I, V, M. It's likely less fine this time because the absence of Chukhula is away watching a concert by small-time band Dream Theatre Tiny little local band is Schumer, they have to go to Singapore and all that. All the way. But not again, though Chukh, I don't think will take too kindly to his favourite band of all time, small time.
I guess so, but I will teach him to take Kajoliv like this one. He's not there. But seriously judging from the things he's been posting on FBN WhatsApp, he's extremely overcome by the entire experience and I think he will forgive me anything this time. I mean if you can produce another pick of like John Turtruch your some other fellow if you can give him then anything he'll forgive really.
Anyway though, nothing forget Chuck, what else has been happening? There is some ghastly news in the world these days, this horrific shooting that happened in Las Vegas, where the randomly one fellow decided to gun down like 60 odd people from a hotel building. And now there's this, I mean, it's just now everyday news for the US almost, right? There's just one shooting after the other.
And at the time we are recording this, nothing much is known about the guy who did it, except that he was not from the usual suspects. So he's not a Muslim terrorist, or he's not any of those things, the regular white guy. And one thing that just recently came out of the year that he was a millionaire. He's actually a very rich guy, who is a rich, middle-aged old man, who had like the stockpile of guns.
He had no criminal record, just randomly decided to go up a building and shoot some people down. That's very unusual. And there is a lot of clamor for gun control. There's a lot of clamor against gun control.
But in a way, I'm happy it's not one of the usual ISIS bunch, because things are pretty bad as it is in the US. And yeah, so it's depressing. And there's depressing news just continues, when we talk about stuff near the home, and there was this horrific stampede on the railway pedestrian bridge at Infinstin. And it's a bridge that we all have used at somewhere.
It's really hit hard for us, especially because it's a bridge that we all have used at some point in time, walked across. It's like an everyday thing. And suddenly, the premise of it also was so horrifying that it was raining and people didn't want to go out. And then there's like behind someone, there's a rumor that there's an electrical explosion or something, and just like that stampede happens.
So you think stampedes happen like at religious places where there are thousands of people. And then you don't realize that could just happen at like when you're on your way to office or something. As someone pointed out, I read this in the paper that when people are really packed very tightly, the entire dynamics of that bunch changes a lot. So they start behaving differently.
It's like fluids and it's very, very dangerous. And a lot of this situation needs to be understood and implemented by planners. So planners should know that you cannot have a concentration or more than a certain number of people at one point of time. And there needs to be something to be done about it, which was completely lacking in this situation.
Yeah, I mean, it's almost like there's this, somewhere I read this theory that on a rough and ready basis, the IQ of a mob, you can just take the average IQ of the mob and divide it by the number of people in the mob. It's the IQ overall, like you are the actual mob. If you have 20 people with an IQ of 140, you suddenly just have an IQ of like 20 odd over there if you divide it by the mob. Very true.
But anyway, I hope, I very sincerely hope people take this seriously and do something concrete about it. So anyway, let's move on to some less depressing stuff. Like maybe your trip in a new reason. Well, I don't know that it's less depressing because it was bloody hot, but I went recently to Dubai.
And it was very, very, very hot. And because one of my customers is a factory. So I spend a lot of time on the shop floor. And shop floors are really hot.
So just stand there and get wet. And really my heart goes out to the people who work there in the UAE. It's really, really hot, but it still managed to put in eight hours a day. I really don't know how that happens.
But apart from that, Dubai was a delight this time because it wasn't crowded for some reason. Very nice. And yeah, went around, shopped a lot, spent a lot of money, ate a lot of good, interesting things. And flew back.
So I have this, every time I fly, I have this, I've never done it, but I have this brilliant idea to take revenge on the stewardess. So yeah, so on the bottom of the body do is you buy almonds from a shop outside. Then you enter the flight. And this only works for the Dubai India flights or India Dubai flights.
So you take the almonds, you ask the erosters for a bowl. And then you put all the almonds in a bowl. And then you tell all your neighbors that the airline is giving almonds. They actually get huge.
Two of brains were very cold. Nice, nice rolling. The four ladies are very highly stressed. I was speaking about food.
I mean, I recently went to Singapore and being vegetarian is always interesting when you go to the forest. And there, for real enough, I discovered that it was a near the place I was staying. There was a fully vegetarian Chinese restaurant. They mean Chinese when they say Chinese.
It's not the masala pack thing that they give over here. So I was really curious. I went over there. Turns out that they have, so the menu, and I opened the menu, it says, it has this green full vineyard outside and says, everything is vegetarian.
