of Jorhat and me...

It's been seven months since i left jorhat for guwahati. However sometimes during the solitude of the night or bouts of insomnia my mind does wanders back to my life in jorhat, about how i fought sheer boredom, made new friends and found my sanity in the television.
The initial days were the hardest as in any new place, the sense of dislocation takes some time to creep out of your system particularly if u r wrenched out of places u never wanted to leave in the first place. After couple of months and a house later i discovered a nice place where i stayed put fot the rest of my days in jorhat. The place was good and quite popular with the college guys since it had a huge open field and no curfew on incoming and outgoing traffic since the landlord's house was quite some distance away.
My life to this point was profoundly urban and i did what i did best to pass the time..observe people around me. Unlike in Guwahati where people r least bothered about what's going on next door, here people seem to know each other's blood group. for instance i seriously doubt that back home people knew that i no longer stay at home and have been transffered to jorhat, heck most of them i m sure r not even aware that i passed out of college. However in Jorhat everybody's business is everybody's business which in a way is quite good. i mean there's is something rather admirable in the fact that amidst the monstrosity of modernization there is this effort to retain the essence of human nature, i mean the curiosity of it. But yes it can get to your nerves when experienced in excess.
Even the youngsters who used to come over to my place asked me personal questions about my life rather than the standard issue queries about careers and college that kids in my place asks. Of all the questions in the world the only thing that bothers them is that why m i still single despite having all the so called comforts of life. However i found it extremely amusing that whenevr they asked about my wedding prospects it was always in almost embarrassing tones accompanied by suppressed smiles as if to ask about one's marriage is to ask about the obvious sex that comes along which in any case is considered a dirty thing in jorhat and certainly not a thing to be discussed in public. Initially i explained that i never considered marriage to be that important a thing but one look at their dumbstruck faces i took the relatively easier way and told them i will get married by next year and all of them would be invited. Needless to say all of them were thrilled at the prospect of attending another wedding.
gradually I began to realise all my neighbours are addicted to bihu songs..morning,noon or night there's always bihu blazing from their rooms. I have never been so much of a serious bihu listener ( except the once in while husori or bihu geet during magh or bohag bihu), so when i listened to some of the songs keenly i found almost all the bihu or bihu huriya songs spoke volumes about getting married. Most bizzare i found is the one which narrates the dreadful consequences about remaining unmarried till thirty, and in another the guy profeses his love to his lady and tells her that not to worry he will marry her by next spring and yet in another the guy decides to elope with the girl since her parents arn't too fond of him. It seems all the songs have one clear message "get married or die trying".
A thousand awkward questions and an uneventful three and a half years later i got transferred to another place and now thinking of my time in jorhat there's a fantastic an almost surreal feeling about the place with its lush greenary and beutiful people. Couple of my friends in Guwahati r from Jorhat and when two of them get together the world can go to hell, other people are amazed at this camaraderie and make comments but i never say anything because i know how it works in jorhat and the time honoured line " u can take man out of his home but u can never take the home out of the man" fits exactly with them jorhatians.