I woke up this morning to read that Britain would be hit by gale-winds of upto
60 miles per hour. Looking through the windows onto the garden that forms part
of the gated-community I live in, all seemed blissfully calm. This, I realised
is why the middle-class the world over, huddle together and cloister in gated
communities. I took my daughter out and played ball, secure in the knowledge
that no ill could come to our corner of paradise.
Gated communities are an experiment in security and self-sufficiency, just as
religion has been an experiment in the world's largest gated community. At the
heart of this experiment, lies a vain hope that one can insulate oneself from
the vagaries of fate if one undertakes a number of exercises to garner
protection.
All of middle-class morality and aspirations are based on this single premise
that order can be created out of chaos. The rich are callous enough to scoff at
disorder and the poor are too disenfranchised from power to bring about order
in their world. But the middle-class, thanks to the law of averages, lives
under the assumption that order can be ordained either by the Divine or if that
fails, by themselves.
Gated communities are going to continue to burgeon in India, for the same
reasons village panchayats assert their power periodically, because a State and
Central governments have failed to provide basic community infrastructure.
Imagine for a moment, a two-parent working family with toddlers. The traffic in
India, would make it impossible to travel across town to drop the toddlers off
to day-care or preschool and then scurry back to work to undertake a full-day's
worth of corporate servitude.
So, families pool their resources, sell their souls and put in a deposit on one
those properties that promises a creche within its confines. Or imagine sitting
at a government health clinic the whole day to be attended to, whilst thinking
about the report you have to hand-in by mid-day. So they prefer to have a
clinic on-hand. The General Electrics and Standard Chartereds of India have to
be constantly fueled by an army of worker-bees, except these worker-bees are
not privy to any of the amenities which would enable them to function at top
productivity anywhere else in the world.
The sad fact is neither God nor Gated communities can protect us from the
vagaries of fate. It is however, important to understand what lies at the heart
of these motivations and address them rather then condemning the outcome.
(Incidentally, contrary to what is written on Goanet that gated-communities in
Goa cater to the rich from Delhi and Mumbai, I know of many working,
middle-class Goan families that live in gated communities and colonies in Goa).
selma
