Most of us always want to live in a good neighborhood. One of the nice features of good neighborhood is being able to take a nice morning and evening walks and being able to say hi to neighbors.
When I was a child I always wondered why my street didn't have a nice pavement like the ones illustrated in the storybooks. They are there in main streets of my hometown, but I used to wonder would I ever be able to walk on them. So I grew up like that looking for my dream neighborhood.
In 1999 after my marriage I got introduced to the supposed to be most sought after neighborhoods in my home state, the so-called Jubilee Hills. When I decided to explore then I took a morning walk, I did notice there are pavements to walk but no people to look at. I think they are still snoozing in one of their 8 bedrooms waiting for bed coffee from their maidservants. Walk was fine but I was little disappointed for not being able to see the neighbors. For then I settled with looking at the people who work for them (my Americanized mindset wouldn't let me call them servants any more). At least quiet streets and nice buildings positioned it to be a good neighborhood.
Now I go back to the same neighborhood again after 10 years. Thanks to the green awareness of the neighbors and hard work of the people who work for them and thanks to good rainfall in the region in recent years, now I see huge trees and lot of greenery. But the problem is many of them were planted on my favorite pavements, it could be bad planning by municipality or selfishness on part of neighbors. Some neighbors even tried to help (worsen) the situation by fencing the trees or the whole damn stretch along their compound. And some went one step further and customized them as tiny parking lots for futuristic $1000 cars. Some of the trees from inside the private property sticking out their poky branches on the pavement, they even started scratching the head of my 6 year old walking with me who is not even 4 feet tall. Again it’s the bad planning of the city; they have put all dangerous electrical transformers and death holes (man holes) right in middle of them. I had to walk on the road but had to jump back on to those terrible pavements, because the traffic from main streets overflowing into our street honked at me. I was almost like a popping corn in the hot kettle. This was the first time I got mad at going green.
Looks like real pavements unlike the ones in storybooks have some real (redefined) purpose from small ones like providing shelf space to novel causes like going green. Now I kind of started liking my old street in my hometown, the one without pavements, at least it is serving as open ground for rainwater harvesting. Ok now I am done with my obsession for pavements and moving on to think about other issues and exciting things that can keep me busy for rest of my vacation.
