Should we call ourselves the Ewaykars?

Lived in Mumbai, moved to Pune, relieved but restricted…that’s us! There is a word that describes and defines people of Bengal who have settled elsewhere: ‘probashi’. Like all people of a diaspora, the probashis too form a sub-culture that is made up of some parts that they carry from their place of origin and some parts absorbed from their new homes. There are many such migrant groups of people with many such names all over the world. One such group that has not yet defined itself or been given a name, but should, is a pretty specific one: people who are born and brought up and worked for a good chunk of their lives in Mumbai (and in Bombay too) and then chose to move to Pune during the last 8-10 years. We are people who knew and loved Pune off and on, before we moved here fully. We were here perhaps as college students, or because our grandparents lived here, or we nipped down on a weekend on the old Bombay-Poona highway to meet friends and enjoy the weather and the music. Then, years later, quite wrung-out by Mumbai, we decided to escape up the Bhor Ghat and settle down here. The coming of the Expressway as well as the Internet helped us greatly – we could continue with much of our work, without anymore having to encounter the crush and rush for the 9.03 fast train to Churchgate, and we could go down to Mumbai when we wanted, without those old 8-hour-long traffic jams of the past. So a new kind of ‘probashi’ was born. (There are and have been, before us, people from Pune who did a weekly up-down by the DQ to Mumbai. Those are different. We are different.) What could we be named? Perhaps Ewaykars, or Pumumbites, or Mumpunites. Our name must encapsulate not just the fact that we escaped from Mumbai, but that we escaped to Pune. We have brought with us some of our Mumbai traits, good and bad, and we have absorbed some of Pune’s traits, good and bad. Maybe if we describe ourselves a little, the appropriate name for apnay jaisa types will suggest itself. We are a bit of a bundle of contradictions: When we first moved here, and even now (however much we crib about Pune going down the drain), we are always aware and grateful that we wake up to the twitter of many little birds, and not to the raucous caw-caw of Mumbai’s crow and the swear-words easily and cheerily thrown around in that city. Yet, at times we do miss the determined bustle of morning Mumbai. When we encounter the rudeness and/or laziness of the shop keepers and service providers around us, and have to wait for anything to open not before 10 in the morning, only to watch it close down on our face firmly 1 to 4 and even 5 pm, we sorely miss the can-do attitude of anyone who sold you anything in Mumbai. And yet, at some level we admire the willingness of the Puneri not to grab every chance to make money, to simply shut shop for siesta. We sorely miss the fantastic public transport network of Mumbai, but a two-day visit to that great city, stuck in megajams and packed like sardines in a train or a bus brings us skittering back on to the E-way, and when the last of the ugly moss-covered buildings goes past us, we heave a sigh of relief, knowing we have put Mumbai firmly behind us and can climb up the ghat and back home in Pune. Till of course the next time we begin to miss the buzz or have work that is done much better and faster in Mumbai, and we skitter right down that E-way again, gratefully back into teeming Mumbai! Another trait that we exhibit is that we tend to loftily say to our friends and relatives in Mumbai, who routinely negotiate that difficult metropolis with its work-in-progress roads, its awful weather, and the crazed crowds: “how do you guys stand to live here”. And back in Pune, we quite as easily give the original Puneris a hard time about their lack of enterprise and professional and get all superior with a “in Mumbai, this would have got done in half a day and with a smile, that too…this Pune is really the pits, I tell you...” etc etc! When we get together, ex-Mumbaikars now Punekars, we get along well, because we recognize what we have happily left behind, and yet what we have lost. We also recognize in each other that impatience mixed with admiration for all things Puneri. Gouri Dange