Life in a Metro

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!