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Song to a seagull

I typed this with the frenzied drums of Ganesha’s goodbye thumping in the distance. They have become steadily louder, not only tonight but over several years.

The chorus in a song by Bob Dylan goes:

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

The din is as good a harbinger of change as any. 

My neighbourhood’s identity is altering quickly. Where once the housing complex I live in was something of a quiet, last outpost before the Bombay highway, it is now a residential society under siege, assaulted by dazzling lights and rapacious appetites, served up at and by a shopping mall that’s too close for comfort and so close it’s convenient.

Our city’s vehicular attitude has metamorphosed and taken on an edge of ugly aggression. In part it is because of the skyline snaking its way upward, in part thanks to the metro tracks slithering steadily sideways. Where once we’d look up to trees and open sky, the canvas is now mostly concrete. Construction activity seems to have generously doled out passes to transgress the laws; drive on the wrong side and on the footpath, ignore traffic signals and turn indicators, helmets never on and phone calls always on, each of these accompanied by a defiant eye.

Our country’s ethos has deteriorated, and many citizens have adapted and adjusted to the new zeitgeist, willfully, gleefully, forcibly, reluctantly...

Our people are starting to fade away. We knew it was coming. The responsibilities our elders shouldered would be ours one day. Some day. Just not today. We who were filling our own burlaps of burden were handed the accumulated weights of those we left behind. Is this life? Walking on with our burdens until they become someone else’s?

It’s a pity we live in interesting times.

I feel shortchanged by change.

 Song for the moment: Till the clouds roll by - Paul Desmond 

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