The Hindu Business Line : <I>Urban lament </I>

Nowadays I dread meeting people my own age in Chennai. Not because we exchange a litany of woes about our aches and pains of osteoporosis or our sacrifice of pickles and papadams. In fact, we have learnt to keep our medical troubles to ourselves. We would, vainly of course, put up a brave front, impressing each other with our knowledge of the latest advances in medicine and diagnostics, health and ageing, gleaned from reading of Sunday magazines or browsing the Net. However, after the usual handshakes and "How are you" the conversation invariably turns vicious with the gnashing of teeth and clenching of fists all round, as we start off on traffic snarls, parking troubles, errant call taxis, road rage of two-wheelers, the perils of travelling in autorickshaws, and the lack of pedestrian walkways, among other banes.

One would imagine that all these people normally live somewhere else, where such experiences are rare and, therefore, like to narrate such adventure stories, much like the European seafarers of the fifteenth century on their return from exploring seaways to discover India. Not so. All this is from people who live smack in the middle of the modern urban chaos called Chennai.

Even the numero uno of the State, with his contingent of family, friends and relatives, as pointed out by his challenger, the former Chief Minister, has no difficulty in coming to terms with the irony of planning satellite towns while he and his ilk continue to stay right in the centre of the city.

With the dropping of the satellite town project, the urban middle class in Chennai seems to have settled for sticking it out, awaiting the day when the systems may collapse under their own weight. Living in densely packed dwellings amid urban squalor, we are free to reminisce about broad avenues, shaded walkways and old buildings, doing little to improve basic hygiene and sanitary conditions.

It is a truism that politicians can keep on talking even if they cannot or will not do anything about improving or ameliorating situations such as hunger, poverty, farmers' distress and malnutrition among children and so on. Sadly, even the urban middle class, which berates politicians at every available opportunity on TV and in letters to the editor, also does likewise. Is it yathaa raja, tathaa praja or the other way around?

R. Sundaram

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