Many Cities, One Soul to Sell

When I was in junior school, many, many years ago, I came across a little ditty about how man can never decide how he wants his porridge – hot or cold:

“…when it’s hot, he wants it cold,

When it’s cold, he wants it hot,

Always wanting what is not.”

And so it ended. Some things just stay frozen in our memories, for no reason except they had rhymed so well, or had looked so colorful, or had smelled so sweet. Twenty years hence, we look back and see that smell belonged to a cheap bottle of scent that unabashedly called itself ‘Poison,’ while knowing nothing else about its high society, uber-sophisticated namesake except the name. Or that the brilliant colors that enthralled us on endless nights came from a fifty-rupee shim-sham lighting contraption where a plastic screen painted over with dolphins and underwater creatures rotated around a 40W bulb. Or, that the melodious four-liner that remains so adamantly stuck to some corner of our consciousness is a paltry ditty we committed to memory in Class V.

And this memory creeps up on me time and again, when I realize that for all our advancement – material or spiritual – we remain, largely, a people characterized by indecisiveness. Understood that we must forever strive to make the world a better place, but all this strife has more often than not resulted in a not-so-very exalted hankering for more and better and cheaper, which has left us robbed of peace and running for enrollment in all sorts of pseudo-art-of-living classes. And yet we would not bat an eye before exchanging our decadent cities and lived-in houses for promises of paradise peddled on every other page, poster, and pavement.

What is the value of a shared human past, then, in a world that is ever hungry for tomorrow and ever looking to conquer the horizon? Is it really easy to erase our memories of the yesteryears and replace them with colorful catalogue cut-outs of the future? Is it really profitable to sell our soul to the devil, to lock up and move out of the ageing cities into the ease and luxury of the best-in-class lifestyles in futuristic fantasylands?

Everything, today, is possible at a price. Change is business, and a roaring one. If you don’t like being a man, Google gives you 4,540,000 results for ‘sex change operation.’ If you don’t like your bedroom, you can call in experts who’ll give you a bathroom there overnight, and throw in a fully furnished kitchen in your erstwhile bath, and a bedroom in your foyer as well. The old cities of today are getting eroded by new lifestyles, leaving holes where the fabric falls away, and those bits and pieces that resist change find themselves neglected, in time demolished, or declared heritage sites where urchins scratch their love poems on filthy walls. People are moving out, heaving sighs of relief in escaping the squalid and devious maze that the city has become, inimical to life in the fast lane. Everywhere, we want more value for money and so we throng towards the ‘1+1 free,’ the luxury apartment which comes with its attached clubhouse, gym, and swimming pool, the space-saving modular kitchens, the mirrors that make your halls seem larger than they are…And we give in unresistingly to the allures of the ultra-modern amenities, hardly pausing to spare a thought that the manicured lawns and paved jogging tracks count for only about one-fiftieth of the space that we had enjoyed in the public parks of the old cities. We are only too quick to forget the verdant, tree-lined avenues leading to our old schools, only too quick to replace the large, sunny, cemented bathrooms with their scurrying spiders, with the new bath-cum-toilet range, complete with bathtub, closed shower areas with frosted glass paneling, vitreous tile-work, and Kohler fittings. All in half the space of your old, musty bathroom, mind you! At only a trifle cost! And a 10% discount for early birds!

To be fair to ourselves, our lust for luxury does have its justification. After all, the old cities are ripping at the seams. Any mention of them only brings to mind images of decrepit crumbling buildings, filth, disease, beggars, queues, sweat, crowds, glaring lights, garbage, honks, hooligans, stray dogs, mosquitoes, hovels, potholes, and the numbing, unceasing, unrepentant stupor of daily life. Where are there any tree-lined avenues, one may ask. The quaintness that was once the pride has now withdrawn behind the wings, or has donned the bawdy trappings of pseudo-futurism to desperately entice a fast-diminishing clientele. We’ve easily moved or transformed our cultural markers to accommodate the flashy, the fancy, and the fast. No need to bind tradition to the past, but free it of its contextual limitations, take only the essence and remodel it to fit new avatars, new mannequins.

