Look around yourself – don’t you observe a strange sense of urgency & aggression in the way people behave and go about doing their usual things. This is especially true for big metropolitan cities - be it pushing to make way in a queue to fill petrol or honking aggressively to psyche out the driver ahead of you at the traffic signal or grabbing service staff’s attention at a snack counter. All of us are really-really pushy.
We forget to give the elderly their due – ‘so what if he is unable to pull his car out of the parking lot as efficiently as perhaps you can.’
We are impatient with women – ‘why the heck she is taking those 8 seconds extra to draw cash from the ATM machine.’
We just do not think about others. Lehaaz and decency is an endangered if not extinct trait.
As social animals we are turning out to be more like animals than being social. Our restlessness could be a result of the governing variables for the existence of any species viz. Time & Space.
Shrinking public spaces or should we say swelling public in the same age old space
Paucity of time – thanks to our super loaded time schedules, which are in turn a result of having to travel large distances for seemingly small tasks. (It takes 15 minutes to get milk & vegetables from a neighbourhood market in Aligarh (UP) in Delhi it takes 15 minutes to just reach the market!)
At the end of it is Darwin in action - survival before social bonding.
Despite our perceptions about the improving living standards viz. AC, Hi-Fi Audio, Microwave, Washing Machine, Vacuum Cleaner, Electric Chimney etc., the living conditions that exist ‘between’ our office & residential complex are constantly deteriorating. It is in this zone that we behave like the urban animals and we do not even realize it.
While there is a economic imperative for a sound urban (and rural) infrastructure there also exists a big, if not bigger, social imperative to have a sound infrastructure to support evolving India’s emergent social landscape.
It is a little paradoxical that the next 8-lane expressway and a bigger parking space and a beautiful landscaped garden and a larger railway platform, and employment opportunities in hinterland (and some family planning!) have an equally big social impact as they have an economic impact.
We forget to give the elderly their due – ‘so what if he is unable to pull his car out of the parking lot as efficiently as perhaps you can.’
We are impatient with women – ‘why the heck she is taking those 8 seconds extra to draw cash from the ATM machine.’
We just do not think about others. Lehaaz and decency is an endangered if not extinct trait.
As social animals we are turning out to be more like animals than being social. Our restlessness could be a result of the governing variables for the existence of any species viz. Time & Space.
Shrinking public spaces or should we say swelling public in the same age old space
Paucity of time – thanks to our super loaded time schedules, which are in turn a result of having to travel large distances for seemingly small tasks. (It takes 15 minutes to get milk & vegetables from a neighbourhood market in Aligarh (UP) in Delhi it takes 15 minutes to just reach the market!)
At the end of it is Darwin in action - survival before social bonding.
Despite our perceptions about the improving living standards viz. AC, Hi-Fi Audio, Microwave, Washing Machine, Vacuum Cleaner, Electric Chimney etc., the living conditions that exist ‘between’ our office & residential complex are constantly deteriorating. It is in this zone that we behave like the urban animals and we do not even realize it.
While there is a economic imperative for a sound urban (and rural) infrastructure there also exists a big, if not bigger, social imperative to have a sound infrastructure to support evolving India’s emergent social landscape.
It is a little paradoxical that the next 8-lane expressway and a bigger parking space and a beautiful landscaped garden and a larger railway platform, and employment opportunities in hinterland (and some family planning!) have an equally big social impact as they have an economic impact.
Lehaaz after all is linked with landscapes!
1 comment:
We have lost our congeniality somewhere down the line. The indifference we show towards our fellow citizens is, I believe one of the major causes for the failure of civil society organizations taking off in our towns and cities.
I loved the post, keep blogging!
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