Dangers of Proximity

Outside Aster

Paraphrasing Shelley, I may say that ‘Hell is a city much like Kochi.’

Kochi was my favourite city when I was young. I studied in a college there for five years. I walked kilometres and kilometres in that city. I cycled even more. I was in love with Kochi.

Now I detest going there. I avoid Kochi as far as possible. Too much development has undone that city. Huge buildings and flyovers and the metro rail all together have made it an enormous mess. I am not a Luddite opposed to new technology and progress. Not at all. It’s just that Kochi never had the space for the kind of development that has been imposed on it. Its roads were not even wide enough for its traffic and then came the pillars of the metro rail right in their middle. The traffic crawls now on the arterial roads like the Banerjee Road and the MG Road. The gap between your vehicle and the next one is just a few inches. If you steer an inch wrongly there comes a scratch on your vehicle, if not a dent. But the drivers in Kochi are all experts. They manage dexterously even when umpteen two-wheelers and the occasional auto-rickshaws come unexpectedly as if from nowhere.

Such proximity is no good. That’s why I would love to stay away from Kochi. But I had to navigate the mess on her roads yesterday as Maggie and I went to visit a patient in Aster Medicity Hospital which is on the other side of the city. We had no choice but drive through the chaos on the Banerjee Road. 

While returning, I dropped in at Don Bosco, the seminary where I studied for five years. Just for nostalgia’s sake and all the more because it was only 4 km from Aster. Unfortunately the place failed to evoke any nostalgia because hyper-development had encroached even those sacred spaces. All those places where flower plants and charming trees used to be now have gigantic concrete structures. Every inch of space was marked by the obscene presence of concrete, except the playgrounds which remained thanks to the many schools running there now.

On the way back, we chose to land in one of the largest shopping malls of Kerala, Lulu. Oh my God! I wish didn’t stop. The entire underground parking space, acres of area, was packed with cars. Some digital signboards showed that there were a few empty slots left and I kept on driving until I came to LB12 which had just one parking slot left. [LB = lower basement] 

Inside Lulu

The entire mall with its four or five storeys was filled with people. I have a serious problem with crowds, especially when people jostle though unintentionally, and that too with no sight of open space anywhere in that centrally air-conditioned artificially lighted cavernous space. Such proximity in a place which engenders claustrophobia is not what I would ever choose.

We didn’t even enter the popular hypermarket which offers enormous discounts every day. There were serpentine queues of people waiting to enter the market. We could see similar queues waiting at the exit counters inside, shoppers waiting for paying the bills and getting out. ‘No, no discount is worth all this,’ I decided to Maggie’s disappointment. Our humble hometown with its Reliance Smart and Reliance Jio and Reliance what-not will continue to serve us without shoppers elbowing one another out.

The biggest hypermarket in our hometown was named Ajmal Bismi. Yesterday we were told by the staff that it was already bought by Reliance. That will be the sixth Reliance outlet in my little hometown of Thodupuzha. Eventually the whole of Thodupuzha may belong to Mukesh Ambani. It’s ok, I suppose, as long as I have the freedom to move around.

Outside Aster