Delhi: a village or a developed metropolitan?

I visited the post office in sector 7, Rohini today. I had gone there because the post office at sector 9 where I live is too small and doesn’t do speed posts. This one surely was much bigger. But the location was what hit upon me. Located in a Delhi village, surrounded by cow-dung, dusty lanes and by-lanes and a sewer drain, this location was truly amazing.

None of the PCs was operational because they had had a power failure!

I went in, after standing in the line for 5 minutes I was redirected to a counter located outside where stamps were sold. After another 10 minutes of wait in the sun, the guy at counter informed me that they didn’t have stamps worth Rs425! This ended my little journey to the post office but set me thinking.

Most of the Delhi is like this. I am not talking about the infrastructure such as PCs not being used but about places in Delhi. Once you move away from the main roads, you are confronted with dusty lanes that will get a traffic jam if two cars come from opposite ends. Cows are obviously sitting pretty oblivious of everything. These places seem almost untouched by the IT-BPO boom that has hogged all the headlines. Even the posh areas of south Delhi have their share of dusty un-maintained roads, Kotla Mubarakpur, Jia Sarai being prime examples. If this is the state of affairs in Delhi, how can you even hope for anything better at smaller towns like the one I come from, or at even the second rung metros like Lucknow and Kanpur?

Its a study in contrast, the Malls and Metro on the main road on the one hand and the road less village within half a kilometer on the other. From the hustle bustle crowd trying to get to work with laptops and state of the art phones, to sleepy underbelly, cowdung and serpentine lanes made for bicycles only. When will this change? Or will it, and do we want it to change?

We Indians have become oblivious to such things. We don’t care if the roads are broken, cows are roaming around or drains are open. We are content with earning our own share, more and more of it. Environmental concerns, hygiene and maintaining a place are a few things best left to NGOs and arm chair activists.