My sweet home Madras...

Why are you so special to me? Why can't I ever get you out of my mind? Unconsciencly I compare everything I do here with the way I did things with you.... Some times you come up a bit short but mostly you win hands down and I seriously wonder why I even left you to begin with... Tonight I watched a video of how you looked in 1990... it was incredibly different and yet, fundamentally, you haven't changed at all... Still the same old Mount Road, same old Cathedral Road, same old Chola Sheraton, same old Stella Maris, same old Woodlands drive-in, same old Anna Flyover... same old Madras!

I just have so many memories of you - every story of mine might begin with 'Oh yeah, when I was so smashed...', but what I don't always mention is 'Oh yeah, when I was so smashed in Madras...'! You were my world, the centre of my everything - my life, my love, my home, my very existence... No one will ever be able to take you away from me... your roads and beaches, restaurants and nightclubs, my house and all my friends' houses, even your stinking river and buffaloes and mosquitoes, they will be a part of me until the day I die...

A lot of people ask me, 'So what's up with Penny Lane?' and I say, 'Well, it's a really cool song by The Beatles', but why I really love the song is because it reminds me of you...
Very strange...
Penny Lane is in my ear and in my eyes
There beneath the blue suburban skies

We didn't have no banker with no mac and no fireman with no truck, but we had blue suburban skies and I still have you in my ears and eyes... I can even smell you still... I remember the chill of dawn as I step off the train from yet another trip, dirty and disheveled, inhaling the filth of Central Station and thinking, 'Man, it's good to be back'... I remember the sand trickling through my toes, tasting the salty wind as I walk towards the waves, menacing and inviting at the same time... I remember days spent blissfully doing nothing... I think about how lucky I am to have experienced such decadence and freedom... a life so simple and uncomplicated that I could celebrate such events as Pot Smoking Day (20 April for the un-enlightened), and Gandhi's birthday and Republic Day were just really good excuses to get drunk!!

And as crazy as it sounds, it wasn't all about the alcohol and the drugs... it's about the people and the darndest things they say... good company, a smoke (or even better, a spliff), and a coffee... life's simple pleasures! And so, most of all, I remember the nights spent rolling and smoking and drinking and laughing... I love the life I led with you... everything I am today is such a result of everything I did when I lived with you... you are a mix of everyone I've ever known... you are me when I was five, twelve, sixteen and twenty... So, all it takes is a word, an image, a song, a photograph... and the memories come crashing back... a stoned, smashed journey on the East Coast Road with the music pounding in my head as I stare mesmerised at the shadows on the road... I won't ever forget you, my sweet home Madras!