Gurgaon, a Paradigm of the Rural/Urban conflict

Gurgaon, the millennium city is a city of  rather complex contrasts,  with a rural culture  co-existing with an urban culture!  The other day I accompanied my brothers to the outskirts of Gurgaon and was amazed to see that there was a  confrontation between the rural and the urban  cultures. While there is a profusion of Malls and the so called posh housing societies, and the high rise multiplexes and offices of Multi-National companies and so on, there is a Gurgaon which still harvests wheat and stores dung-cakes in piles. This paradox of two cultures co-existing with each other is represented in the photographs that I have pasted below:

     

    

In the first photograph the piles of dung-cakes in the foreground and the shell of a building in the background highlights a rather sharp contrast between the modern and the traditional! It was amazing to see the field of wheat just ready to be harvested right next to the shell of a modern building!

Development does come at a cost and it could be seen that the up-coming Dwarka Express Way would change the entire landscape and instead of broken down roads, it was hard to imagine cars zipping along!

               

And I wonder what the water buffaloes in the second photograph would would be thinking about the transformation of their landscape and environment! Somehow it appeared as if the buffaloes and their herder had some how been caught in a time trap!

               

I wonder what will happen to all these water bodies, lakes, ponds and wetlands! The Buffaloes will certainly have a difficult time in the future!

                

          

                 

With the sage looking down from his pedestal, I am sure we will see Gurgaon as one of the finest towns of Haryana maintaining a fine balance between the rural culture of the land and the urban culture of the metro! Ultimately, it seems as if Gurgaon would provide fertile ground for the Sociologist interested in studying the phenomenon called Culture Shock! This eye ball to eye ball existence of both cultrures, a western more liberated culture juxtaposed by a more ethnic and traditional culture could time to adjust to! Imagine smoking a Hookah inside an SUV with the A.C. running and the windows rolled down to let the smoke out!

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