An original species

At the edge of civilisation, there is a door. It is something like Alice's looking glass. I am there every day: knocking, sometimes bangi...

At the edge of civilisation, there is a door. It is something like Alice8217;s looking glass. I am there every day: knocking, sometimes banging, pleading to be let in. Most of Delhi is at that door. Around me, lie the ravages of an ancient world. And beyond, the bright lights which only beckon from a distance. These lights are like the trees you see from a train. They always stay at an equal distance from you, never near or far.

Living with water was something I had taken for granted. At the turn of a tap, I had achieved separation. At the press of a light switch, I had become an outsider. With the power to watch people. A city child on a vacation to the countryside, watching black ants carrying tiny bitty leaves to a cavity in the ground.

Then I came to Delhi and joined the ant-walk. With a rationed water supply from the Delhi Jal Board, I remember E.R. Braithwaite. I exist. I don8217;t live. I am now a guinea pig on its little merry-go-wheel. Every step that takes me nowhere just goes to prove the veracity ofDarwin8217;s theory of evolution. At 6 p.m. and beyond, with every passing minute that the bathroom tap refuses to gush, I become a character in a great Truman Show. I am surviving. That8217;s what this city has done to me. I am nearer now than ever before to the origins of human kind.

New humanity 8212; they are a species now, which has somehow managed to cut the survival factor out of its collective life. Do they ever hunt for food, perhaps in pretty neighbourhood shopping malls 8212; the hunting has transmogrified into a debate on which tin of fish is better.

The only way to get the excess, perhaps vestigial, adrenalin out of the system is to go bungee-jumping, sky-diving, or even write a book. If they fall ill they have medicine. And they can even predict natural disasters.If only Darwin could see us now 8212; the human super animal 8212; specifically those of us in the First World. The arrival of the Internet is a sign. The information superhighway is the unshackled human mind, the tight coils of the human brainbeing laid out into hundreds of kilometres of pure information. It is the final distillation. A human-size big bang. One who surfs the Net is wafting away from the streams of evolution 8212; into another form of being. Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Darwin would have loved Delhi. The majority are struggling in the shadowlands between the old and the new.

Fat Neanderthals, and Australopithecans 8212; analyse the sentence 8212; the adjective is out of place 8212; from all that we know of these people did they ever get obese. Somehow I can8217;t imagine them fat. That8217;s new humanity for you. Hundreds of years of hunting, searching for food boils down to 15 km on the exercycle, calorie meters on the tread mill and endless cans of shiny food in the city-like department store. Like the Fat Boy Slim single 8212; Right Here Right Now 8212; doing the rounds of the music channels: Three hundred and fifty billion years ago there was a blob, which passed through several stages of natural selection to end up as a fat man on acity bench. This battle for water and power at the edge of civilisation has taken away my detachment, my power to look at this society and consider. Because I am no longer outside looking in. The Return of the Body Snatchers has come to pass in Delhi 8212; a society of automatons 8212; which live around voltage fluctuations, and clumsy transport networks, that make the city one giant gas chamber 8212; has taken over my functions.

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My eyes glazed, I live one day to the next on the wrong side of Alice8217;s one-way looking glass. With the misfortune of being able to see the other side and the wonders that new humanity has created there.