banaras and varanasi!!

i am born and brought up in the holy land of shiva,varanasi.i have seen the city very closely since i was small hence i have a very good idea about this city in most of the aspects and with my growing up i have seen the city growing too albeit in a slow manner.i left this city 6yrs back and went to pune for my engg.

the city which i left then was growing at snail's pace,i have hardly seen it changing in over the years,and no wonder it was still the same when i left it.the roads are better called narrow lanes with cows and buffaloes lazying in the middle of it as if it is their thier own property,you can find numerous rickshaw pulleys,people sitting in their shops displaying their round bellies proudly with mouth filled with banarasi paan and because of lack of dustbins (or abundance of it),they are spitting it over the place,the traffic is so much that sometimes it seems that its going to stampede.
one more thing i'd like to emphasize is that due to lack of any source of entertainment,people back then used to frequent in all those old single screen theatres during weekends or they would visit their relatives and their idea of having dinner outside would be restricted to those few selected places which is so common that nearly everybody bumps into each other.

what i mean to say is that benaras(as its rightly called) is more or less a very typical small town of uttar pradesh displaying proudly all kinds of its backwardness ranging from people's dressing sense , their manners,their attitude and their lifestyle.

being born in this city these things should pose no difference to my perception of this city ideally but the reason i am writing this is because now when i have come back home after 6yrs and when i go out in the city ,i see the city has changed by leaps and bounds.the change is phenomenal in the parameters i just described above.
their are so many malls opened up that people can choose according to the locality they live in,their are so many eateries and stores for shopping,i mean when i juxtapose benaras 6yrs ago and varanasi now,it has really changed and it is very much visible.

to just give you an idea about the change in people's thinking,back then people were just never bothered about their food habits and they were pretty complacent with their life.it was one evening when i went to a grocery story to buy some food stuffs that i saw a fat Punjabi lady coming in in mid 30s flashing her expensive mobile phone and telling the shopkeeper "bhaiya ek brawn brad dena".i mean here i am wondering by looking at her,she looks as if she hardly keeps a check on what she eats ,but she is now so much particular about what she wants.it really makes me feel good,the city is coming of age finally.

thanks to globalization and increasing public's spending capacity and to the competion!!