Ever wondered why you are getting all the aches and pains, as if the nuts and bolts holding your joints are giving way? Or the constant headaches, the itches and the bouts of sneezing that leave you teary eyed and red faced. Not to forget the respiratory disorders, or the unexplained chills in the night besides the stomach disorders. Or the dreadful thoughts that greet your waking day as you wonder what awaits you in the journey through the day. Stop a minute and reflect. Do the following signs sound all too familiar?
Roads that are dug up and not re-laid; garbage dumped on the roadside; unstriped humps higher than prescribed normal norms; stinking wayside open urinals ; newly laid footpaths with loose tiles thanks to shoddy work; waste scattered all over due to improper loading onto the trucks; open lorries carrying soggy waste, leaving behind a trail of telltale sign and stench; branches chopped off and rotting away for months, come rain or sun simply because both BBMP and Bescom think it’s the other’s responsibility; uneven pavements or pavements dug up to construct better ones but with the debris left heaped by the wayside, narrowing the road and causing inconvenience to motorists and pedestrians.
Add to this, people riding two wheelers on the pavement to bypass the heavy traffic snarls during peak hours; heaps of cable wires lying dangerously on the roads; dirty uncleared dustbins swarming with flies and stray dogs, inviting an epidemic outbreak; mindless concreting of footpaths around trees which chokes the roots, depriving them of water and respiration and ending up in toppling them during the monsoons; storm water drains that carry sewage water in low lying areas, lakes that have gone dry all because the inlet sources have been plugged to give way to high rise apartments…Or the floods caused by nature’s fury as the skies open up, simply because we have no means to save the precious water that goes waste due to unmindful exploitation of the green cover and the tank beds.
Look no further. You are in the IT capital and Silicon Valley of India! The solution to your ailments? Fret not. World class medical centres are at your disposal to cater to every need of yours. Be it to treat the ear, nose, throat, heart, lungs, kidney or eyes – we have them all. All, almost at your doorstep! Never mind if you have to sell your soul. For, doesn’t everybody have a right to thrive?
Do you yearn for the days when ‘full many a flower was born to blush unseen. And waste its sweetness on the desert air’, as in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a country church yard’? Alas! Those were the days of yore. Aren’t we now in the twenty first century, keeping abreast with the best in science and technology, aiming for the stars, to be among the super powers? And don’t we need all those flyovers of concrete and iron and those gleaming glass structures rising high into the sky where thousands of our young people spend the best years of their lives, upsetting their biological clock, and getting ‘burnt out’ even before the age of forty-five all for the sake of a better quality of life? So why crib?
