I grew up on the films that played on Doordarshan every weekend.
The ones you didn’t really choose, because there was nothing else to choose from. You just watched whatever came on, and over time they all began to feel like variations of the same story. A village somewhere in North India. Fields. A lot of space. The kind of space cities don’t have and films seemed very eager to show. A poor farmer. A rich landlord. Someone being oppressed, someone doing the oppressing. Occasionally an honest boy who would leave for the city to change his fate, as if the city was waiting specifically for him to arrive and do that.
The problems were obvious in a way that required no interpretation. Hunger looked like hunger. Poverty looked like poverty. If someone was the villain, you knew early, sometimes just by how they were introduced, which was usually not subtle. There was always a house you could point to and say, yes, that’s where the problem lives.
The books weren’t very different. Rural settings, or at least some rural connection that grounded everything. The city, when it showed up, was not where the story lived. It was where the story was headed. The place you went when the village could no longer hold you.
Somewhere in the 90s, that shifted.
The village didn’t disappear entirely. It still shows up. I read Kabhi Gaon Kabhi College recently, which is set in a rural context, the details are all there, but somewhere while reading it I noticed that the rural issues weren’t really driving the story. They were atmosphere. The actual concerns could have belonged anywhere, any college, any campus, and the story would have held. Which is interesting in a quiet way. A rural setting now does what the city used to do. It frames the story, but it isn’t the story.
Most of our stories now live in cities, and the city brought its own characters with it.
When I moved to Delhi, a few months after getting married, someone said to me, you don’t look or sound like a Bombay girl. I had grown up in Mumbai since I was seven. But I spoke Hindi the way we did at home, like a North Indian family, which is what we were, and apparently that disqualified me from being whatever version of a Bombay girl they had assembled in their heads. There was a template somewhere. I hadn’t received it.
The Bombay girl, it turns out, is a very specific character. And like most characters, she is easier to recognise than to actually be.
Which is what urban storytelling does, alongside everything else. It creates types. The Delhi girl. The Bombay girl. The software engineer in Bangalore. The startup founder. People assembled from a few visible details, legible within the first few scenes, in exactly the same way the landlord and the farmer were legible in those Doordarshan films. The setting changed. The instinct to categorise quickly didn’t.
I remember an incident from a few years ago. A domestic worker who had been with a friend of mine for some time asked for a loan. Five thousand rupees. Her child’s school fee was due. My friend gave her the money, and then almost as an aside mentioned that she could have sold her phone. It was an Android smartphone, not the most basic device, and it would have covered at least part of the fee.
It didn’t sound unreasonable.
The woman said no. Not defensively. Just as a fact. All the school communication came through it. Homework, messages from teachers, bus updates. Without the phone, the system around her two children would more or less stop working.
The conversation moved on. That moment didn’t.
I understood my friend’s instinct immediately. The phone looked like an indulgence. In the stories I had grown up with, it would have been. Something you give up first, not something you protect. The markers were reliable then. Land. Money. Power. Lack. You could see the problem, name it, point at the house where it lived if you needed to.
But the story had changed. The instincts hadn’t.
Cities tell a different kind of story. Smaller on the surface, more complicated underneath. The signs are easier to read in some ways. The house, the car, the school the children attend, the ease with which someone moves through certain spaces. You can tell fairly quickly that someone is doing fine. What you can’t tell, just as quickly, is what that fine is built on, or what it takes to keep it looking that way, or what one unexpected expense might do to the whole arrangement.
The outside of a reasonably comfortable life is very good at looking like comfort.
The old stories didn’t prepare me for this. They were generous in their clarity. The struggle was visible, structural, it didn’t make you go looking for it. Even the city-arrival stories had a legibility. You knew who needed what. You knew where to stand. The stories I see now don’t offer that. What looks like an indulgence might be infrastructure. What looks unnecessary might be the one thing holding everything else together. The absence of visible struggle doesn’t always mean the absence of it. It might just mean it has learned to look like something else.
I have thought about that domestic worker more than once. About how close my friend’s instinct was to being right, in the framework we both inherited. And how completely it would have missed what was actually true. About how often I am probably still reaching for those same markers without noticing.
The city has changed what struggle looks like. I am not entirely sure my instincts have.
This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .
I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.
Discover more from Lifestyle of a Professional
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
