Cocooned control freaks!

When was it last that your housing complex allowed entry to the kabadi wala (remember the signature sounds they made as they announced their arrival!)? Or the steel ke bartan wala that your mother used to haggle with while exchanging old clothes for stainless steel utensils?
What strings together the jamun wala, a regular to our Railway Colony and the sone-pappdi seller outside the rusted school gate, during lunch hour?

What connects the shakarkandi wala, at the bus stop under the overcast December sky in Delhi and the chholey kulche wala of Sarojini Nagar market?


Images like these represent a certain environment, an urban context that many of us have grown up with. Many of these images are so very Indian that you may not even find them in the Lonely Planet!

I do not know if nostalgia is making me say so, but I certainly feel that as urban sprawls become more organized; as lonely vertical dwelling units take over the horizontal social ground; as Hamilton Courts and Whispering Meadows replace the High Court Colony or the Shiv Mandir Market, these images of street and neighbourhood vendors would fade away from our collective memory.
Big cities are riding high on the wave of residential & commercial expansion. The plaza has all but replaced the paan wallah & the park has made way for the parking.


The rise of organized urban landscapes is giving a new meaning to living, and loving.
We live in residential complexes that boast of the state of the art security systems, 24 hr power back-up, Olympic sized swimming pool, fully equipped gymnasium, lush community centers, parks and even temples!
These residential complexes have names that could bring Manhattan condos to shame - Galleria, Hamilton Court, Malibu Town, Acropolis, Riviera and many more.
These are the new townships within the city. Townships that are Islands of infrastructural brilliance in the middle of an ocean of crumbling public administration - bad roads, poor street-lighting, lack of hygiene!


The growing urban infrastructures buffer us from the external inconsistencies. So much so that the price of a housing structure is a function of its ability to turn-off the larger city that lies outside its huge security gates.
We turn-off the city all the time. For example with a driver, an air-conditioned car cabin, power windows and a good stereo system, we are turning off the city.

This holds true for or offices too. They are increasingly disjoint from the city outside. Be it climatically, language wise or even basis things that we use while in the office. There are people working on cutting edge car design projects at work and commuting in the rickety trains and buses that cannot even be classified as outdated. In many ways our work zone is becoming independent of the conditions on the street- the common area.

Consciously and subconsciously we are turning off the common area and tuning in to a different, and more comfortable personal zone.
As people live, work and commute in ‘temperature-controlled cocoons’ that are dust free & sound proof they are turning into cocooned control freaks!

These cocoons create a feeling of order while simultaneously feeding on and stoking our instincts to control our living conditions. Our desire to regulate our surroundings - be it temperature, dust, number of people, noise, hygiene or anything else possible.

As the city landscape evolves, it is slowly morphing into a bipolar world. This world has two broad groups – those living in the area outside the temperature controlled cocoons and those living inside it.

The first group is growing up and thriving in the city that we have always known. A city with its bunch of street sellers, neighbourhood ‘uncle’s’ shop; meeting friends without appointment and spending time together.

The second group is living in vertical organized townships typified by power dressing, power lunches & power windows! They live in townships and towers that are guarded by the best private security guards and monitored by state of the art CCTVs. These are townships where aththi devo bhava has been replaced by a board announcing ‘No Parking for Visitors’!

This notwithstanding many of us would agree that a large part of our ingenious creativity stems from the ‘less structured’ environment that we as Indians grow up in. Be it the uncertainty of guests appearing at the front door or the unexpected power failure; be it our trek to the school, which happened in a cycle rickshaw or perhaps on foot; or having street food and drinking water from running taps; plucking flowers and even stealing fruits from vendors!
Many of these are still a norm for the people in the first group that we identified earlier. They continue to live in an environment that is not patterned; an environment soaked in multiplicity of forms, shapes, colours, sounds etc.

These kids still see street vendors making different sounds as they came in selling different things from ber and falsey (fruits), fullle (popcors), bhutte (corn) to ganderi (pieces of cane sugar) & gubbare (balloons), list is endless.

It might not be that obvious, but together all these street vendors and many of the street inconsistencies of the urban landscape have taught us a lot. Because ‘street’ is the essential ingredient that goes into street smartness!

But temperature controlled cocoons block out most, if not the whole set of these experiences. We run the risk of forgetting them all, some kids perhaps would never even get to see them. I wonder this knowledge and these experiences can be passed on to the next generation.

As we scale the heights of urbanization, we run the risk of losing the soul of our cities. I hope that noise of the Caterpillar Drilling Machines does not out-shout the warmth of a beating heart - something that our culture derives her identity from.