CONCRETE DUST

This time it was Bangalore. After I had been to likes of New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune to name a few. Blame it to the meager amount of years I had spent being born, or call it a blessing in disguise; I had been saved the agony of seeing Biejing, New York, Santiago or London as yet. Agony? Can’t really believe I said that. Huge roads; four lanes, the most striking of all. Long way had we traversed since the times of Hercules. Pity the times people had to run hundreds of miles to deliver letters. Wonder if there were any beautiful love letters delivered that way. Would that be romantic or unromantic? Either ways! Personally, I prefer e-mail, sometimes sms too. Sky scrapers; literally brushing away the clouds, reminisces of some Tom and Jerry show I saw sometime in life. I wonder how kids could ever stand those. Rudimentary animation! Audis, Mercedes, Fords you name it, they have it. This metropolitan culture; I just love life. Not just the cars though. At least I don’t have to look at horse-carriages, they still run in old cities of Britain I’m told. Talk about animal rights! These modern day people have rights for everyone except men. When was the last time a sheep complained against vegetarianism?
I was never comfortable in huge cities. Maybe it’s the anonymity and insignificant-ness that is scary. Does that mean I’m chicken hearted? I need a psychiatrist, or maybe a psychologist! Doesn’t matter, I’m not going to pay heed to either! At the cost of remaining chicken? Talking of chicken, people have discovered a new disease, or should it be invented a new disease? Bird flu they call it. Is it new at all? I don’t want to know. Returning back to big cities, not that I flow opposite to development, but our roots still need to be firmly networked into nature and simplicity. Amazing statement. Guess Aristotle’s soul got into me! Or were Wright brothers better environmentalists? I’m told they used to watch birds fly day in and day out. Alas! Birds never flew at night those days. The third generation birds have night flying capabilities too; I heard someone say that on Discovery channel. I don’t think he was referring to airplanes. They don’t still have head lights. My old car is better in that respect.
Oh, I forgot the topic again! But big is good, I guess. Shopping malls, multiplexes, drive-in basements, five star hotels, excellent Chinese restaurants, cool cabs, street lights or maybe flood lights, I don’t know which. What will the world be if all we could eat were eucalyptus leaves, wild fruit and wild flowers. Sorry for sounding like a polar bear; or are they Pandas, hardly matters. I could be a honeybee instead. World renowned eating joints, McDonalds, Baristas.... sorry, I mentioned coffee shops pretty late; though I love coffee much more than that. Wonder what people had before they discovered coffee. Life would be so useless without tea, coffee, pastries, chocolate and soft drinks. I wish I owned a restaurant which sold all that. Thank God I was born in the 20th century. But how could people in olden days be vegetarian? It’s so... backward!
I see show rooms, arcades, big banks, airports, at times more than one in a city too. Railway stations; big enough to give a complex to most old time forts and palaces. Pardon me again, metro services! How could I forget? These days distances are so mammoth despite the world being such a small place; wonder who said that clichéd sentence first; I would hate to travel in anything other than an airplane. Maybe a helicopter also would do, in difficult areas. Thank you Left brothers; of were they Wright brothers? Whichever! Anyways, mobile services and sky rocketing antennas! Oh! My phones, my life lines, I know I start suffocating without them. It’s so impossible to imagine myself without them. How could people work before they were discovered? Invented? Either! This must be factual reason for poor work outputs and low work indices in earlier days.
Neatly laid out market places, luxury buses; air-conditioned too. Electricity lines, high tension wires, sprawling lawns and gardens, with huge roses and marigolds; thanks to modern fertilizers, land movers and imported grasses. What sweet smells and sights! Why would anyone even want to visit a national park or sanctuary? I think they are the same! Or are they not? The animal rights people I mentioned earlier need to be summoned for causing this confusion. Or should the Oxford University be sued for so many similar meaning confusing words? Not my palette of duties. Well coordinated traffic signals, smooth flow of vehicles, over the fly-overs and under the sub-ways. What intense harmony. God himself could take few tips from these! Huge apartments complete with gymnasiums, swimming pools, private roads, private departmental stores, state of the art elevators and escalators. Business class offices, server rooms, imported telephone exchanges, tasteful furniture and tapestries; eye catching working environment. Wonder why people took pains of weaving and knitting by hand. Awfully slow and inefficient way to produce stuff. Every thing is so wonderful these days, made with clockwork mechanical precision. I keep getting so excited seeing all this. Those gymnasiums were absolutely incomparable, complete with complex equipment that could put any mechanical engineer to shame, Jacuzzis, sauna baths, absolute bliss. Making an effort to keep fit is so easy now. I’m sure people before us would have been all obese and weak.
Those business offices were breathtaking. If can’t even dream of comparing it with the kind of offices we have in my profession, to say the least. A good and rich ambience definitely puts you in a mood to work well. But I guess those office chairs were a bit too comfortable. I would hate to get caught sleeping in the office. But I guess their beds are even more comfortable. Though I can’t imagine anything more comfortable than those chairs. But who knows with all those hi—tech mattresses I keep seeing on the television, maybe they have come up with one that’s more relaxing than a mother’s embrace. I think these new mattresses automatically start singing lullabies when you want to go off to sleep.