You go inside, they have beef and oyster and everything in the menu. I'm just looking, I was like, why did you say it's a vegetarian restaurant and you have all of this? He's like, sir, all of this is vegetarian. I'm like, how?
It's all made from soy. Wow. So it's apparently beef flavored like beef, but it's made of soy. Oyster is made out of some vegetarian components.
So did you, did you? I was here for a different point. It's a defeat. I'm sure it was great for recovering non-vegetarians or something like that.
But for me, it was just pointless because I was like, I've gone there to eat food that does not taste like meat. You're giving me veg food that tastes like meat. So it was very self-defeating. But they had some good stuff.
So I discovered a couple of nice places and overall had a great trip. Anyway, so by the way, let's visit one of our usual sections called the Profundity of the Week. This week's Profundity comes from our dear friends who have now become fans of the section and has started supplying us with ammunition to go with it. So this one is all about, so let me go through it.
It says, smile or fat-free, sugar-free and also tax-free. Reduces blood pressure, helps relieve pain and depression, require no batteries, absolutely free of cost. So keep smiling, live, love, laugh, good morning. So I mean, this is full health benefit based, right?
And it also, it also gives this entire perspective of, okay, when shared in a family group, everyone resonates from one part of that. You're a miracle blood pressure. You're a miracle fat-free. But what I, it never ceases to amaze me is that somebody has actually sat down, okay, and composed this and it has a nice background domain.
I know, yeah. I think that. So it fascinates me that people actually put man hours into trivial life. But then we also have government where pretty much the same thing happens.
We also have simplified people. We also have simplified people. Really? Really?
So maybe we should. So pot-killing the whole thing. Yeah, I know. I'm sure in an alternate universe our podcast is the Profundity of someone else's.
This is what they're saying. On that note, let's move to the topic of the week. Nary, what are we talking about today? Well, I want to talk about cities.
Oh, cities. Well, we're living in a pretty big one right now. But what about it? You want to talk about it?
Oh, lots. And maybe we should take a little break and be right back and then expound our views on the great topic that is urbanization. Be right back. Stay tuned.
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So what happens when someone who's lived her whole life on the court decides to bring those two worlds together? I'm Sanya Mirza, and I'm bringing you a brand new podcast, Serving It Up with Sanya. I've had some incredible conversations with friends, fellow athletes, artists and entrepreneurs. Each episode starts with the game of Pickleball and once the rallies are done, the real job begins.
Serving it up with Sanya, watch and listen on YouTube and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And we're back with the topic for today, which is City. So what I was, you know, how this all started for me was the episode at Elphinston Road. I found it deeply disturbing and sad that it had to happen.
And then I thought about what it is, you know, because we have the usual stuff, you know, everyone talks about the spirit of Bombay. We've had bomb blas, we have had floods, we've had fire, we had water all. And the city still moves. And it's not even the big, big, big, big stuff like every day, some of the other poor sort is dying falling off the train.
Yeah, and some of it is often serious because you'll have accidents where dozens of people die or something or the other keep. And everything in India, everything is at a magnified scale of 10. So like, if there's a tiny accident then 50 people die in a stampede because it's just so crowded. Correct.
So the question that, you know, that occurred to me is what is it that keeps driving the city? And I refuse to believe in things like the spirit of the city and its unique and Bombay and so on and so forth. It's not, it's a bunch of people who are really desperately trying to earn a livelihood and they cannot afford to sit at home. They have to get out of the house and go to work regardless of whether there's a bomb, whether there's a fire, whether there's a flood or whether there's a bridge collapse, anything.
And the question is, what is it about a city that makes people so desperately want to live in it? Yeah, because there was this, I mean, there's this amazing book by Ual Noah Harari called Sapiens which talks about the evolution of humans and how we started off as hunter-gatherers. And the human in general has been a lone wolf kind of species. Or a tribe at least.
A small tribe which nomadic tribe that keeps moving around and has acres of space to it. So while you may not have a settlement where you'll have some protection, you have this whole world as your oyster and you're moving around the city. So what he says is, nowhere in our genetic makeup is settlement necessary. Settlement necessary.