But we have to be entirely deluded if we assume that the new ‘cities’ of the future are entirely free from the maladies that brutalize human existence everywhere else. The ultra-luxurious apartment complexes give rise to such demands for electricity as cannot be fulfilled by our existing natural resources – money can probably buy a lot, but only where there’s something to buy. Deeper basements call for more desperate measures to tackle flooding during monsoons. More vehicles need more space vacated for their parking, and release that much more pollutants in the air. Instead of less pollution, these pockets of fancy living actually have given rise to meteoric pollution levels that impact human health. And diseases have new names. I live in a city that was touted to be the city of the millennium. And when fatalistic newspapers give a daily body count of casualties of dengue, chikunguniya, swine flu, and named and nameless other ailments, I wonder how successful have the engineers of our future been in crystallizing these dream settlements where life hangs by a hair.

Platinum or enamel, dentures are dentures. And no matter how natural the look, hair rebonding is still something you get done to cover up your baldness. Can there be a future without a past? Can there be a futuristic city that has divorced the past? A city is not merely a conglomerate of buildings and pipes. The phrase ‘living and breathing city’ is not just a pretty metaphor to slake poetic thirst. The city ‘lives’ in the lives of its citizens. A city wakes, it runs, it celebrates, it grieves, and it ages. It ‘breathes’ in that we can sense the sigh of collective relief after a long day’s haul, or a long night’s power failure. And just as the city lives and breathes, many a time, it dies.

For any conglomeration of buildings to become a colony, there has to exist a symbiotic force that unites block to block, flat to flat. There has to be a uniqueness that coexists with the imposed similarity of condominium-lifestyles. There has to be chaos for us to understand and appreciate order. There have to be rules and more importantly, the occasional breaking of the rules to bring us back to a realization of our essential humanity – that we are not merely battery-run androids of some Brave New World. Just as we may live in a catalogue cut-out and call it home, we may live in a new-age astropolis and call it a city, but until the time it ‘lives’ and ‘breathes’ in its people, it ceases to be more than just a name among thousands and thousands of these concrete heavens that are churned out daily and sold to bedazzled millions.

Artifice has its limitations, one of which is that it does not accommodate human nature. And having sold our stocks and borrowed those loans to get the house of our dreams – our metaphorical hot bowl of porridge – we start doubting if liked it better the other way. To quote a line from a recent newspaper article favoring the shift from a rooted but chaotic past to a rootless yet controlled future,

“…If mineral-pani gol-guppa in sterile townships never tastes the same as the real thing on dirty streets, introducing some e-coli should be no problem at all. And even if you start craving for the old wholesale urban chaos, you can rest assured that you won’t have to wait for long. We’ll mess them…”

If it is e-coli flavored gol-guppa that we want, then why pretend we’re too good for our finger-licking indulgences and start swearing by forks and spoons to the extent of appearing a thorough fake? And if it is e-coli we will painstakingly introduce in sterile cups of mineral-pani gol-guppas, or mess up our neon-lit organized markets for a more ‘natural’ feel, then why relinquish all that is actually natural, just so that we can appear to be the super-privileged denizens of some ultramodern, salubrious, eco-friendly swank millennium township? While we do not spare our purse in splurging on billboard luxuries, why are we so quick to ‘throw in the towel’ when it comes to salvaging our old avenues, singara-shops, irani cafes and intra-city locals? What is so unsalvageable about them, for after all, we are as much responsible for their sorry plights as any other person?

When, as citizens, we sneer at our once-prided heritage, and neglect our collective responsibility towards our city, the city – no matter how manicured, how immaculate, how closely approximating heaven – will eventually fall to utter ruin, and devolve into images of fragmentation, decrepitude, neglect, and despair. Packing up and moving out is easy, like ancient nomadic cultures after they exhausted the resources of the land they temporarily camped in. Staying and fighting is hard. And when it’s a city we’re talking about, a city where the cement and mortar of the past hold our buildings together, where even potholes contain memories… surely it is a crime against conscience to quit trying. And finally, there’s no better testimony to the success of human enterprise than when we defend our homestead from internal as much as external onslaughts, enlarge its boundaries, rebuild its damages, replenish its reserves, repopulate its desolations, and most importantly, repose faith in its ability to survive through the ages. That is when it ceases to be a mere settlement and grows to become something that lives and breathes.


That is when it becomes a city.