Commentary/ Rajeev Srinivasan

On why I could, seriously, chuck it all and go live in a Kerala village

My friend Varsha Bhosle is upset that I maligned her adored Mumbai in passing. Well, I once complained to Ms Bhosle that her article on San Francisco on Rediff was not adulatory enough: She didn't rant and rave quite as much as I wished about how wonderful it was. Turnabout is fair play. I am sorry I have hurt Ms Bhosle's amour-propre, but I really do despise most very large cities.

I am disgusted not only by New York and Mumbai, but also by Los Angeles, Jakarta and Hong Kong; and mildly annoyed by Mexico City, Paris, Bangkok and London; although I rather like Tokyo and Singapore, and certainly Calcutta. It is in the nature of big cities to be intimidating and uncaring and difficult. In my humble opinion, their citizens's attitudes makes all the difference.

It is hardly the moral equivalent of racism, which Ms Bhosle implies it is, to notice that cities breed certain characteristics in their residents. Isolated single incidents of kindness, or even of saintliness, merely provide the exceptions that prove the rule. I am glad that Ms Bhosle's New York benefactor did not attack her, but merely did her a kindness. Surely one swallow does not a summer make?

On the other hand, there was the celebrated 1964 case of Kitty Genovese, raped and then stabbed to death, screaming, begging for her life, in full view of 38 people, in the courtyard of her Queens apartment block. Not one person intervened, because they did not want to get involved! They simply watched, as though it were television. Where was the New Yorker's sense of decency then?

I suspect if a person were to have a heart attack in the middle of a city street in many of these cities, people would walk carefully around him, and perhaps step over him. (In New York, his wallet might disappear, too.) Yet, in Calcutta, I used to hang on to the outside of crowded buses -- people didn't try to push me off, they would even let me hang on to their necks. What magnificent people!

I like Tokyo because the residents are charming. It is the only major city where an obviously lost foreigner standing at a street corner looking at a map with a puzzled expression on his face evokes no reaction whatsoever from passersby. They will not intrude, for the foreigner would 'lose face' if they offered help. But if asked, they will go out of their way: people have gotten off the subway to walk me to my destination!

Of course, my beloved San Francisco is not without its faults either. There is an alarming brown layer of smog that overlays the Bay; and traffic here is getting to be a nightmare. When I first visited here years ago, the stately neo-classical City Hall was delightful; today the surrounding Tenderloin district is full of homeless vagrants; and there are pathetic teenage-runaway-junkie hookers hustling on street corners (although refugee Southeast Asians make it a prime spot for Cambodian and Vietnamese restaurants).

Sadly, as Ms Bhosle pointed out, even in the pleasant suburbs of San Francisco, it is possible to get mugged. But by and large, the average local resident is courteous, decent, and friendly. And it is not a ploy, but genuine warmth; this is perhaps because we know we live endangered lives.

For there is the looming 'Big One', the unpredictable killer earthquake that will, one day, wipe out the city, as it did in 1906. The Damocles' sword of the San Andreas and Hayward faults, which will at some come apart in a quake of magnitude of 8.0 or more, hangs over the area, rendering ever more poignant its fragile and evanescent beauty, as 19th century authors used to write about beautiful women dying of tuberculosis.

Yet, San Francisco has a rakish charm; that Bridge, and the enchanting, clanking cable cars, and the Golden Gate Park. Once I came across a statue of King Assurbanipal, donated by the Assyrian diaspora to the City. I was astonished; I had thought the Assyrians extinct, that ancient Mesopotamian people who invented the Code of Hammurabi about five thousand years ago. It made me think of how fortunate Indian culture is to have survived, bloody but unbowed.

I think there are big-city people and then there are non-big-city people. I grew up in a smallish town, and therefore I am partial to smaller cities. San Francisco is the right size for me: a real city that one can saunter around, look at (and on extra-steep Nob Hill, even lean against!). I used to like Boston, too. I agree with Mark Twain: there are only three interesting cities in the US -- New Orleans, Boston, and San Francisco. I think the others are either boring or revolting.

There is an interesting trend towards exurbia here in the US: given that it is entirely feasible to telecommute, many people are now moving out of the crowded and unpleasant cities and suburbs and into essentially rural areas. Unfortunately, they take their city habits with them, and in fact turn these rustic paradises into the very cities they were attempting to flee.

An interesting example is the desert of the American Southwest: Phoenix, Arizona, for example. People moved there for the clean, dry climate, to help their respiratory problems; unfortunately, they brought with them all the trees and plants of their hometowns, so that now Phoenix is as pollen-ridden and polluted as anywhere else. Some of this migration is also white flight away from urban non-whites, but that's a story for another time.

The Americans, of course, have the great luxury of having an immense land to use and abuse. It is startling to drive in the West: Utah, Idaho, Montana and so on, and to see just land, just open land, with absolutely nothing, no features, not even trees, just semi-arid, mountainous land, for miles and miles. India, sadly, has little unused land.

When I visit India, I think about where it would be most pleasant to live. I have come to the conclusion that it is not in the cities, but in a little Kerala village that I would like to live. And this is not some naive, 'the real India is in its villages'-type of sentimentality. I would like to live there simply because it is extremely pleasant and comfortable. I admit, I do like my creature comforts.

I am jealous of my aunt: She lives in our ancestral village, not far from National Highway 47. Years ago, I used to think the village was quaint but backward. But now they have all the amenities of modern life, electricity, piped water, phones, paved roads, even cable television. They also grow their own staples and 'boutique crops': rice, tapioca, coconuts, oilseeds, cashew, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon.

Every day, the vegetable seller brings fresh local produce; the fisherwoman brings freshwater fish. There is the temple where they go on festival days. There are the visitors, who drop in unannounced to discuss politics or the price of pepper. There are the sundry relatives and their little intrigues and quarrels. All this in breathtakingly beautiful surroundings, lush and green.

And they have clean air to breath. They have access to reasonable schools and colleges; doctors, both ayurvedic and allopathic, are easily available. There is a railway station within twenty miles; and a fair-sized town within fifteen. They are a bit far from the nearest airport, say a hundred miles. And they are well served by media--three major newspapers.

This is the good life, I think. After all, what is the good life: a sense of community and belonging and roots; adequate health care; salubrious and clean environs; education and the ability to relate to what is going on in the wide world outside. They have it all. I am seriously jealous. Omar Khayyam would approve: 'Ah, wilderness were paradise enow.'

Ms Bhosle and other city folk might have a different definition of the good life. But the average city person might think it is a choice between 150 cable channels and ignorance; between conspicuous consumption and penury; between high-tech medicine and rampant disease; between 242 brands of breakfast cereal and starvation. It is not. The quality of life is a continuum, and it is entirely possible to be content without excess.

Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine, a Ph D candidate at Stanford, wrote to me after seeing the Malayalam film, Piravi, set in the monsoon-washed, ravishing countryside: "I'm so tempted to chuck all this and go live in some Kerala village!" Ms Bhosle could never leave her Mumbai. To each his/her own. Vive la difference!

Rajeev Srinivasan is marketing director for a Silicon Valley multinational. He also contributes a column to India Currents and The Sunday Observer.

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