And that all came about because of agriculture which later on resulted in us all living in one coop together. And actually he makes a great point where he says that living in cities is great for humans as a species because it allows us to pack more numbers of our species into a smaller space. But for the individual person, the individual of that species, the life is actually quite miserable because you have limited living space, you have limited resources, you're rationing everything, you have to live with so many other people avoid conflicts on those accounts. So it's great for us as a species and our evolution has been such and it's a paradox almost that we do something that we all gravitate towards doing something that we all hate, but still end up living like almost like cockroaches in a very small space.
And so that's why it's very interesting to see how cities are considered to the pinnacle of human civilization where actually people can theoretically are the most miserable. But there is also a very, very strong point of view one which I subscribe to as well, which says that cities by themselves have evolved to a point where they offer a lot of things which not living in a city makes it impossible to have. For example, in Bombay, you could probably find Lebanese food and Greek food and Japanese food and the regular Indian family. But in a small village in Maharashtra, maybe 200 kilometers from here, you won't get any of these.
So that entertainment commutes, so somebody living in a small village in Maharashtra has to go to a school, he probably has to catch an ST bus and go for 20 miles and the ST bus is probably twice a day. So commutes are long, they're not convenient. Where in the city, you don't even have to think about your department of house, you catch an auto, not available catch up bus, not available catch a train or whatever. So that brings me to another point that you were mentioning before we started the podcast about a lot of these things, actually coming in as luxuries and then morphing into necessities.
So tell me something about that. Yeah, so it comes across, so what it says is again, reference to Cpns, it talks about this thing called the luxury trap where it says that humans started off as they discovered farming and they discovered agriculture and crops and that was a good source of food. So what felt like a luxury suddenly became a necessity. Now grain is necessary for food.
And similar, you cannot afford to hunt for a rabbit or star if you don't get a rabbit. And what also happens is he also talks about the luxury trap being such that now because of the luxuries that the city offers, like you have an ability to get food, you have an ability to get shelter and security, the hunter-gatherer man or woman was completely self-sufficient. They knew how to protect themselves, they knew how to build their own tools, they knew how to hunt, skin, cook everything for themselves. But now we have evolved to a point or devolved really where many of us don't have any of the basic skills to survive by ourselves.
We are dependent on that. So for example, I personally have no ability to cook. So but yeah, left to yourself, you're probably even star because I wouldn't have an option. I would either eat raw food, but I have no ability to make food by myself.
But I have no luxury of having someone else make your food for you is a necessity now before me. So that is the luxury trap where once you are in a luxury. So you can't get out of this area. Once you are in a luxury, it becomes a necessity for you.
That is where actually cities play a big role where you assume these things are luxuries, having the ability to get food, having the ability to get transport. And suddenly before you realize that they're all necessities and absolute mandatory is few. So coming back to another point that we were discussing about cities being unpleasant places to live in as compared to the wide open spaces. This had echoed a lot among many thinkers and people in England because they were the first to experience rapid urbanizing the squalor of urbanization because of the industrial revolution.
And industrial revolution is pretty bad. So a lot of people cram in small places, get over dirty streets, so on and so forth. So a planner or a gentleman actually by the name of Ebenezer Howard thought that this was too squalored and we should have garden cities. So you should have cities with huge idea of gardeners really, really enormous.
So we're talking about 25,000 people in 6,000 acres. So it's like enormous. And 6,000 acres though, I think we can have the population of Australia basically as far as we are concerned. And they built those cities, those enclaves in cities and it was great for the privileged people.
And they could go back and forth in their carriages and later in their motor cars. But for a lot of the ordinary folk, it was painfully distant. You just couldn't go and come for work and things like that. So they continue to stay in their ghetto.
They continue to stay in small clusters. And they evolved or at least society evolved if not as individuals to start liking living in close spaces. OK. And from there started a concept of a living city.
So somewhere along the way, there's this lady named Jane Jacobs, a great thinker and a political commentator. And I think she's one of the Pulitzer Prize and also sure journalist in America who was effortlessly protested the efforts to plan Manhattan. And she said that sidewalks are the places that become safe if they are widely used. So if there are many different kinds of people, different situations, different times, different things happening there, all the time, there are always eyes on the sidewalk.
And suddenly that sidewalk becomes a very safe place. So a lot of things, and then later she extended this concept and they started calling it or analyzing it as complex adaptive systems. So basically they're saying it's cities, you can't plan it. You can't have a garden here or a building here and things like that compartmentalize and decide how people should live their lives.
Because people are not going to live their lives according to your life. According to how your planner thinks. And they say that you have to treat them as a complex adaptive system, which means a bunch of different systems which are all dependent upon each other. So it's a very lacy fair attitude.
