An Ode to the National Capital Region: Memories of Noida and Vaishali

Time of India

6 days ago

There are cities that arrive in the world fully formed, like Delhi, Mumbai, Varanasi, New York, and Rome. And then there are places like the National Capital Region (NCR) where cities are still building themselves, their grammar off, ever so slightly run-on, their punctuation strange, but somehow always readable. And here I am, a consummate Delhi-ite, penning a love letter to a geography that is suspended somewhere between the promise of tomorrow and the stubborn reality of today. Noida and Vaishali were not merely the backdrop to my youth, but the co-authors. We came of age together, and not always gracefully.
I studied at one of those famous private schools in Noida which prided itself on high academic standards and higher egos. There was but a schizophrenic duality to school life from which most of us have never recovered. In school plays, we took great joy in enacting the agonies of Lear after he had been defrauded by Goneril. But, within the privacy of friend circles, we listened to the latest Himesh Reshammiya chartbuster, ate cheap food, wrote cheesy (but sincere) letters to crushes, and discoursed in the finest and roughest colloquialism ever known to man. We were always stuck between two personalities – one which we aspired to emulate, and the other that came naturally to us.
Noida seemed to mirror our dilemma. It was a place that reinvented itself faster than its people could keep up. Sector 15A, cloistered in leafy affluence, wore its old-money aura with poise and elegance. Visiting a friend there felt like entering a different dimension, one where the air conditioning was constant and the internet connection was high-speed broadband and not MTNL's scattershot dial-up. The houses had names, not numbers, and the verandahs were impeccably potted with beautiful flowers.
Contrast that with Sector 18 or the eponymous Atta Market. No one knows why it was named so; it simply was. Atta was a commercial fever dream – a sensory assault of crowds, bargaining, brands, and sweat. We learnt haggling as a survival skill and tasted our first Domino's garlic breadsticks. Life in Atta felt kinetic, for it was where the contradictions of desire and despair collided headlong and unapologetically. The mall culture in Noida represented another pole. The 'Mall' was where adolescence went to flirt with adulthood. You watched an English movie, window-shopped Converse sneakers, ate a Subway, saw a sports bar from the outside, and quietly bought into the illusion that life was upwardly mobile. Within the mall, we could pretend to be what we were not, much like Noida herself.
But, if Noida was the performance of aspiration, Vaishali was its preface. For a brief period, I had the good fortune to live there. We used to call it Ghaziabad's quieter and more introspective cousin.
Its apartment complexes – beige, unambitious high-rises named after rivers – always looked slightly bemused at the theatre of middle-class dreams that unfolded within them. The balconies were meant for non-verbal communiques with society friends, and the neighbourhood wore the look of a middle-class uncle, perfectly fine but ever so slightly out of shape. And the background was the ever-present soundscape of construction, a reminder that everything here was still, in some fundamental way, unfinished.
However, what Vaishali lacked in polish, she made up for in personality. The local Mother Dairy booth was a place of whispered gossip while you bought the toned (or was it full cream?) milk and curd packets. Sabziwalas knew your name. In the evenings, parks would fill up with retirees and cricket-playing restless children, two groups of people equally suspicious of their future. And conversations revolved around property prices and the 'moral decline' of today's youth. There was a kind of lived intimacy that was not present in Noida or even Delhi.
Living in Vaishali meant learning to love imperfection. The roads that promised to be finished next month and the power cuts that arrived with seasonal regularity taught a peculiar patience to the residents. We learnt to find humour in dysfunction and to create strong bonds of community despite the lack of infrastructure.
Looking back today, what I carry with me from those years is not empty nostalgia for places that were perfect, but gratitude for places that were honest about their imperfections. Noida and Vaishali were hardly glamorous places. They did not belong in movies unless something went wrong. But, somewhere between the brash ambition of Noida and the calm lassitude of Vaishali, developed in me a personality, which continues to shape me even today.
So here is to NCR. Not quite Delhi, but a region built on hard work and an ability to continuously move forward despite a strange incompleteness. And I will forever be grateful to have learnt the art of living a life which is perpetually a work-in-progress, yet fulfilling.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.