Apartment Blocks Really ‘A-Part-ments’

By G. Gayathri

This incident happened in real. A posh apartment complex in a metropolitan, with all the modern amenities and comforts. It's night ten o clock and someone is having dinner, someone is already asleep and someone is busy with the cores at home.

Suddenly there is lot of activity and everyone is running down to the cellar area, suddenly there is a knock on the door and all of us were asked immediately to switch off the main and leave to the cellar area.

There is some malfunction in the main of the block where all the electricity mains are there and it has caught fire and sparks were already seen in homes at the ground level.

So everyone is immediately alerted and asked to come down. Every one left home as it is and left for down stairs, where everyone is assembled.

Fire engine has come and everyone is talking about the accident and long it will take to restore the mains and how difficult it would be to manage without electricity.

As it is an apartment complex there are buildings opposite and beside this block where the incident took place. There, from that block, people are peeping from the windows and doors trying to find out what is happening and some are closing their already open doors, switching off lights, as if they have seen nothing and nothing matters to them.

There are nearly four blocks in the complex and not one person from another block has come to find out at least what has happened and offered any kind of help or anything.

All living in the same building, all working in corporate and multinational companies drawing salaries in lakhs, very well educated and living high end lifestyle.

I was wonder struck, what kind of educated persons are we and have our hearts also become so concrete, living in the concrete jungle? Don’t we feel anything for our fellow humans and are we just living life as money making machines and nothing else.

By God’s grace nothing serious happened and everyone was safe. But what kind of humans are we if something happens to a crow all other crows come and at least make noise, animals and birds have this sense, but what happened to humans?

People in the cities feel that they are superior to people in villages and in towns but in a remote place and in villages or for that matter in slums that are there in the cities if something happens every one comes together and stands united. These are the things that we definitely need to learn from them and from birds and animals even.

Let us get back to our basics and the roots from where we hail. Let us try to remember that we are humans and we are supposed to have a responding and sensitive heart. Our greatness and development does not lie in foreign degrees and corporate cheques, but the way behave and lead life, not just living for ourselves and for our family, but thinking of helping others in times of necessity.

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Urban Life is it Really Life?

Sunrises and our curtains rise to the problems of mechanical life; we start the day not thinking about the good things and God but about the tasks that are there on our head.

We wake up lifeless and discouraged oh God; need to go to office again. We are always in a race to go in time to office, race to give the best, race to do our duties, and race to excel and to accumulate money, this race knows no end and we keep running and running till we run out of time and energy.

This is the hard truth behind the glittering urban life. We stay in the same home but have no time to see each other faces. We just sleep together and once in a week eat together and are busy completing the other works.

We don’t have time to call our brothers or sisters we don’t even bother to answer their calls, because we are too tired doing our cores at home and at work.

We don’t bother about relationships because we earn enough that we think we don’t need any one. Because money is all that we need in today’s time and we can buy anything with money.

All that bothers to us is our own family me, my spouse and my children and no one else not even our parents. Life in urban areas is like this, we don’t trust the person next to our home we don’t know their faces even if are living there for a long time.

We have nice cars, luxurious flats, and handsome bank balance but we don’t have time to eat and sleep. There is every “thing” in life except “life” this is the real face of urban life.

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Villagers’ better Than Urbanites

Some times, I really wonder, of what use is all the education, all the knowledge that we accumulate? Education should make us, humans, it should fill in values in us, human values, but now the scenario is opposite. The more educated the person is the more selfish his thinking is, the more sick his mind is becoming. We don’t bother about the person living next door, we don’t bother to help somebody on the street, we don’t react when the whole system is corrupt, we don’t bother to just react, in any way to any of these things.

Fear to react; fear to help the other person in need, fear, fear and fear. This has become omnipresent now. Instead of love and compassion for the fellow being, we have developed suspicious mind towards others. And we are not to be blamed for this because, the situation has become so. Whether it is night time or day time, we fear to keep our doors open; sometimes we are forced to suspect those whom we think we they are our own.

Where are all the humans gone, where is all the humanness gone? I think though not educated like us though, though they don’t have worldly knowledge like us villagers are better than urbanites in many matters. In villages if anything happens to any one the whole village is there for him, to help him and to support him. Anything happens in any ones house, let it be good or bad, the whole village is there for them.

If politicians don’t keep up their promises, they don’t allow them to step into their village, they show enough guts, to ask them for what they are accountable. They sit together, decide together, what to do to, vote for whom and if not. Unity and humanness, compassion for the fellow beings understanding and standing together for others, if these are the qualities that a lay man, uneducated man has. We better remain uneducated, and have some humanness left in us, instead of being educated and inhuman.

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