The Price of Dreaming in a City
What is actually the price of living in a city? Is there really a price that we have to pay to dream in a city? Does everyone dream the same dream in a city? – All these questions do really matter to anyone?
We all have been a part of a big city or a metropolis in our lives because of our education, jobs, etc. But have we ever thought of seeing the city in a different way? We all just come and stay or even settle and go back and forth with our works, but have we ever stopped for a moment and observed something peculiar happening inside the city that we live in; the society or the area we belong, the office that we work in, the mall or the shop we go to, the street vendors we go to, the cafĂ© or the restaurant or the club or the pub we regularly go, the school or the university we study, the cab wala, the rickshaw wala etc. Is there anything common among all these that we never see or never tried to enquire even? Maybe ‘A DREAM’.
Have we ever asked this simple question to anyone in a city – “can you also afford this dream too?”
But what’s actually the Dream that I’m writing about and just beating around the bush for you to read - “A Dream to live to live in this city”. What this ‘city dream’ really signifies? Some materialistic needs that will sustain and keep us in survival process to live in the big ‘human jungle’ of the city. Now, the big question that should come to the mind – all these materialistic needs or the essentials equal to everyone? When we go to a shopping mall and buy a new branded t-shirt worth of hundreds or thousands of rupees, have we tried to ask the cashier of that mall – can you afford that too? Or the security guard with the same question too. Or when we are in a grocery store and buy essentials of again worth of rupees thousands, do we again ask the cashier or the security guard – can you afford all these items too? The answers are not with me because I never tried asking.
THE CASHIER
(Source - https://unsplash.com/photos/PrbqkrWlfhk)
For an individual living in the slums of the city whenever wakes up, dreams of getting the essentials to at least to survive one more day in the city. For an individual living in an apartment or a flat or a rent, dreams of going for the job or the work and at the end of the day or the weekend to spend some essential time with the family or friends. For an individual living in a bungalow or a mansion, dreams of how profits can be made for the day and how much either to spent or invest. And for students living in a city, it’s more of living on the edge because they don’t earn nothing or even earn a little only to meet their daily necessities, not beyond that and to survive on the little they receive as long as possible. There is this connection growing among all these different individuals living in a city; the connection of the “hierarchy of dreams”.
THE SUPERIORS
(Source - https://unsplash.com/photos/BP1Ze0qcp-c)
Now, how much one has to pay to achieve that dream? A few hundreds, thousands or lakhs or even crores. The dilemma of living in the city and enjoying the luxuries of it, never make us see the true horrors of it; it trap us both externally and internally and before we even realize, we are in the loophole of the city dreams, where we just dream of owning everything in the city, but able to get the hands on the few of all things. We see the high-rise buildings of the city, build to talk with the clouds, but at last they also become amalgamation of various cages for humans to trap inside from the outer world and to have the feeling that they are safe and sound inside their beautiful small cages. Though you have to pay something to live in a city – Is it the various tax that everyone pays? Maybe a right answer for some. But more than that, individuals pay and spent or invest more in one thing that make them to live in the city – it’s the ‘Status’. Someone’s status tells more about how much they resemble of a city dweller. Your origin might be from a very rural background or a place which is way more remote for anyone to reach, but here in the city no one likes to maintain that chain of bonding to their roots, everyone likes to call themselves with their more modernized version of themselves. And how they gain that? By increasing their status power. And again, how they gain this status power? Accumulating as much external wealth as possible. The way you look, the way you dress, the things you own, the way you talk, the way your body language speak to the other city dwellers etc. all these matters for the status power. To be in the status group of ones, no matter what the cost is or how much you have to fake it, still everyone tries to maintain it, that’s the city life.
But is it legitimate, someone having an iPhone or a big SUV car or
having a big bungalow, comes and talk about poverty and inequality in front of
some underprivileged city dwellers? The question is for you – the reader, think!
Yes, we all are dreamer living in the city; dreaming
of becoming someone; someone who is more superior than anyone because the word
inferior is a taboo in the city and we don’t want to tagline with that. But in reality,
the city runs on this majority inferiors living and working in the city and the
few superiors eat up the big chunk of the profit gain by the inferiors and the
inferiors are left only from hand to mouth.
Again, one more question
has to be raised – who is to blame for all of this?
We all know what are the problems and what are the solutions for it, every information is in the device that is on our palms, 24x7. Then why everyone is still facing all these problems? Until and unless, the problem doesn’t affect us personally, we don’t think to admit it. The time we realize, we already in the crux of the problems and there is no coming back. That’s how, even if we pay a big chunk of money to resolve the problem, we can never get the full and complete solution. And this is the way the city tests our testimony of our times, if we survive then only, we can proceed living in the city or else no one is coming to even ask for it – “Have you achieved the dream?”.
"HAVE YOU ACHIEVED THE DREAM?"
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