on Cities

While walking around among the concrete houses in a posh neighborhood in Ahmadabad I came across a seed of a thought which soon germinated into something quite interesting. I noticed rows upon rows of houses made mostly of bricks and concrete with little windows to peek out on to the streets which were filled with bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks, and pedestrians. And then I dipped gingerly into my shallow bank of early memories to discover a large ancestral house, since sold, in a much smaller town in North India. It exists in my memory within a quiet setting, one where I could still clearly make out the Milky way in the night and one where I could step out during the day and experience such natural elements which have been so efficiently removed from the urban setting. Domesticated animals of all sorts, ponds, trees, and rivers. Compared to that setting and that time almost everybody I know in India has moved to places which, in my opinion, are worse in almost every respect.

Big cities in India, like big cities in the US as well, have accommodated an immense concentration of human beings by driving out those very elements of nature, in relation to which humans become aware of their humanity. In these modern metropolises the average human is surrounded, for the most part, by dead things - walls, furniture, and electronics - and he is surrounded, for the most part, by artificial noise. He breathes polluted air and puts up with congestion, traffic, and a general loss of identity. He spends significant portions of his days in long commutes and spends much of his waking hours in jobs which further suck the life out of him. Unfortunately he has little choice in this whole scheme. Power has a tendency to centralize and productive power in the industrial (and post-industrial) age centralizes in large cities. Young people move to these areas out of a necessity to find decent jobs and the older ones, at least in India, tend to follow their children into these nightmare cities. The cities, on the other hand, do what they were meant to accomplish in the first place - efficiently convert human beings and their labor into commercial products (shit which nobody needs, as I like to think). These cities are dehumanizers par excellence.

US is not much better in this respect, although there is still a little more freedom of choice mostly owing to a much reduced pressure on resources compared to India. NYC, the prototypical American urban center, is a despicable and detestable place from the point of view of  a human being and his relation to nature, from the point of view of his humanity. However, it can still boast of harboring culture even though the average person living in the city can hardly be called cultured. The other great urban center in the US, the silicon valley, sadly cannot even call itself cultured. As the center of the tech juggernaut, however, I think it is very appropriately mechanical. Other urban centers fall somewhere along this spectrum. They are all similar to each other in their merciless dehumanizing effect on people.