• Prema Jayakumar

‘Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good.’ Novelist Ian McEwan says this among other things about living in the world of today.
Have you thought of the world you live in? I don’t mean anything large, not on the scale of the earth, or even the country. I mean something very small. The neighbourhood perhaps, at most, the town or suburb or whatever. A place of shared roads, shared water supply, shared air, shared space, shared infrastructure. It was the failure of water supply in a suburb in Bangalore while I was there that brought the thought to the surface. It affected everyone, the mistress and the maid, the chauffer and the gardener, the flat-dweller as well as the villa-owner. Yes, each was affected to a different degree depending on the storage facilities and so on, but all were affected. The same thing happens when there are repairs to a road, when a road is dug up or closed to traffic. Everyone has to go round instead of going straight to wherever they wanted to get to and everyone is affected to a certain extent.
Normally, events that occur used to affect lives connected through being members of the same family or extended family. But these problems of infrastructure do not affect a connected or linked group. This is not a grouping based on any kind of kinship, familial or even social. Membership in this social collective is based on where you happen to be. It is based on the fact that you share the same space as the others. It is quintessential to living in that space. Earlier, this space might have been decided by kinship, when members of an extended family lived more or less near each other. But that is no longer true even in most villages. Now it is mostly other factors – convenience, affordability, availability – that decide where you live. The place becomes important because it affects the way you have to live your life. You may want a large lush lawn, but if your area is prone to water-shortage, you would be wise to refrain from that indulgence. You may want towering trees in your yard, but the electricity lines that cross over may limit your choice. You may want to hold a musical evening on your terrace, but the decibel level that you can pick depends on your neighbours and their tolerance. You may decide that you want to buy a particular make of car, but it is the area you live in that decides whether that car can use the roads that run around your place of stay. And whether there is parking nearby. Then these decisions become not an individual’s choice but a compromise based on the surroundings.
The conveniences and limitations of the surroundings again are not decided randomly. The decisions regarding the surroundings, the conveniences, the development of a particular place are part of a political and social decision made by those who run the government in that place. The people who live there do not have much choice except at the time of elections to give voice to their needs or to protest against inconveniences.
We have yet to acknowledge the need for a collective reaction to the place we live in. While gated communities and apartment buildings have their associations and committees and take decisions these tend to be mostly a matter of form. The feeling of community, the feeling that you are a part of a living organism, and you need to be active to preserve it in a way that adds to the comfort of most people is still a rare phenomenon.
Margaret Thatcher once said that, in today’s world, there is no such thing as society, there were only individual men and women. In a way that is true. The fabric of the society that most people of my generation are familiar with has been torn and life has placed us in communities that do not have ready-made links Therefore, it becomes necessary to cultivate this feeling of community, of living in the same space, of sharing the air and water and light that is available. We have to regenerate a feeling of societal living, we have to create a society that we can be a part of, perhaps first in the immediate neighbourhood, and then expanding further.