Living in Uttam Nagar, New Delhi during the first few months of my Delhi experience was quite of a horrible task for me. Me being from a city in where this is a noticeable open space between the residing house and the road and also with the next house, found it quite ridiculous to be at a place where you open up your main door of the house and find yourself in the middle of the main road. I came from a society where people even hate to share their boundary walls with their neighbour and here I was put into a concrete structure which shared even the walls of your bedroom with the neighbour. That seemed quite unorthodox to me.
The next shock came to me when I went to the rooftop to have a glimpse of the whole area. But as I had never expected the only thing I could see were concrete structures and hundreds of cell phone towers. For me being coming form a part of the country where you can at least expect to see greenery if not others, felt quite out of the world as I did not find a single green element in the whole frame. It seemed that, I could cover a distance of few kilometres just by jumping off to the next building separated by only a mere small knee length wall.
So, when you have such great environment than, how good can you expect the interiors of the house to be. The building allotted to us by our Institute which was so called our hostel seemed to quite of a depressing one. I actually have seen very few of such structured buildings. Two faces of the cubic building were concrete walls, to be more precise the Eastern and the Western faces. That means there was sunshine in the the buildings only during morning and evening, which was mostly available to the extreme rooms at the corners, and as for the middle rooms, it didn't matter if it was day or night as all throughout there was darkness. This really made me think, did I come all over from Guwahati to leaving behind all the fresh air to suffocate here. Yeah, people say you need to work hard and adjust to achieve success, but did that mean that you have actually have to adjust to a suffocating environment.
All the houses nearby had the same orientation. All having a dull structure. But the thing that has amused me was the adaptive capability of humans. The local residents have been living here have been living such for years. My experience of 6 months in such a place was quite of an adventure for me. It was very hard to have such a sudden change in your living environment. This is quite of a fact that all people like a bit of freeness where they live, of course we never want to live in a place which is situated right in the middle of a chaotic market, but actually how people have been living here, with actually zero personal space, and yet surviving was quite for surprising me. The only affect of such that I could make out was, people here seldom speak sweet and surprising enough use a slang as punctuation mark after every line.I don't yet know the contribution of that six months in Uttam Nagar yet in my life. But I do hope it will later help me adjusting to any other typical North Indian metro environment. But I can sure say that living there was no less than living in a free jail.
Guwahati: The Green Cherishes the Eyes
Uttam Nagar: Searching for Green
PS: This is totally my point of view of Uttam Nagar and my life over there. People might agree nor not, but after coming from a land of fresh air, light and freedom, I surely found it suffocating. No excuses are to given as it being because of the busy life of New Delhi as everything available here is available there too. :D
Bro ... not only North Indian cities.... its the same everywhere,,... even in South cities its the same.....It will definitely add to ur lifes experience of adjusting in any metro cities....(in india ofcourse) May be .NO,I think i am sure enough... its the result of shortsightedness of our Godly IAS level officers,(top municipal authorities officers) who thinks who knows everything of India...n plan the cities accordingly...they r real Shit ...i believe.... n why only Suffocating cities.... Most of their policies sucks... big time...(Always behind time).
ReplyDeleteI too think so...it surely is pity in that in a rising economy people have to compromise by living in such areas.
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