Circumstantial City

A vast majority of us do not live on Earth anymore. Not in any real sense of the word.

We live in Urth – the Earth we made, the Urban Earth. This is the truth. We live in cities and we shall live in cities evermore. And those of us who do not live in cities today, will probably live in cities tomorrow.

Cities do not resemble Earth. I don’t mean that badly. It is just the truth. Earth is made of soil and water, and overgrown with vegetation of all kinds, and infested with insects of all kinds, and over-run with animals with strange shapes and colors. Earth is full of things that are trying to kill each other, and from murder they bloom and grow. Earth is full of reproduction. Really full of reproduction.

Cities are nothing like that. except for the reproduction.

Cities are our dreams – and the most ideal cities are the dreams of the idealists among us. There are clean cities – where every inch of soil has been covered in pavement or grass so neatly trimmed and carefully chosen that it resembles a carpet. There are beautiful cities, filled with beautiful buildings, symmetrical streets, unnaturally uniform colors – and resemble a jungle as much a Ferrari car resembles a human. There are grand cities, which boast of the difficult things humans can do – how big we can make things, how tall, how wide. There are futuristic cities which drop all the illusions of being Earth, and are covered in neon.

Then there is Mumbai. It is not an ideal city. It would be difficult to describe a person who could’ve dreamt it, because quite clearly it wasn’t dreamt up.

It just happened, because you know, things do.

Delhi was dreamt up, and then dreamt up again, and dreamt up around the edges. So was Bangalore. Kolkata was dreamt of and then abandoned. Tokyo and London and New York were dreamt up. Perhaps they were even drawn.

But Mumbai was purely born of circumstance. Out of desperation and mistakes, and things and stuff, and let’s try and why not. And perhaps that is why, in a way, Mumbai resembles Earth more than any other truly large, important, significant city in the world.

Scootie Girls

A lot of the Indian paradox, especially in the social sphere is simply explained if we remember a fundamental fact – till even 50 years back, we were a primarily feudal society. The average life expectancy was less than 40 yrs, urbanization was less than 20%. Today the life expectancy is close to 70, urbanization is close to 40% (my guess is it’s actually closer to 50% on including census towns).

But just two generations back, when our grandmothers were shy beauties and our grandfathers were angry young men, we were a feudal society. Today we are a not-really-feudal society.

Now, for some reason, feudal societies across the world seemed to bring out a very virulent sense of patriarchy – far more than tribal/hunter-gatherer societies for example. Being a not-really-feudal society, we are a pretty-much-patriarchy.

This is well known. If you see a street in any of our cities you will mostly see men. There will be something like 3 women, and 50 men in that street. It’s almost eerie. In comparison, if you see a street in Singapore or Japan it’ll mostly be full of women, and the street itself will be full of women’s shops. That is perhaps a very basic, but I feel robust indicator of the level of patriarchy in a society, since job statistics are more skewed by parenting choices.

Then of course we have crime statistics. Women are not safe in our cities, and in our families. There are so many rapes daily. There are fathers and brothers hacking girls in their family to pieces because she married/loved the wrong boy. This is really what shames the urban-middle class. It directly affects their sense of what their country is. Each disgusting, shameful, terrible criminal incident, makes them despair at the barbarism of our patriarchy. But there is a caveat here, and it is a large caveat: news cannot report the everyday. The news anchor cannot start her story saying, of the 30,000 fathers in India who got to know about their daughter’s love interest today, 4 of them undertook a heinous crime based on feudal morals. She cannot say, 70 million women went to work today, went out for dinner, went to meet friends, and there were 10 horrible rapes across the country.

So how do we get a sense of where we are then? How do we know is we have reached the stage of a pretty-much-patriarchy, instead of a barbaric feudal patriarchy? How do we know if we are moving forward?

It’s a difficult question, and my personal answer is – scooties. Girls on scooties. I have seen young women whizzing around on scooties in Meerut, Porbandar, Udaipur, Mangalore, Goa, and random parts of Kerala. It’s happening everywhere – whether the North or the South, whether it’s in cosmopolitan Bangalore or small cities in Uttar Pradesh. It’s happening because girls need to study, they need to go to coaching classes, they need to sometimes get the groceries, they need to meet friends and there is no public transport. It’s happening due to necessity, but it’s happening – and it means that our society is responding to our changing needs. Our young women are getting that space to be individuals pursuing their goals. Their families are buying them scooties to do so, even in places without a single multiplex or shopping mall.

There’s no going back from that. Once there are girls on scooties, once that idea of a young woman taking individual action has happened, things can only move forward. That’s my belief.

Source: Google images (http://images.travelpod.com/tripwow/photos/ta-00a9-e964-2c08/scooty-girls-patna-india+1152_12864436785-tpfil02aw-3458.jpg)

I don't know who these ladies are, but they're cool and I'm happy