You let it grow by itself. So one of the nice things that came out in one of Amit Varma's episodes in his podcast, Seen and the Unseen, was about slums. And for most of us, because we don't live in slums and we think slums are very eye-sourced. We better read of it.
Yeah, I mean, there's always a drive to reduce the amount or number of slums in the city. You have made the dictator of India for a day. You'll probably say, OK, get rid of all these slums. They're a nice, very nice plan blocks of flags.
I think they made a movie about it called Naik. But anyway, yeah. So it would be a disaster. It would probably be a disaster.
And one of the big reasons why it would be a disaster is slums form a very important entry point for a lot of rural people who come and who continue to come into the city. So people sort of come into the cheapest place they can find, land up there, find work. Then some of them do well. They move on and other people come to places like this.
It also is a place for, so India as a country is, I mean, the one of the big reasons why all forecasts are available at India and China will do, India specifically actually will do really well in the coming years is because of this concept called a demographic dividend, mainly that the fact that India's birth rate has stayed strong throughout the 90s and into the early, into the 2002, this day it continues to remain strong, which means we have more young people than older people, which a lot of other countries, the majority of the countries around the world don't. They have low birth rates, some have even negative in European countries, they have negative birth rates. So that means we have a huge number of young people. And that means we have no birth of people to employ.
And therefore, all the odd jobs that the cities require, especially cities the size of Mumbai, which millions and millions of people, the backbone of all the essential services that happen come from these slums, where these people live and the reason they can manage to live and the salaries that they make, the amount of money that they make, they are able to sustain themselves and their families because they are living in these slums and they are able to work from there. So it actually... They use very, very few resources actually, when one family of five can live in a 10 by 10 space, they are really using it very, very efficiently. And often add a great deal of physical discomfort to themselves.
But here I'm talking from personal experience, we have a maid and she walks a couple of kilometers to come to our place too. She does some odd jobs, sweeps the floor and goes back. And she never misses the day, but she's always smiling. And she's really very inspirational, because her life is terrible.
Actually, if you are, I had to live in her world, you would be crushed because a really small house is very far from wherever she works. And there's a lot of squabbling around and a lot of squabbling happens, a lot of fights, a husband is a drunkard, so on and so forth. But it continues to be a source of life for her because she's very connected. So she knows all the neighbors, she has friends here, friends there, everything happening, Gunpati times, festivities, Durga times is more festivities.
The festivities all the time, somebody's getting married, somebody's doing something or the other happening. So slums have a life of their own and so do cities. It's almost like a paradox, right? Like you said, you're maid, she really had this drive to move to the city and all the city dwelling people always dream of that and I want to move to the village and stuff like that.
Yeah, and I've had an interesting experience one. So one of my wife's relatives lives in Koor, so we went there and it's a beautiful place. Koor gives us rolling hills and green all the year round and it's beautiful temperature. The weather is a pleasant 18 years.
Everyone knows that, it's like transformed. So I went there and I really love to play. So I've asked my host and I found out that the price of an acre of land is less than the cost of a one room kitchen apartment in Bombay. So I said, what Shilah, what we'll do is, we'll just settle on here.
We'll buy a place, we'll settle on whatever we have in Bombay. Buy a place here and live happily ever after. So she told me, okay, one condition, that you come home and then you last 24 hours without your internet, without your phone and without any kind of connection to the outside. Well, just no books, nothing.
Okay, you can read books, but you can't. So I said, peace out, 24 hours, get 48 hours, we'll carry on. And I couldn't last, I couldn't last 60 minutes. I was 60 minutes later.
I was dying to know about what people are saying on Twitter. Yeah, you know. And the rolling hills would have your voice of sobbing. That's all over there.
So we are addicted to being connected. So being connected is... That's our luxury trap. That's the luxury trap.
That's the luxury trap we are so used to. And we get settled into it. And then afterwards, moving to any of the other places, no matter how beautiful they might be, which is becomes like, we have now gotten used to living like cockroaches almost. I remember one of our very good friends, Chuck's wife, she had gone to Istanbul and they had gone to the Hagia Sophia over there in Istanbul.
And they got massive, it's huge palace. And we just got like this. So they went to this massive room, which was just the turban room. So everyone would keep their turban's over there and all.
And so everyone's taking in the beauty and the marble and everything and they're just standing there saying, so many 2vhks could be there. Oh yeah. So basically once you've settled in Bombay, you're just seeing 2vhks spaces everywhere. That's where you're at.
