LOOSEFOOTING around town these days often brings home a distinct awareness that Nagpur city is assuming newer look almost on a day-to-day basis. At least cosmetically, it looks good, though loaded with faultlines of modern architecture and half-baked urban planning. Broader, cemented roads lined by pavements covered by interlocked tiles, MetroRail tracks as if scouring skies all over the city, high-rise buildings dotting the urban landscape almost everywhere, increasing numbers of fly-overs (that are in most places only half-heartedly designed) modern malls where people are seen indulging in compulsive and impulsive buying as if there is no tomorrow, posh restaurants where ordering pizzas or burgers is the order of the day, swanky cars gliding along roads all over the place, people with modern (and sometimes terribly scanty) dressing showing up everywhere in town, food-delivery boys (and some girls as well) with colourful shirts moving at break-neck speeds on their two-wheelers meeting and beating dead-lines. The city also boasts of a few clubs tucked in this or that far-corner -- where grace and grandeur and wealth are the special attributes of the social life that pulsates there. ...! These are some of the dimensions and nuances of the city that is hectically modernising itself.

 

The overall feeling is of vibrancy, so to say. One cannot escape feeling good for the city -- at least superficially. Roam around any locality in any part of the city and the picture would be more or less the same. The high-rise buildings really look daunting in most places -- tall and lean and standing on plots that are paved to the hilt. Individual homes, too, showcase their opulence in their own way -- occasionally demonstrating arrogance as well. ...! Though the loosefooter is quite used to all this, thanks to his global exposure, at times he gathers an uncomfortable feeling (for valid reasons). For, he wonders if the city is losing its character in the quest of modern living and so-called national and even global standards. For, Nagpur was one city where everybody seemed to know everybody else -- marking a social closeness beyond class barriers. Today, that does not appear to be the case. For, in the so-called ‘flat-culture’, people do live in a single building or a building-complex, all right, but do not have what is called a common neighbourhood.

 

The city seems to have lost the understanding of the difference between living in a single building or building-complex and living in a neighbourhood -- as if having lost meaning in translation (from old-style, traditional living to modern lifestyle) ...! The loosefooter is sure that countless among the thousands of readers of this column will agree with this observation. He is sure, they, too, are feeling similar pangs of the fangs of changing ways and means of the city. Another grief that pinches the loosefooter hard is about a continual decline in green cover and increasing disrespect for water-bodies on the part of both, the people in general and the administrative, political and social leadership of the city in particular. He feels terribly hurt that the city has lost a few water bodies in the space of a couple of decades, and has made a grand mess of its three rivers. He also is traumatised that beautiful green landscapes of the city -- like the Seminary Hills, for example -- are being lost to human greed and thoughtless and arrogant approach to urban planning.

 

Yet, there is no disputing the fact that the city is assuming a new look which has its own attractions. The loosefooter appreciates modern urban planning, but insists that it should not be devoid of deep thought -- which appears to be missing in Nagpur’s planning process. If this is all urban planning is, then the loosefooter is afraid that in a few years, we -- the citizens of Nagpur -- may come to grief from which we may have no redemption. He will never hazard a negative prediction. Yet, he realises that that situation will never be welcome for us. n