Glass doors, sliding windows, trimmed hedges, elaborate porticos, emphatic bakeries and fully automatic machinery, it scares me to think that some day, these computers and machines may take over the human race. On top of that, they even came up with a terminator movie with the same theme. Technology can be creepy? No, only my wayward intimidated imagination. Automatic teller machines(I came to know that ATM is an acronym today itself) , gas driven eco- friendly cars and better than real sounds and picture qualities in music systems and televisions, not to forget mentioning plasma televisions and DVDs. Designer clothes, Rohit Bal is it? Irrespective! Internet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, computers, laptops, palmtops and everything in zeros and ones! Picture this as we go along. Stage shows by billboard stars. Sorry, I forgot again, billboards, huge ones and famous stars. Freeways, expressways, toll booths. Police teams in mobile interceptors. All interceptors are mobile, aren’t they? No, I’m sure in old backward times we even had static ones. Not that it affects me in any way, but I do get curious about old things, the same way those outdated people once were curious about new things.
Imported strawberry and chocolate flavoured syrups. They make me also taste like a good cook. Wonder why our moms used to spend hours in the confounded kitchens cooking the whole day. The automatic foods these days take only few seconds to get ready and are fully of artificially induced naturally occurring minerals and vitamins. Talk about health food. Some stale and nutrition-less diet people used have earlier, and even today in small towns and villages. Imagine we have even come up with nutritionists these days. Soon we’ll have automated foods with balanced nutrition which we will be able to drag and drop into our stomachs straight from out laptops. Food mixes, one minute meals. Pretty looking gift shops; Archies and Hallmark collections, beautiful posters and magnetic florists stationed outside. Night clubs, pubs and discotheques. Bowling alleys, snooker tables, fitness centres, water parks and amusement parks by the hundreds. Maybe thousands, I have no idea about the difference. Ever since we started using calculators, I have forgotten how to count. Why do we have to teach our children how to count, why teach them mathematics at all? Scientific calculators and palmtops can do everything that is required! Unnecessary load on the kids, detrimental to their mental and psychological development. No wonder people in olden times were so dumb. It took them so many years to ‘discover’ that ‘zero’ also exists. I knew it when I was just three years old. They teach counting in school. Fortunately! Was I opposing conventional education just now? Anyways, you understood that earlier people were dumber than today’s bright generations.
I haven’t forgotten go-karting and video game parlours. Ice- cream parlours too! Baskin Robbins, Naturals and Nirulas! Thrill, over – whelming happy moods, laughter, celebrations and ecstasy everywhere. Its amazing how much happiness ice-creams can spread. I think I just figured out why children earlier used to remain so unhappy and depressed. Their elders had never thought of ice-creams. I think Black Currant is the best, or is it Strawberry? I’ll have to ask some friends. Oh my God! Friends! We have e-friends, pen friends, school friends, college friends, close friends, boy friends, girl friends, ‘just know each other’ friends. That is how our social lives are so active yet serene. Ultimate companionship. Now that’s the best advantage of metropolitan cities. It has so many people that you invariably end up having so many friends even if you don’t know each other’s names.
We soon became bored of natural parks or sanctuaries, whichever the Oxford University dictionary didn’t scrap; that we also came up with artificial lakes. Some beautiful ones I have seen myself. In magazines and on the television of course. Who has the time to visit places? Sit-outs, cable cars, rotating high back leather upholstery office chairs, exotic cigarettes and champagnes. Whiskies, scotch and vodkas too. Terrace lounges, digital cameras, hi speed printing presses. These things may seem a little unrelated but trust me they are very closely linked. Neither of these were available couple of decades back! OK, clear those wrinkles on your forehead; half a century back! Industries, innumerable and ‘unaccomodatably’ expansive and expensive! Inflation has had its toll too. But the rupee is getting stronger I am told. And the dollar is getting weaker. Great! Half of the nation’s earnings are in dollars. Guess we must rush to foreign exchange counters. But I really wonder how people exchanged currency a thousand years back. Maybe people never traveled abroad. The world was a bigger place then, I think. Booming stock markets, a currency gaining strength by the smallest fraction of time. Turnovers in uncountable proportions, development, automation, management of all aspects that exist or avenues that shall ever exist or ones that ever existed. Call centres, hospitality industry, mutual funds, foreign investments, mass communications.
Then ones' imagination runs amok and you can practically see the next millennium, robotics, nuclear energy, battery run cars, unmanned aircraft, blinding speeds, interconvertible energies and matter, scientific and technological break-throughs that we may not even contemplate today, colonizing the cosmos, reining the seas, the winds and the stars. ‘Nanomillimicro’ technology, artificial intelligence, smart wars with smart weapons, unified appliances... the list goes on and on and on......
Shall we ever stop? Where are we running to? Is life actually a celebration and are we invited? Have we become modern before we have become civilized? Are we becoming intelligent and unwise at the same time? Dust of power and materialism has settled on love, sympathy, sacrifice, courage, faith and happiness. I need to breathe! But only dust enters my nostrils. Concrete dust! PHOOH... i need to hit one of those comfy mattresses that sing lullabies... good bye mom! hello mattress.