The pandemic has driven many to return to their small towns and make new discoveries

The upside of a semi-urban city or small town is, quite ironically, its meagre development

When Sneha, now a postgraduate student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, found herself en route to Tikamgarh, Madhya Pradesh, in March 2020, just days before the junta curfew was announced, she didn’t anticipate staying very long. “Mentally, I was very settled . I had enrolled myself in coaching classes; I was barely in touch with my family,” says Sneha. Soon, life in Tikamgarh became the new normal.

After the lull of the initial few weeks, Sneha recalls how there came a point when the ennui of being in Tikamgarh turned unbearable. “Ye kahan aa gaye hum? (Where have we come to?),” she would ask of herself. Reconnecting with the family over the daily ritual of watching Mahabharata and Ramayana soon became the running theme of the lockdown. As for Tikamgarh itself, the town she had lived in for 17-odd years before moving to Delhi, the changes were minimal.

Then, when the town opened up after the lockdown eased, Sneha travelled to sites that had remained out of her reach as a child, and found herself gushing about her beautiful discoveries. The town’s polity was now more discernible to her, and she noticed a lot of things she hadn’t before this visit. Soon Sneha found herself organising a street play in Tikamgarh to spread awareness about vaccinations, joining up with a group called Hifazat (protection). “I tried to understand the city better. The political awareness I had gathered in Delhi helped me see in my town what had remained invisible to me as a child,” she says.