Mayank Shekhar: What's a small town anyway?

A nightclub in Kanpur looks no different from one in Mumbai

There's deja vu. And there's pure disorientation. Both can happen if you travel much. Or at least it did to me once, couple of years back, when I'd stepped out of my hotel in Lucknow at night, taken an auto rickshaw to meet Mumbai friends who were staying in another part of town, chatted with the rickshaw guy all along - about his life and pastimes (the usual) - made it to my venue, gone up the lift, and genuinely felt that I'd been in Mumbai all this while! I was totally sober.

How's that possible? Being in Lucknow, the rickshaw guy obviously spoke in a rustic UP accent, or what's known as the 'Bhaiyya' twang across Mumbai, which only gets thicker as thousands converge from various parts of the northern state, to practically run all three-wheelers, black-and-yellow cabs in the metropolis. Lucknow, by night, or through its lanes, like every small town in India, resembles the non-highways of Mumbai - potholes in the middle, chai 'tapris' in the corner, garbage collected in open dumps right beside, and small shops named after owners/kids (Vijay, Ajay, Alka, Vandana) with metal shutters on either side.

At the eye-level, what is most of suburban Mumbai (and a lot of Delhi as well), but a series of small towns, and a bunch of villages recreated/degraded as slums anyway. It's always been so. Little over a decade ago, though, I had a cousin over from Raipur in Mumbai, gawking at the malls and multiplexes we'd frequent. It used to be the same, a decade earlier from then, with Indians who went even as far as Dubai - seemingly gob-smacked, observing the gifts of Mammon and the glitziness of it all.

Surely the new high-rises - apartment blocks, five-star hotels, major malls - superficially set metropolitan cities apart from the rest of India. The gap appeared ever widening. Those in big cities adopted a tone towards small towns quite similar in condescension to how the West had traditionally perceived India itself. Their interest in Tier-II towns (or even state capitals) almost bordered on the exotica - Lucknow's kababs, Agra's petha, Nagpur's oranges...

Over just the past few years, one notices - whether in Bhopal, Indore, Ranchi, Dehradun, Raipur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, etc - the mall, you know from Mumbai, is the same, if not even bigger, almost everywhere. So are the branded goods within. What does that say about the upper-crust shopping inside? They look absolutely the same. The dressing sense makes it impossible to tell a region from its town. There is no more the uniformly 'small town' tailored look either. Bhopalis once had a peculiar accent. The young don't.

They walk in droves into the same restaurant chains, or coffee/ice-cream shops that most of Delhi does. The weekend playlist at the discotheque in Kanpur roughly matches the one in Kolkata. Only the drinks are perhaps cheaper; and the gender ratio is fairer, by the way. The young girl I notice in the little red dress, having her friends shoot an Instagram video of her dancing on my hotel floor in Indore, could well be in Bangalore.

You instantly see the media consumption - on TV, radio, or Internet - aspirations, mostly consumerist; and pop culture heroes, emerging from both, merge. As does the content in the coloured, local newspaper supplements in all these towns. The YouTube video I just watched, starring Ayushmann Khurana and Kriti Sanon, promoting their film Bareilly Ki Barfi, makes much sense to me then.

Titled 'Things people from small towns are tired of hearing,' it has these two actors at a posh corporate office, being told by colleagues: "Lovely presentation, your English is pretty good for a small town girl." "You drink?" "Let's go to a mall, you've been to one?" "You're from Bareilly, you know Rameshkumar Kedia?" Ayushmann orders a "Venti Machhiato with a shot of espresso and hazelnut syrup." Frankly, I don't know what that is. His colleague wonders aloud if he mugged that up from Google. You know where this video is headed. Exuding a sense of confidence born from having missed out on little, these two characters give it back. Indori comic Zakir Khan, whose popularity possibly exceeds all other YouTubers, and stand-up groups on the Internet, exhibits that swag best.

Which makes me wonder, would this be the first small town Indian generation to vote en masse against moving to a bigger city? Tough to say. Perhaps not the ones I meet. The pipeline through which the codes funnel from is still the great Indian metropolitan opera - cinema, pop music, reality shows, top fashion labels, et al. My friend DJ Shak from Patna is already in Mumbai - for now, anyway. The top RJ in Ranchi holds a similar conversation with me. As does the emcee I met last night in Indore, although she's booked for the whole year in her town, already.

I guess they'd like to be around people like their own, and yet those who are varied still. This is perhaps as true for the Indian migrant who'd prefer to create his desi circle, and still be exposed to more, in London/New York. I'm not sure if this is just as true for the rickshaw guy from Lucknow/Jaunpur in Mumbai. Maybe there's much pleasure in being anonymous - lost in a vast crowd. It's addictive, for sure.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com