But yeah. And there is another big part of city planning, which a lot of people, a lot of us ignore it, which is parking. So while every place you go to, you're almost assumed that you will have like a... There has to be, they have to provide for parking.
And everyone's willing to pay some nominal fee for that parking. And in the city you go to places, because everyone's skipping about the lack of parking and all that stuff. But when you think of it, we're being astronomical amounts like for rent. But there is like parking is always assumed to be free or nominal.
And that's a very big paradox when it comes to city planning. When you look at it that way, that's how the city is developed. Actually, I was reading something about this on this website called Vox. And they have this piece they talk about where, when Ford's revolution, the Molotie Ford and the revolution happened, and basically cars got democratized and everyone was buying them.
It was chaos initially, because everyone was parking wherever they saw fit. And there were no rules or regulations or anything. In fact, the Molotie Ford came out in the late, towards the end of the World War I, which was in 1990-1920, and the parking meter, which was the only first measure of regulating parking, was invented in 1930. So I can imagine the chaos in those 10 years.
It was a neutral malad-west. During 20 years. So it was madness. And then, so one day it was the parking meter, which actually regulated the way people would park and all that stuff.
And the second thing that they did was, cities started mandating all establishments to include parking. So planned for parking include a certain amount of parking lot. That must be part of the zoning laws. You want to license to build anything if you don't include parking.
And it's become this way that most establishments have almost 300 to 200 to 300 times more parking space as floor space than the space for their own establishment. And they do this because they have to provide those lots. And the second thing is cities did this because they wanted more cars and more cars and more consumers. And it's almost the base of capitalism in some way.
Because it has linkages to all other sectors of the town. If you don't provide parking, people don't come over there. It reduces economic activity. People stop moving around cities and stuff like that.
And what this again later did, and everyone still continues to assume that parking is free. But what it does is, I mean, there's a retailer, he's going to provide that much floor space. He's going to transfer the cost somewhere else. If he needs to pay for it.
So that is basically raising the cost of all the goods and commodities that you buy. So when you go to a mall or you go to a Zara or an H&M and all that stuff, and you're paying $2,000 for a pair of jeans or $5,000 for a pair of jeans, you can almost, I think if you were to put some basic math into it, calculate how much you're paying for parking out of those jeans. And it also raises the cost for people who are not utilizing that parking. Because it's an unfair tax on people who walk to work for the public transportation.
So that matter. So I mean, when you look at it that way, parking itself is a big part of the economy. Because if you were to eliminate parking and mandate people, walk everywhere and or take public transport, suddenly retailers will be more competitive and start slashing prices because they no longer need to pay for the exorbitant. And then more retailers because there's more space for the competition.
Overall, it would change something as mundane as parking. It would just become, I mean, I think that the song Big Hello Taxi makes a lot of sense. They have paid paradise to put up a parking lot. That makes a lot of sense, therefore, because you're actually...
You're paving an entire city, so much of a city. If you look from the sky, that's what now where Sanhansa's aliens looked at earth from a distance and saw and they'd be like, okay, the dominant life form in this world is cars. Because everyone seems to be moving in the loading and city. I read another interesting fact.
Apparently, urban spaces, they're called urban heat islands. Because there is so much paving, or the natural heat-sinking abilities of the earth don't work there. And urban areas tend to be one to three degrees hotter than rural areas. And in a hot country like ours, that is actually a pretty bad thing.
And our response is to have more air conditioning. Which, in fact, increases the heat overall. So, yeah, I mean, this is all... I mean, very...
I think what we can kind of sum up with is that cities... Like you said, they're all interconnected systems. Humans, like any organism, adapt themselves to live in a certain way. There are a whole bunch of byproducts that come out of this method of living.
That either are harmful for the humans themselves who live in the cities like we've seen with the Elf Instant Road incident. Or the ecosystem that they live in, and the world around. And how these motions of people work in that way. So, I think more than anything else, more intelligent, more organic, thinking around how cities are structured and how they need to be allowed to grow.
And how people can live in them is required so that we can kind of have a more intelligent way of living rather than in smaller and have such horrible incidents happen. Yeah. So, that's the sum of the podcast for today. Is that cities are growing systems and they have a life of their own.
They're incredibly complex. And it's something that all of us need to sort of just keep studying and observing and thinking. Because it's too complex for even us to simplify. So, see you guys.
Stay tuned and see you in a fortnight's time. Bye-bye.