What Chandrapur Taught Me That Nagpur Couldn't

I have lived in both a small city and a larger one, and each taught me things the other could not. Chandrapur — my home, a modest city in eastern Maharashtra — gave me lessons that Nagpur, larger and busier, could never have taught. This is not a claim that small places are superior to big ones; that would be its own kind of foolishness. It is a claim that small places carry a distinct wisdom, easily overlooked by those who assume that bigger is always better, and I want to honour what mine gave me.

The wisdom of being known

In a small city, you are known. The man at the shop knows your family. The neighbours know your history. You cannot be anonymous even if you wish to be. When I was young this felt suffocating — the constant visibility, the impossibility of escaping into a crowd. Only later did I understand what it was teaching me: that we are embedded in a web of relationships, accountable to people who will remember how we treated them, part of a community that holds us whether we like it or not.

The larger city offered anonymity, and anonymity is genuinely freeing — you can reinvent yourself, escape your history, be no one in particular. But anonymity also loosens the bonds that make us behave well and belong somewhere. Chandrapur taught me the weight and worth of being known, of living among people to whom I am not a stranger. That rootedness is a kind of wealth the anonymous city cannot provide.

The wisdom of slowness

Small cities move slower, and their slowness is instructive. Life in Chandrapur is not organised around the frantic urgency that governs bigger places. There is time — for conversation, for sitting, for the unhurried texture of ordinary days. When I spent time in busier cities, I felt the tempo quicken, the sense that everyone was rushing toward something, the subtle pressure to always be in a hurry.

The big city taught me to move fast. The small city taught me that not everything worth doing can be done quickly, and that a slower life is not a lesser one.

I am grateful for both lessons, but I suspect the small city's is the rarer and more endangered one. The whole world is speeding up, and the wisdom of slowness — of a life that is not perpetually racing — grows scarcer by the year. Chandrapur keeps me in touch with a pace that most of modern life has abandoned, and my writing, especially, could not survive without it.

The wisdom of enough

There is a certain contentment available in a small place that the ambitious energy of a large city can erode. In Chandrapur, life is not one long comparison against ever-richer neighbours and ever-grander possibilities. There is a sense of enough — of a good life being available at a human scale, without the endless upward straining that larger, wealthier places seem to demand of everyone in them.

The bigger city, for all its opportunity, carries a restless discontent, a constant sense that you should be doing more, having more, becoming more. The small city offered a counterweight: the possibility of being satisfied, of a life that is enough as it is. In a culture that profits from our dissatisfaction, the small place's quiet contentment is a form of wisdom worth protecting.

What I did not learn there

I want to be fair, because romanticising the small place is as foolish as dismissing it. There are things Chandrapur could not teach me, things I needed the larger world for — exposure to difference, to ideas outside the local, to a scale of ambition and possibility that a small city does not contain. I am not arguing that anyone should stay small and never venture out. I am arguing that the small place has its own curriculum, and that those who only ever know big cities have missed it.

The ideal, perhaps, is to know both — to carry the small city's rootedness, slowness, and contentment into engagement with the wider world's opportunity and difference. That is what I try to do: to build for a global market while staying grounded in the wisdom of my modest home. Neither alone would have been enough.

Carrying it forward

Chandrapur is not just where I am from. It is a teacher whose lessons I carry everywhere — into my writing, my building, my sense of how to live. The wisdom of being known, of slowness, of enough: these came from a place the world would call unimportant, and they have shaped me more than anything the important places offered.

If you come from somewhere small and have been taught to see it as a limitation to escape, consider that it may have given you a curriculum the big cities cannot. Small places carry their own wisdom, and it is worth learning before you leave, and worth keeping after. I write more about place, pace, and building from the margins in my other essays.