By Purabi Bhattacharya
Introduction
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf writes:
“He was too weak; he could scarcely raise
his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those
who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of
sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.” 1
Woolf more or less takes us close to the
robust urban wilderness we are in. Together, yet distant. Not alone yet
forlorn. Connected, disconnected. Social dissociation is not an unfamiliar term
in the urban space. It is a choice and not necessarily imposed. It is a
consequence of a plethora of factors churned out by the relentless human
pursuit for “development”. In cities and expanding towns, this is becoming a phenomenon
wherein an individual is unable to cope with the challenges city life disposes.
India if in the first half of Independence fought economic distress, in seven
decades she has come to battling out an additional emotional dolour.
Sample
these
Into
the deepest congested crowd, she knew this was going to be long, lonely living.
25,000 days and
few more turned to dust like quicksand and whisked out of sight. Bela (76) just
lost her husband (87), a Professor teaching Bangla in a college for three
decades and plus. With the husband gone Bela is putting up with one of her
sons, uprooted from the place of origin and trunk full of memories. The
immediate generation being caught in their own webs, Bela becomes the single
elder, trying to scoop out and piece together the shrouded hobbies, whatever to
keep her mind off from creating space for nothingness.
Natvar (25) an MNC
professional migrated to the city of millions with dreams and degrees. He has a
routine filled up life, luxurious lifestyle and digital friends and family at a
descending scroll. Meeting new faces at the work place and around it, he
socialises but cannot recollect the names. One fine day, he feels the razor
sharp edges. All that seemed seamlessly extraordinary in the beginning becomes
mundane, monotonous and a system failure. And then begins a journey- into
the woods within.
A headstrong,
self-esteemed Anna (in her early 50’s) never looked back. She chose to remain
single, lived with her parents, siblings. Economic independence kept her in sangfroid.
Nothing reminded her ever of her age, her biological clock or the several
imperatives to gradually follow. Siblings settled in respective marriages, and
death of both the parents singled her out. Officially the remainders click
and dine together now; but things for Anna have become painfully lonely
despite being not alone.
A 70 year old
urban India draws breath through such stories. Stories of homebound existences,
of aloofness, of getting marooned in life’s continent: malignant of sorts are
only becoming commoner than they ever were. It can take all sorts of people to
be left to their fast shrinking world. At 70, India puts up a brave front
juxtaposed with the cluttered silences.
Technological coup
d'├йtat has worked double-time as a catalyst for the ever-burgeoning
distance between the visible generations: sagging, its successive and the
following after. For the geriatrics, the inability of getting in with the newer
tools of communication has either pushed them to the fringes or intimidated
them.
In either ways, both the grown-ups
wait for the Godot:
“We
wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don’t protest, we are bored to
death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do?
We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! (He advances towards the heap,
stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone more, in
the midst of nothingness!” 2
Clash
of the ages
A
lot has gone down the Ganga, heaped up as well in the Himalayas. India at 70,
if has its share of mirth, also has its lump of mellowness. And the latter is
of great concern.
Due to their
compressed mobility and crippling conditions, the elderly become dependent on
other people to carry out their minute by minute errands. With more of nuclear
domestic establishments in the society and fewer children in the family, to
ride herd on older persons becomes a task, at times unfeasible. Methodical and
time to time psycho-medical assistances can take stock of the grim situation as
and when required.
The Census 2011 reports that of the nearly
250 million households in India, 31.3% have at least one elderly person. Around
22.1% households have one aged person and 8.3 % have 2 aged members in the
household.3
“These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I
know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.” 4
The data certainly
is far reaching. With each passing Census year, things only give shape to worry
for an ever swelling Indian population of 1.34 billion.
If the old garner
sympathy for the challenges, the youth too is not let off without any. It has
to keep pace with the time, precipitating. Can forlornness then be far
behind?
It seeks power.
Absolute. It seeks independence. Absolute. It registers its say. Unhindered. It
is in a hurry. Uncautioned.
Technological
infringement has given it what it craved for. And came striding along a banzai:
apartness. The young often finds himself a lone wolf, fighting his own battle:
of identity crisis, of belongingness, of urban living. Ripped out of his place
of origin, he is placed to the whereabouts of growth. Between all of this
silence, void, hollowness have found a cushion inside of him.
“Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each
of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly
alone.” 5
Gender
gander
This
is a country where everywoman is a Goddess, everyman her worshipper. It always
stood firm on doling out equal rights to genders. Men, women, others alike. But
behind the smokescreen of frankincense every gender has its designated roles,
determined by two millenniums of patriarchy.
If women, more
often than not are expected to endure, public figures wouldn’t shy away defending rapists from public platforms6.
The process leads to isolation for women at home and outside and men on the
defensive at least in public. The morality chasm thus breeds alienation and
distance, chipping away the fundamental cure for loneliness.
