Life is beautiful
Living in Bangalore for a very long time of my life, especially in a BDA approved layout, I have come across a litany of woes. I am sure this will evoke that “nothing new” type of feeling in you because you would have witnessed similar things. In spite of that I will go ahead and write this down. Most of this will resonate well for other Indian Metros or Cities as well.
Broken pavements. There is no way pedestrians can have a safe walk around a neighborhood. I have seen the main roads in my area where they spent few crores laying the footpath with vitrified tiles. That was abandoned half way. So it is even worse than the usual broken footpath that you encounter while walking. If you know you will fall, you will be looking out for it and be careful. If you find you are walking on a well paved surface, you will forget to lookahead and may end up twisting your ankle all of a sudden when it ends.
Another thing about the foot path is the encroachment by hawkers. You keep walking until you encounter a number of vegetable vendors occupying the footpath. Now if you are walking on it, you have to step down the road for a while and again go back.
As you step down the road, especially if you are holding a child, or walking with your family, you have to be very careful about vehicles that are speeding very close to you because the vending carts have taken a good amount of road space. Imagine the plight of old people and kids who are not very alert about where they are.
On the other hand, if you are driving a two wheeler or a car, you have to be extra alert about people suddenly stepping onto the road and make adjustments to handle that without colliding with the oncoming traffic.
I told you that this is all nothing new for us, because we all adjust and keep moving. That is the positive fallout from this thing. You learn to adjust. It is like when you see an ant and try to block it with a piece of wood, it will simply move around it. You keep doing it and it will keep adjusting to it. I used to wonder if the ant has any idea of where it is going. Unlike the ant, we know where we are going. We take the least resistant path of adjusting and continuing to go ahead, may be to work or drop your kids to school or whatever.
Inside the house it is the same. There will be dust all around. Clothes and books and things will be lying everywhere, but survival drives us to continue to focus on our work. Only if we work, we get food to the table. And we add a teeny-weeny bit to our GDP. We stand as a nation with proud feelings.
The more you work, the more taxes you pay. The more taxes you pay, the more you feed the broken system similar to raising the amplitude of a signal that results in raising the noise levels as well.
You can endlessly debate on fixing our politics or politicians or the bureaucrats who are the net consumers of our labor. But that is not the problem to be fixed.
The problem to be fixed is You and Me which includes the politicians and the bureaucrats. We spend countless hours on Amazon to understand which brand is high in quality when it comes to buying a table cloth. We spend a lot of our life energy on Twitter or Facebook about how great we were as a civilization 2000 years ago. Well, it is another thing that Indus cities will give a run for your money today in the way their cities looked. And if you are so worried about 2000 years ago, you should be worried about how we look for those who look at you 2000 years from now.
But we are perfectly fine with the quality of the place we live, with broken footpaths, with potholes, with garbage, with mindless digging of newly laid roads for fiber optic cables, with power cuts, with water supply issues, with lack of trees, with the noise levels of traffic and construction, with encroachments all around.
Quality of living is not just about inside your home and being able to cross everything outside in a vehicle. When you keep things beautiful inside or outside, life is beautiful. But you have to work hard for it.
