Flat culture

Whenever I think back about my childhood and my grandparents house and summer vacations in their house, I remember lush green plants, trees, awesome fresh environment, muddy floor outside the house cleaned with cow’s dung and fresh rangoli, a cow shed with lots of cattle inside, walk a few steps from the house, we see beautiful amazing huge green paddy fields, we would walk through the plants, purposely walk on wet muddy puddles, play in the fields, wash our feet in the clean kutti streams that ran through the fields and it used to be so awesome and so close to nature.

Today most of us are adapting to the environment, hectic life, lifestyle, hi-tech science, and what not and if not all, most of us are ending up living in flats/apartments. We hardly have any greenery in our houses and the only green we can boast of would be some few pots that we have planted – just to give us a natural feeling of being close to nature. If at all we have some greenery or trees around the flat, then that can be considered as a blessing or boon these days. I sometimes wonder when we have kids and grand kids, what kind of memories will we be able to give them? Of our congested flats that look like mere match boxes, the congested roads the minute we step out of the house, the few green plants in our houses which may or may not have survived till then and what about the place to play? On the cemented ground / artificial man made commercial parks? Ofcourse practically speaking, everything has its own reasons of growing population, survival of the fittest context.

Sometimes I pity the upcoming generations, they will definitely miss a lot of things in life what we saw and would want to give them. But how far can we succeed in this? Is the Flat culture really creating a FLAT culture? I wonder…