This city. I’ve grown up here in this city- and I’m sure a lot of you who are reading this, too, have grown up here. It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it? It’s alive. But a part of this city- it’s dead, just like the dark side of the moon. It’s there, it exists, it’s just not visible to any one of us who are just living our damn days, sitting at the porch of the Hauz Khas fort, or the staircases of metro stations.
The second kind that lives in this city is the kind that’s trying its level best to forget.
And unfortunately, whatever external stimulation it is that they need to forget their past, or even their present, is easily accessible to them.
When I was thirteen years old, I remember looking at some young lads outside my school, must be around seventeen, in their worn out school uniforms. They had something stuck between their fingers, it was burning. I knew what a cigarette was, in case you’re thinking maybe I was the naïve kid who had always believed in a hunky dory beautiful life and the existence of Santa (but in my defense, how do you explain all those gifts kept by my bedside on the Christmas morning?). But it wasn’t a cigarette. And it was only until my second year of college that I finally understood what that goddamned thing was that was stuck between their fingers.
Alcohol and cigarettes are available everywhere around us, despite their perpetual legal troubles, and most of us are aware of it. But there’s something more to this dark, addictive side of Delhi than just the two.
NEW DELHI: Fine quality of heroin and cocaine worth Rs. 70 lakh has been recovered by Crime Branch with the arrest of three drug traffickers, including two Nigerian nationals, from different parts of the national capital.
These were the headlines leading the papers a while back.But there are many headlines that never even reach the print presses of this city.
Recreational marijuana- this God has many names- Kerala gold, Idukki gold, Malana cream, and a lot of others. But the purpose that it serves isn’t as recreational as they say- it’s gotten worse.
There’s a notion that all the damn corporate slaves are the ones that are “ruining” the young minds around them- but that is a misconception. The target market for this damned devil varies through all age groups. You’d be surprised how young students learn to score and smoke before they learn to solve their math equations. And more often than not, they graduate from recreational drugs to hard drugs by the time they graduate from their respective colleges.
It isn’t just marijuana that’s easily accessible here in Delhi, but a lot of other hard drugs too, which are available at the drop of a hat. It’s sad how all along their journeys from being impressionable young teenagers, to raging college students, to corporate slaves and finally, even being companions with their loved ones, a major chunk of Delhiites, as we call them, more often than not “need” that external stimulus.
When was the last time you just hung out with your friends or lovers without having the need to smoke up and “chill”? The question being addressed to all those who usually do need the stimulus, that is. (before the exceptions sitting amongst you bash my head up over it)
And the worst part is, the mass scale consumption that does get materialized in this city is not for recreational purposes after a while, it becomes an escape route for most of them. Every person’s problem is individualistic in nature, it’s understandable. Some of us have troubled pasts, some are dealing with their present, and some- future, and some of them, well, they just want to run away from their own damn minds, but for how long can one even run away from oneself- the bitter truth is that one can’t. One can take some time off maybe, but one can’t run away, and driven by this greed of taking too many vacations off, people get addicted. And by then it’s too damn late.
It’s not a want anymore, it turns into a need.
This issue is a lot more magnified here in this city than they portray it to be, we might not be the greenest city in the country, but we sure as hell do import a lot of greens, accompanied with some whites and browns. Maybe this issue wouldn’t have been as major had there been proper implementation of the laws that exist- but like every other issue in this country, and every other election manifesto of every party ever- those laws just exist inside the big black book and inside the courtrooms.
There’s a lot more to this city than meets the eye. It isn’t as beautiful as our tourist brochures make it seem. There are patches of unwanted greenery in our lives, which need to go away.
