Luminiscent Monotony

It snowed in the mountains, hailed in the valleys and rained in the city. I walked down the muddy lanes of my neighbourhood, buoyed by a sense of excitement because the sky had been washed clean. I breathed in deep, ignoring the grey blasts from engines; and made my way to work.

The metro ride was done with a childlike gaiety and gazing out the window. As I walked down the stairs of the metro station to work, I noticed the clean grey roads with their neatly stacked traffic cones, scrubbed by the rains.

The sense of buoyancy vanished within a second as thoughts lurched in turmoil within me; I realised how urbanism makes robots out of us. How city life in its sheer repetitive and similarity makes us numb. Any part of the city would look no different than where I stood at ten am this morning—metal grey streets, muddy by-lanes, grumpy immigrants heading to work while the elite splash through the puddles in their cars, only to later berate the middle class inferior about this shoddy sense of dressing or mud spots on his shirt.

The Delhi sky is still a dull shade of grey, not a brightly washed blue and the sky in its all encompassing omnipresence seems to affect the people’s moods through mere colour. I begin to marvel about the hills where some lucky friends are ensconced and I find myself wondering, what does rain sound like on a roof in the jungle, uninterrupted by horns and music and technology? Would it not be music in itself, the sound of rain on the parapet akin to the sound of wheat husks falling onto the field of freshly harvested wheat while an army of mustard flowers hums methodically in the wind?

In the city today morning, when it was at the most tolerable that it could be, nothing had changed. People were still trudging to work, brown paper bag breakfast in hand, headphones fastened on, tapping away on phones and occasionally chuckling  “what a romantic day, wish we could go for a movie”. This conversation made my hopes rise and dash quicker than the woman next to me could text.

It is so disheartening to live in a city of robots. People talk the same, walk the same, wear the same, do the same. Life is all about work on week days, drink and fuck on weekends. I wish I would not use strong language here, but this is the true face of the city. People save money for spa getaways, fancier phones and even fancier homes. Everyone goes to the gym to be fit but prefers taking the lift or the escalator everywhere else; women fret over their skin while men worry about the beer belly. Yet, not one of them stops to think of resorting to a simpler lifestyle that in its own cycle takes care of everything.

Its disturbing that mere rain has made me so hugely happy and upset at the same time. I only wish I could walk away into the mountains where my mind, my eyes, my body will be set free to roam, to hear, to see and to be at peace amidst simpler people not charged up on android phones.

The fiercely cold mountain air can do me more good than the luminescent monotony of this neon-lit prison of the walking dead.