New York ..New York..

Manhattan, the big apple, home to sky scrapers, immortalized in movies, Carrie Bradshaw’s muse and a city that never sleeps. It has been four years since I first came face to face with the city and I still cannot stop obsessing over it.

My love affair with the city began when I was 12 years old. I was visiting a friend and she had a huge New york city poster at her home. It was the first time I had seen anything that extraordinary, a concrete forest, and a jungle of sky scrapers. The buildings almost felt as if they were live beings with a soul of their own.

Over the years I caught fleeting glimpses of the city in movies and western songs but nothing gripped my attention the way that poster had done. Years later I would find that what I had seen was an aerial shot of the Brooklyn bridge and Manhattan.

My first experience with the city, it left me speechless. I was surrounded by an expanse of tall imposing buildings and I suddenly felt very tiny. It was like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. An evergreen forest with no sunlight except that the forest was made of concrete buildings. I wondered, was it even humanly possible? The tallest building I had seen was 14 storeys high, somewhere in Mumbai. What I saw in the city was beyond comprehension, I strained my neck trying to get a glimpse of the top of the buildings.

And then beyond the buildings were the people. Europeans, Asians, Africans, Jewish, Catholics, Artists, Hawkers, Tourists, Brokers, Models, White, Black, Brown and even Yellow etc etc, people diverse in all respects from each other, but held together by the city. I spent the day walking through the city, in a daze, my eyes trying to register everything around me. Strangely everyone seemed to be moving, there was a constant hustle and not a moment when the city came to a standstill, even for a split second. How could a tiny island like Manhattan hold it all?

It was as if the world had been shrunk into a city and somehow it felt home.