Krishnan and I have been cycling around Gurgaon since 2009, almost three years now. Our daily rides and weekend rides were mostly trails and sometimes were road rides. Road was towards Delhi and all the trails were towards Sohna, interiors of Gurgaon. In just three years, most of our rides are road rides, all our trails have been nicely paved and families have moved into apartments along these roads. Sure enough, we have roads that are worse than trails but every day our cycling habitat is lost some more to “developers”….
On one of our rides I found a fish.. intact, not cooked, just dead. Maybe a lake that existed till recently and has dried up to let another set of apartments to come up. There is one vantage point on our daily ride where if you look left you see a copse of trees and you could fool yourself into believing you live in a green planet and just focus a little to the right and you see the concrete jungle advancing rapidly towards you – menacingly !
In three years if this is what could happen, I dread to think of the next three years … the racing cars, the polythene bag eating cattle, stray dogs, apartments, after apartments, after apartments – proof of an advanced civilization. We will soon be buying oxygen to breathe or maybe mutate to live on methane … loss of a cyclists habitat is a loss of green open spaces. Maybe we need to find another “developer”-less satellite town !!
I share your pain (again) on the loss of livable space..its the affliction of the urban world everywhere. But truth be told we are a part of that growing encroachment and cater to it…I can remember Gurgoan with far fewer buildings of any kind..and the upshot of our upward mobility is to occupy one of those apartments that invade habitable space. Another satellite will soon become another Gurgoan…maybe what we should do instead is to re-invent and re-occupy the existing urban space in our cities…much of which we have allowed to rot ..but we dont see that rot…because we have moved…to another Gurgoan.