Nagpur rising

For the people who do not know me but read my blog, I was born in Nagpur and lived there for the first 17 years of my life. So, my love for Nagpur is undying. Many acquaintances of mine still remember my famous quote when I was 5-8 -"I will bring Olympics to Nagpur". At late twenties, I have given up hopes on that as well as the Nobel Peace prize, but I still have hopes for a Padmashri (well that doesn't need hope as much as money these days)

Nagpur is a very strange city. In any kind of stats across India, Nagpur comes in top 10 (In population etc). However, thanks to Nagpur's excellent infrastructure, at any traffic light, even at peak hours you won't see more than 30 vehicles out of which 28 are two wheelers. Nagpur is never in regular news. You would probably even hear more about Allahabad than Nagpur though Nagpur features in all those top 10 lists and Allahabad not even in top 20. Nagpur is 9th or 10th in those lists followed by Jaipur, but just see the % of headlines that Jaipur has as compared to Nagpur. For years Nagpur people have talked about state of art industrial area called Buti Bori which till date hasn't come up with anything more than Vicco Vajradanti and the MIHAN project which is still going on.

To summarize the two paragraphs above, I love Nagpur but Nagpur is never in news. We crave for any kind of Nagpur news. I remember during my undergrad, when Dravid got married to a Nagpuri girl, we Nagpuris prided ourselves for a long time. Those pictures of Vijeeta getting up into Rajdhani Bangalore with her shades on is fresh in my memory.

Anyways, Nagpur is back again in news. The importance of these, I solely reserve for your discretion.

* Cricket Nagpur: VCA is now a day night stadium. It hold very important records for for team India including Sachin and the retirement venue of Saurav Ganguly.

* The director of the top grossing Hindi movie of all times,Raju Hirani 3 Idiots, guess were he hails from? --- Nagpur

* The national president of the opposition party, Nitin Gadkari is from Nagpur.

Over the past 2 months, whenever these news came, I always swelled with pride. Jai Bharat, Jai Nagpur, Kha Santra.