Past of the Metro Cities

Have you seen your metro city by night?

The over-crowded suburbs. Luminous, wide roads. Flashes of lights of speeding vehicles. Neon-glowing complexes. Giant super-malls. Glossified multiplexes.

Awestruck by exuberance of the urbanization, you may tend to forget that Rome was not built in a day!

At least I would not forget.

The period of late '‘50s.

It was nearly a decade that India had been enjoying the fruits of independence.

Freedom brought about a transformation.

Radical changes in the form and the content of life.

Our family, too, rode a wave of transformation.

We shifted our residence.

From a busy, congested city area to a developing locality. On the outskirts of the city. What was termed as a "“would-be suburb"”. (True, today it has grown into a posh suburb!)

I stretch my memory back to childhood days.

The picture begins to emerge: Hardly three or four colonies in the radius of a kilometre. Fairly far apart. A small grocer's shop. Not far away, a little-used railway track. All that would make up a sparsely populated locality.

Our colony was a cluster of bungalows. Surrounded by vast land. Almost barren fields. A few small hillocks. Thorny bushes. Dusty walkways. Negotiate them patiently and you reach another colony.

No asphalt roads. Not a single road light! At night, the dusty roads would plunge into darkness. The cries of fox would add to horror of haunted roads!

Relatives used to laugh that we had settled amidst forests!

The initial spell of our stay was, indeed, nightmarish.

Civic amenities were almost alien to the locality. Erratic power supply. No water supply(a couple of months'’ wait for tap water supply). No street lights. It would be foolish to talk about public transport!

Dust, dust and dust everywhere.

With the passage of time, the locality underwent facelift. And that continued on and on.

The same dust, the same soil produced a most coveted, posh locality of this metro city.

A metro city does not take "Avatar"’ as a metro city.

Scan the glittering magnificence of these cities.

You will find heaving soil, trampled footprints and untold stories buried beneath the gloss.