A city filled with racist communal gated communities that brook neither diversity nor dissent, an elite echo chamber, with organic food, Netflix, bicycle paths, Saturday night parties and Sunday morning social responsibility activism. It is a glittering success story after all, a rising skyline, its underbelly invisible.Without an iota of doubt, almost everyone who resides in our building is secular, democratic and broad-minded. Yet, we have never ever discussed this, and we do talk a lot about politics, about events, trends, and are obsessed with what is fair, and what is not.The ploy worked like magic. Colonies grew into cities.

We traded them China mold parts Manufacturers away for swimming pools and gated security, cameras and multi-level car parking. Asif is our on-campus plumber, Wasim is our on-call electrician, Rehmat, on retainer, manages our piped gas supply, while Yusuf attends to errands as a carpenter-cum-pest control resource. Or choose to. We used to build our colonies as we believed our country was. We fought against socialism, yet somewhere along the way, secularism died too.Who stole my Muslim neighbour? When did I stop missing his absence? Why did I never notice it before? If done in phases; the first being an outright veto enforced in super-constrained real-estate jungles of Mumbai’s high rises; the second one was perhaps mutually accepted segregation — of voluntary ghettos and separation of zones.

Petty politically-incorrect disputes aside, religious differences were never a burden, most certainly not a blemish to be corrected. Those who never protested when we build colonies in which they had no place, none surprised the gated community had cancerously grown to gulp the nation. Now that the colony has been metamorphosed, who could prevent recasting the country in the image of a gated community?Small towns are aspiring to be rapidly recast in the image of mega-cities, perhaps have the same formulae laid out.Without an iota of doubt, almost everyone who resides in our building is secular, democratic and broad-minded. 

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