Friday, September 12, 2014

On the extreme

It's not that this city doesn't sleep. Just that she won't sleep with you. Unlike what Aamir Khan's character in Dhobi Ghat labeled her, she's neither a muse nor a whore. She is something else. Someone with a very high level of tolerance for iniquity. She has what it takes to give. Something she has been at since the days Baghdadi Jews figured out that Bombay could be a capitalistic jewel someday. Of course, she's more than that as of today. She has certainly exceeded all plausible expectations, economical or otherwise. The only trouble is way too many people are leeching her without offering much in return. Without going into the environmental specifics, suffice to say that time is basically running out on our grandkids. Not us. Them. Because the sort of waste we are leaving behind, they won't have much to rejoice in this rubble of a city. The public parks are shrinking at an alarming rate. The seawater has a colour even Photoshop can't correct. The air is what makes Pune so damn pleasant. Roads and gutters are in an immoral relationship here. Litter is a way of life. Too much neglect and way too overdependence has brought us to a point where we escape into a mall pretending everything is all right. It's not. For a place that has given so much to so many in such a limited time-frame, she merits a change. A kind of public awareness that might gift her moments to rest instead of rot any further.

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