A smaller world is a lesser one...

When we took an auto to Alpha One mall yesterday, the auto driver did not agree to drop us at the mall, but a few hundred meters away from it, because he was supposed to take another route. (The mall is less than two kilometers from where I stay). We had no choice but to walk. And as I walked, I saw the families that lived on the pavement. Not that it was the first time I saw people living by the side of the road, especially since it is a rather common sight in Ahmedabad, but after a long long time I saw them so closely. People sleeping, camouflaged in the dust, kids playing with broken tree branches, women cooking on firewood.

And I realised that although I know for a fact that there are countless families that live by the side of roads, I hardly get to 'see' them anymore. I travel so much and so fast that I end up being concerned about just the destination (which in this case was the mall). And the speed of my journeys obscures everything that lies in the way. I look at people fleetingly. I recognise the phenomenon too and even reconnect it within my mind with what I have read, discussed and written about issues of development-induced homelessness. But then I do not retain it long enough. And once I reach the mall, I get lost in the brands and the visual merchandise and the lights.

I felt something similar when I was travelling in a passenger train from Gomoh to Gaya. Passenger trains are good eye-openers. For all those who refuse to come out of the bubble of development, need to travel by passenger trains for a reality check. When you take a car to travel a distance of a couple of hundred kilometers, you fail to observe certain things. The reason being the fact that amongst a few things that the governments nowadays do invest in, are good, wide roads.  These roads are more often than not widened and re-constructed after displacing the 'encroachers'. And you love speeding on these roads. Passenger trains, on the other hand, offer a rather different landscape both inside and outside. You stand for long hours in a crowded compartment and get ample time to observe and talk to people from different walks of life, people you would otherwise not encounter beyond them being your research subjects. Also, passenger trains tend to stop for exceedingly long periods in between stations and you are able to look into the houses and lives of people who live along the railway tracks.
It is the speed that makes all the difference in perspectives. As the speed increases, the world gets smaller and our perspectives get limited. We end up in a world that is sanitised of its 'unnecessary' complexities, a simpler world, a lesser world.