Living in a small town doesn’t let you know, what challenge living in an apartment is all about. So here I’m lodging in an apartment for a few days at Gurgaon. The place is Ridgewood Estate in heart of the city. And apparently I’m living at great heights. Literally, I mean: a 100 feet off the ground. A friendly piece of advice goes about this: Don’t just loiter in the balcony if you got weak gut.
Now there are few things some of them, perturbing I must add I have been experiencing living here. And I am here to share them. Firstly, the old adage ‘Privacy is a Privilege’ applies. It’s a practice of the civil engineers to raise buildings close to each other – facing each other because well, there’s lack of free ground. And so also having made floor to ceiling windows-cum-doors (you don’t know which to use how) there are a hundred rooms that have a clear cut view of all the room décor there is in the hall I sit in right now. Weirdly, the concept is alien to me, a small towner where we have our doors bolted even before the primetime movie hits at dinnertime.
Secondly, I don’t know how children get raised up here. I mean in sense, there were my kind whose first real toy was mud! Shaping, digging, making bridges in the vegetable garden was a major choice of “playing outside”. Here I see kids that have no access to ‘grasses’ except that in school ground and have to play on hard concrete of parking in the evening. As I watch them from the eighth floor, they only skate or cycle on the tarmac. Poor souls.
Thirdly, even if this particular set of apartments gets counted as posh society, there still is a lot left to catch up in here. In the entire area of a house that can be counted on fingers for hundreds of feet, there’s hardly a corner left to recreate. You know, add a little dash of a self-made painting to the wall, set a bunch of bean bags here or there, set up a little study. Basically, things that go beyond the bedroom-hall-kitchen drill, to add an element of genius to one’s living place. And there’s not even storage here, I wonder where one puts their winter clothes or the Diwali gifts.
Next, there is a mentionable uncomfortability about the lift systems. Every time the door opens, a group of people are found staring at you like deers caught in headlights. Obviously having a hostile looking stranger standing inches from you can be unnerving for some but the biggest dilemma comes at what do you do for those really excruciating 30 seconds or so. Where to look, where to stand, how to press the buttons with people cramming the corners!?
Lastly I add, even as the homes go smaller in the cities going bigger, and the cost-of-living spirals as resources deplete by the hour, what one sees through the glass window remains virtually unchanged to the people whose life is in the fast lane. And which leaves them little to think over the changing socio-cultural economics to which they adjust, in compulsion maybe but they have the box office seat to changes we the people may have to excruciatingly accept as we head towards a society trying to find its new roots in the glossed up world of pamphlets.
I guess I better post this once I depart from here. Someone reads it, I’m sure to get some piece of advice from neighbour next door or next floor. 🙂
The Elevator Times
The Thought Spout 