadn't checked. I hadn't clocked who was standing where, which side had more streetlights, whether I should have my phone in my pocket or my hand. In my own Rohini colony after 10pm I do all of that automatically. I didn't even know I was doing it until I wasn't doing it.

Not saying Bengaluru is safe utopia. I know it has its own issues. But that particular thing that low level background hum of alertness I didn't need it there. And putting it down felt weird. Like taking off a backpack you'd forgotten you were wearing.

Coming back

Landed at IGI on a Sunday. June heat, the kind that hits you like a wall the second you step out.

By the Rohini flyover I could already see it that brownish-yellow tint on the horizon that Delhi people have just accepted as sky. An auto guy tried to charge me ₹200 extra. When I said no he got personal about it. Some guy cut across three lanes on the highway and not a single person reacted because obviously, why would they.

I was home. And I felt genuinely warmth. Like actual love for the place. This city made me. Everything fast and loud and a little aggressive about me, that's Delhi. I know how to argue, I know how to negotiate, I can read a room at 2am in a way that I genuinely don't think Bengaluru-raised people can.

But I also noticed, for the first time in 28 years of living here that I was holding my breath a little. Not stress, not anxiety. Just. Physically. My chest doing a thing it apparently always does here and I'd never noticed.

I'm not moving. Family is here, whole life is here. And I'm not writing this to dunk on Delhi honestly there are enough posts doing that.

I'm writing this because something shifted and I don't totally know what to do with it.

I think for a long time I defended this city because I loved it. I still do. But somewhere along the way I stopped being able to tell the difference between *loving a place* and just being *loyal to its problems*. Like they'd fused together into the same feeling and I'd never examined it.

The chaos used to feel like energy. Sometimes it still does.

But some mornings I open my window, feel that little catch in my throat, and think, yaar, we've normalized so much. We've normalized it so completely that we rebranded it as personality.

Anyway. Didn't know where else to put this.

TL;DR: Rohini guy. Three months in Bengaluru for work. Didn't miss the pollution or the post 10pm streetscanning or the morning throat situation. Came back and felt love for Delhi and also saw it clearly for the first time. Both things at once. It's a weird feeling.