A little put off with the hustle and bustle of big city life, Madam R_ decided to take a break, and head to slightly less turbulent waters. What caused this need for calm is a matter of speculation, but it did exist, none the less, and well, was to be pampered by a visit to Lucknow.
Lucknow isn’t exactly the backwater town it is perceived to be. Some form of social inertia prevents people from realizing that it indeed has a hustle and bustle, which, while not equal to Delhi’s none the less prevents the average citizen from being a sleepy person. Lucknow’s advent into the main stream is made painstakingly obvious every now and again when a miniskirt makes itself seen in public. Rare though the phenomenon might be, it definitely belies the image of Lucknow being an ‘old’ city.
However, it is still known for its etiquette a reputation it will definitely have to leave behind before it can make space for itself in the upper echelons of India’s Metropolises. No one in Delhi or Bombay for that matter has the time to be polite, or help someone across the street. Quite frankly they barely have time to notice that the names of the streets have changed, or indeed in the case of Bombay, that the very city has changed names.
So Madam R_ found two friends who lived in Lucknow, and flipped a coin to choose who she was going to spend the holiday with.
Madam R_ was dutifully shown around the city. Taken to shiny new malls, with the same stores that all malls across the nation had, with the same range of clothes, though truncated towards the more expensive stuff, Lucknowis don’t yet spend that big on labels.
She was of course unimpressed by the bright lights of the city, being used to much brighter lights herself, and in fact looking for escape from their glare, she was mostly disappointed. She made the obligatory visits to monuments of the city and to the obligatory artifacts in obligatory museums and was still unimpressed. She also received the obligatory letches and cat calls in the more seedy parts of the old city; and managed to remain unimpressed. One wonders whether this was because cat calls in the big city are better, or just because it was the smart thing to do. Though Madam R_ definitely gives one the impression of being feminist enough to do something about being a woman.