The shrugging
islands
We
were one at one (read 1947). We
opposed serfdom. Hand in hand we rose against imperialism, against colonial
invasion. Now we fight one on one. We detect each other’s race, sect, religion,
social status, gender and not to forget character and sit down quietly
assassinating one another from our private walls. We have mastered the art of
trolling, cave camping and playing God, the almighty. The country breathes in a
crunched space which has no room for discussions and opinions that could be
politely disagreed upon and matters to be cobbled together. Social media,
peers, all that was meant to be friends play shadowy games with the
unsuspecting minds.
“Every
hour a student in India commits suicide.”7 A headline such as this chills us.
Tim Syiem was a
boy of 15 years. His school teachers maintained he was a low-key student, but a
sharp boy. His English teacher with tears swelling up in her eyes reiterates he
wrote exceptionally good poems, much ahead of his time. He was the eldest son
of well-established professors and they had no clue where, what went wrong. He
had left no note, nothing that could console the parents bearing a loss as huge
as his precious life. Dented forever, the parents have only to pray for the
young boy and a few of his poems as memoirs of their first born.
Cases of students
resorting to suicide have become a matter of concern. The National Crime
Records Bureau, 2015 reports ‘Family
Problems’ (2,139), ‘Failure in Examination’ (1,360) and ‘Illness’ (904), as the
main causes of suicides among children (below 18 years of age).8
Cities with their
ever expanding issues become the melting pots. They are also the market. They
emerge as the evermore powerful places of individual for perfecting human domination over the social, economic and political
environment. Cities hold onto the laissez faire
capitalism. Suburban lives come to action pushing population to urban wide and
its wealth. Technological prelation invades households. But then the cities are
not too late to witness the unimagined population overspill and its spaces,
resources shrink.
For
Braudel, “money meant towns” while “cities and money created modernity”
9
70 years down the
line, one also sees the class differences only growing and the efforts to
leapfrog an economy that not so long ago was agrarian to well past industrial
are not sans pitfalls. Digitisation of economy thus invited probing questions
from the experts.
On digitisation of
economy, Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, former governor
of the Swedish Central Bank who held distinguished positions in the Swedish
ministry of finance, including that of director general and head of the
economic affairs department for example observed:
“There are risks (with digitisation) and IT
policies need to address these issues. This is not something that will solve
itself. People have been left behind in the process and I expect we shall see
more and more academic debate on how to keep fairly equal, at the same time we
have good economic development… The populist movements in the western countries
reflect that people are left behind." 10
The tale of two
states continues to be on our face as India albeit walks free with a duffel of
if’s and but’s.
Thoreau cautions us in his
prophetic way:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the
desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and
muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what
are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for
this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate
things...” 11
Way out
Isolation
and loneliness in the urban space have become unavoidable realities.
“This
abyss of isolation delves into grave endlessness and has him suffering from the
lack of interaction with humanity.”12
For now Bela has
no soul in the neighbourhood to share her mother tongue and her love for Bangla
literature, she waits upon chances, chances to meet another to twist and turn
her tongue in language her own and one who shares similar tastes in literature.
Now time, voluminous and silence, uninterrupted are the two constants and she
finally picks up the pen over living with a litany of complaints.
Let not this world make islands out
of us, for:
No man
is an island,
Entire
of itself,
Every
man is a piece of the continent,
A part
of the main.13
As we stand in an
interesting juncture of history, not everything looks brilliant and that is the
way it is. After all, the change that we sought commands a price. It is the
process of being that would determine how much to pay and when to negotiate.
After all, post liberalisation, our ideas have totally integrated with the
globe and we shall ergo walk the talk in the
global language. There will be some gain and associated pain. The catch as
always lies in balance.
References:
1. Woolf, Virginia. “Mrs.
Dalloway”. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1925.
2. Beckett, Samuel. “Waiting
for Godot”. New York: Grove Press, 1954.
4. Huxley, Aldous. “Brave
New World”. New York: Harper Brothers, 1932.
5. Brown, Dan. “Angels
and Demons”. New York: Pocket Books, 2000.
7. Saha, Devanik. “Every
hour, one student commits suicide in India”, Hindustan times, May 08, 2017.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/health-and-fitness/every-hour-one-student-commits-suicide-in-india/story-7UFFhSs6h1HNgrNO60FZ2O.html
9. Fields, Gary. “City
systems, urban history, and economic modernity. Urbanization and the transition
from agrarian to industrial society.” http://docplayer.net/21079209-City-systems-urban-history-and-economic-modernity-urbanization-and-the-transition-from-agrarian-to-industrial-society.html
10. Bhattacharya,
D. P& Dutta, Vishal. “India's share
of global economy to increase: Lars Heikensten, Executive Director, Nobel
Foundation”, Economic Times, Jan
14, 2017.
11. Thoreau, Henry David, Michael Meyer, “Walden;
and, Civil disobedience,”1983.
12. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart
Of Darkness: And, The Secret Sharer”. New York: Signet Classic, 1997.
13. Donne, John. “Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions. Meditation XVII.”1623.
*Note: Case studies are of real people, names changed to
protect identities.
