No matter which city across the country one chooses to live in, particularly those hosting more residents than they would themselves feel comfortable in life from dawn to dusk, the unalloyed affinity most of the residents have for their chosen city should bring to our memory the popular song from a Hindi biopic of 1950s “Ae dil hai mushkil jeena yahan, zara hatke zara bachke ye hai bambai meri jaan,” with the message “Oh heart, it is hard to survive here, be careful, be aware this is Bombay my love.” Bombay city, now Mumbai, decades ago was deemed grand dame of India’s cities. Both the message recounted above and the accolade bestowed on that city, unarguably, applies to Bengaluru (then Bangalore), once proudly called the garden city. The capital of Karnataka wears the look of modern ruin (pun intended) being sticky, humid with about 135 lakh people getting mixed in its unending nooks and corners, the whole world seeming to be in the same place at the same time, packed like a can of beans. The two big casualties of the city are patience with the other residents and security to one’s life with dimming chances of reaching one’s homes at the end of the day.
The ratios of urban and rural populations to the country’s total headcount used to be talked about passingly by demographers until not too long ago. With the prospect of those ratios reaching a point of equality between the two regions and the ongoing exodus of rustics to urban spaces, apart from raising the question of what holds for the country’s masses in future but also calls for adjusting attitudes in life.
