Feel like home

 The Diwali special  ambience that makes everybody "feel like home" has clouded yet another centrally important issue. Recently, on October 31 to be precise, was celebrated the "World City Day", indeed a very important event. 

Indeed, after the LPG (liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation) settled in, across the world, the mo(ve)ment of/to/for/by the cities became the dominant paradigm. Throughout the world, the process of urbanisation became the focal point. Cities started floating like giant octopuses, spreading their tentacles in all possible directions. This spread was not merely horizontal; it was vertical, too. Despite 9/11, skyscrapers, competing with each other height wise, are the norm in big cities, surely in the metros.

Are cities good or bad? Sure they are ugly, despite the posh glory, and we do not need any  T.S. Eliot or his Avatar/the reincarnation in Marathi  or the IWE literature to hold a mirror to that reality. Cities, moreover, may give one food to live, but take away life. People live like an automaton in a big City. There is a set mechanical routine to this life far away from 'nature' in all the senses of this term.

More than anything, however, cities make the very feel of life common, that is both ordinary and 'common', lacking any individuality. Precedes and/or follows the MacDonald-isation and Americanisation of life. The eyesore look of the place, its rusty, rotting smell, cities can cause claustrophobia. No wonder, the crime rate is very high in cities.

Sure, cities have their own appeal. Centres of trade and tourism, these melting pots help the common man overcome caste identities, for instance. Very professional in nature, they respect calibre  than class or caste . Along with the city come up satellite towns, shanti towns, ghettoes that remain interlinked and interdependent in interesting ways.

A city state like Singapore, literally re-emerging in unique ways per annum, shows what cities can achieve 'system'atically . Such an example,sure rare, proves the rule. Yet, despite all its problems, city life undoubtedly has a charm of its own.

Cities hence are like the classic proverbial sense of holding a cobra. Hold it, it will bite you; release it, it will run amok. It needs a truly special treatment, be it of drainage, pollution, water management, name it, you would have it. A necessary evil, in brief,‌ cities, and citizens, too, need a unique identity to 'feel like home'!

Pratima@earth has not any other 'fare' thus to share (with apologies to Wordsworth)