There have been times when I've been
asked what city I'd like to live in for the rest of my life. What
sort of neighbourhood, what kind of streets, what shape of home?
I've never been able to come up with a
good answer. The answers I do give sound unreliable even to my ears.
Do I really want to be stuck in a big city? Do I really think I'm a
small town girl? Is there anything worse than the sort of city which
is neither metropolitan nor cosmopolitan, nor even eternally
familiar?
It's a tricky question. What does your
corner of heaven look like?
I find it easier to imagine my corner
by eliminating the things it most certainly wouldn't have, if I had
my way. I know that I wouldn't like my share of the sky eaten up by
concrete. I know that I would not want plastic bottles and food
wrappers in the vicinity, and if they were thrown, then – since
we're talking of heaven where anything is possible – I'd like some
sort of technology to be put in place that the thrown bottle or
wrapper would fly right back to the hand of the thrower and attach
itself there. The more one tried to throw a piece of rubbish into
public property, or someone else's property, the more adhesive the
rubbish would become.
In my corner of heaven, the air would
not be corrosive. And the groundwater would not be poisoned or
cancerous. Industries would not be set up in the vicinity, and if
they were, then the owners of those industries would be required to
put down roots in that same corner, so they might breathe that air
and drink that water and bathe with it too.
All surfaces in this corner would not
be covered over with concrete. If there were bricks or tiles, then
gaps would be left for the rainwater to seep back into the ground.
The streets would not flood each time it rained, and there would
always be the assurance of water lying deep and clean a few metres
below the surface of the earth.
I also imagine that a patch of heaven
would be the sort of place where you don't have to clean out the
gutters before every monsoon. And if you did have to clean and
desilt, that it could all be done in a coordinated, collective
manner. That one team didn't have to pull out massive globs of silt
mixed with sewage, which they then left out in piles on the sidewalk,
at regular intervals. That those piles would not have to wait for
days until some more paperwork got pushed around and someone else was
hired for this leg of cleaning.
An ideal city, a dream city, would not
only be clean above all things, it would also be clean through small
and big acts of collective responsibility. People who cleaned would
have a chance to live in the little patch they cleaned themselves, so
that they too had a stake in it. And people – a able-bodied adults,
that is – who never cleaned private or public spaces would have the
least right to live in the cleanest parts of town. In such a city,
there might be embedded the principles of heaven.
First published here: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-mumbai/finding-a-corner-of-heaven/article24051903.ece
1 comment:
I wish. How simple these wishes are. And yet.
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