What would you call an Indian
Metro? What kind of people live there? Well, there are some minimum mandatory
requirements that a city should have so as to achieve the status of an Indian
Metro. Chennai will help me best to explain. It is a city where people from all
walks of life commute in front of me. Round the clock. I often wonder where all
these people keep going. I do so especially when I am in a sea of vehicles and
stuck in traffic. From millionaires through corporate communists through the
clichéd middle-class through homeless beggars to streaking mad men, all these
people pass in front of my eyes or I travel across them, every now and then.
Given below are some trademarks of the different classes of society I listed in
the former sentence.
1. The
millionaires are not a majority lot. I don’t see many of them out in the open
except in air-conditioned imported cars that never sound to vroom by or in
expensive attires in shopping malls and multi-plex cinemas. Wherever they are,
they make sure they are in an air-conditioned, aromatic and imaginarily
red-carpeted spaces surrounded by big glass walls. They breathe air-conditioned
air. KFCs and Baskin and Robbins are for them what road-side chat shops are for
me.
2. The
business dons and political magnates – they decide what others can do. In
sun-filmed and UV-protected SUVs assisted with security convoys they roam the
city and the blocked traffic trails to where they have gone. I don’t know much
about what these people do, but at the end of the day, they run the show and
the law.
3. Corporate
chaps are easy to spot – they set, follow and do (and rightfully they have the right to do so) the trend. Work,
eat, sleep and party. Now sorry if I omitted family people – they too do a lot
of partying sometimes with family or sometimes when they have time after work
and attending to family matters.
4. Corporate
communists seem pretty good in camouflaging and others think they change their
colour. They might not have been fortunate to be born with silver spoons in
their mouths, but they will make sure their kids have spoons of atleast silver.
But these people really have an inclination to the society, and most of them
really do some good stuff to the society. The rest are turncoats who stand not
for the cause, but by the side where victory and justice are apparent. I have
felt at times whether I am a corporate communist myself.
5. Now
the most talked about and the most hyped and the always baited bunch – the
middle class. They consider them the wealthiest and the most happening in this
world, until they see some wealthier people pass by. Even though, they are what
we call the man power. People who move the world. Thus constituting the best
portion of the working population, they deserve better respect than what I have
given in my words. They are into everything man has known, and become real
social animals. I claim that I belong here.
6. The
homeless are a big lot, now they keep wandering from road to road, slum to
slum, and live at the mercy of the political heavy-weights and hence end up as
a loyal resource to the election and other political propaganda.
7. After
the nomad come the mad. These people happen out of weaklings when the world
turns too cruel for them to handle, and then their clocks stop ticking.
This financially divided
demography will continue to exist and the divide will increase even more, as
more and more metros come up, more and more development happens. A metro has to
have all seven of the above members intact to sustain it as a metro. A holistic approach like this will make life
in a metro a little less metrosexual. Give it a try!
