“It’s a prescription from the disease, to the diseased”, I wrote when thinking about decarbonization, in the context of “us” from the developing nations, prescribed to by “them” the developed nations. Sitting in the far-away mountains of the Himalayas, on the mud-plastered verandah of my village home, the lens has zoomed in, and I have become “them”- the disease and my village the dis-eased. Today when i see the disintegrating population of my village into a few old houses with few old people - a effect of “palayan”- migration motivated by the search of- education, employment, aspirations, convenient lifestyle, sometimes in that order, sometimes not. When i see the morphing of these few old houses into concrete boxes with metal lids, when i see the hazy-ignorant understanding that i am left with of the deep, collective knowledge of the village, when this is what i see my reflex remains to present solutions.

But soon i find myself realizing how no matter what the solutions are but this very act cuts my experience from its long line of causes- many of which are very local, sometimes national and suddenly creates it as an isolated problem that i begin to look at in the background of some or the other global or national cause(climate change, hyper-consumerism, communalism etc.) justifying the urgency in which it needs to be resolved, suddenly the scale has changed disproportionately. The nuances of the local & the personal, flattened out, the sense of “time” hijacked.

Today if i even try to imagine why would an urbanized population come back to the village and if they do, in what way will they engage? will they inflict what was inflicted unto them, under the sweet name of urbanization. i try to imagine why would homes still be made of stone and mud, when they cycle of its maintenance and the feasibility of its sources and the value of “time” has all been changed, weakened and exploited. i try to imagine how someone like me, exposed early to the cellularising world of a modern city- where the individual’s consciousness, development, rights  are to be of the highest importance and everything else a derivation of it- can even begin to value the collective consciousness, knowledge of a village, slow cooked and assimilated over generations, authoritative yet tolerant sometimes, messy and violent at other times.

So should it then be left to take its course, hoping for self-organized forms of resistances and rethinking to emerge from the within, by them, for them. Maybe yes, a healthy community can think, it can resist, and it can figure its own priorities, the only value the disease can provide the diseased is to be let open, to present itself in its most constrained and un-harmful way for its own dissection, for them to see what filth lies at the heart of it. For them to see through the eyes of the perpetrators and best figure for themselves not just their defense but their action forward.

"Cities have been seen as generators of employment, economy, goods, and aspirations. But at the same time, cities allow for the creation of multiple kinds of urban living, and these are reflected in the form of the city. The everyday lives of people in cities depend on several external factors (work, leisure, services, etc.), and the aspiration of the people always remains to function in sync with all of them. The importance given to these external factors generates the urgency to act, producing hurriedness in the process.

People in cities experience hurriedness—the constant need to move and work at an eager speed—under the influence of various working and living conditions. Different places experience different levels of hurriedness in the city.

This hurriedness is blatantly noticeable in metro cities at several instances. Whether it's a small purchase made at a street vendor in complete haste, often using simple monosyllabic communication, or an automobile driver always attempting to "make the next light." A quick cup of coffee or cutting chai is gulped, and people have breakfast standing on the road at a fast footstall before reporting to work. At the station, one dashes in haste to get aboard a local train, which will be followed in five minutes by another. In these, as well as several other subtler processes of hurriedness, the city or the immediate environment is experienced in a very different way compared to strolling through the same place.

These experiences of hurriedness become evident and noticeable when a person moves, either from one city to another or within a city. For example, when a person living in a metropolitan city visits a second-tier city, it is common to hear them exclaim how the ambiance of the place felt extremely laid back. This general statement made often about cities being slower or faster is essentially saying that the experiential time of the people in either of these cities expands or compresses beyond what the people are used to in their everyday lives. This expansion/ compression changes the experience, and hence the image of the place.

The image of a place is crucial to the way people develop associations with it. For example, people in metro cities nearing the age of retirement often express a longing to move to a particular town or second-tier city. One of the reasons is that these places have less hurriedness, and there's a belief that it will allow for a peaceful and stress-free life. This notion of relating the absence of hurriedness in a place to the quality of life is not limited to a specific age group, but even the idea of a vacation for a metro city dweller usually involves escaping from the city to a less hurried life, even if it is for a small period of time. These examples from within the city show how experiences of hurriedness in the city may also have implications for the city itself.

Hurriedness might also have a spatial character that it generates. When we talk about space for an individual, it can be generated through three means:

- the experience of the form and its characteristics (the idea of the container),

- the people around him/her and their activities, social position, character, etc. (the social space),

- and the space created by his/her own state of mind and body (the space of the self).

Hurriedness is the experience generated by a place on an individual. This hurriedness of the self-and/or social hurriedness both change the space the individual. The change is more in the sense of space (perception), which may then cause a change in the physical form, or the way spaces are appropriated.

This relation of hurriedness of a city and the space that creates it or the space that gets created seems to be an interesting enquiry, which could enable one to generate a new lens for evaluating spaces in cities and their relationship with people."

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