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There goes the neighbourhood

Remember the time you practically lived in your neighbour's house, eating what they did and playing with their kids?

All it took was a call from an old neighbour. "How are you?" the voice at the other end shrieked. "What, you have forgotten us after you have moved? You used to come over almost every other day when you lived here and now there is no sign of you at all."

I rattle off one mobility-challenged excuse after another till the good soul hung up. After recovering, I idly wondered who my new neighbours were. Hmm... There is a an Oriya family next door, two Tamilian families in the floors below me and the couple who are supposed to work day and night at a call centre. I can't remember any of their names. True, they were all there for our housewarming, but we never seem to have progressed since then.

I blamed myself for moving into an apartment which cocoons people into their own private cells. Then along came a friend who was from a part of a city that still has something resembling a neighbourhood. I asked her how much she interacted with her neighbours. Pat came the reply: "A smile here and there... That too if they and I have the time."

She went on to say she knew her neighbours for 19 years but didn't know their names or precious little else. So much for my theory on apartments. Wasn't there a time when we knew neighbours like they were a part of family? Wasn't there a time when you could just pop next door and be greeted with a steaming cup of coffee? Looks like days such as those are just reserved for trips down memory lane we bore our children with.

"Back during my childhood days, anything at home would see a horde of neighbours drop in. Even if a neighbour's relative was getting married, a representative from our house would make it a point to register our presence. I still live in the same house today, but somehow I have not managed to forge the same relationship with the same neighbours," says Vijaya Sunder, 26, of a residential locality.

Sudha Sitaram, Professor of Sociology, says that people-to-people interactions have plummeted over the last few years. "We used to earlier define communities in face-to-face relationships, but it is now within four walls. The scene is not as bad as it is portrayed as the community today has a different kind of orientation. People still care for each other and civic sense still prevails. But the community today is different from its old description. It depends more on the telephone and email."

I asked her how often people land up at their neighbour's unannounced these days.

"The absence of this behaviour comes with lack of time. How often do you have the time to knock on someone's door today?"

But Jayath Kaikini, writer, says that it is not just about time. "It's also about your inner world, your mind. Society — be it a neighbourhood, state or a nation, it's all in your mind. Your interactions depend on how much space you have for others. Today's man is like a telephone diary. You have so many people and in an emergency you don't know which number to call."

Time and spaces are in our own mind, he adds, while saying that nowadays we are more interested in ourselves. "If there is no time, it doesn't take away a neighbourhood. A good public transport system is very important for the collective mind to work. If you have good public transport like in Mumbai, people are together more, and it's not about my scooter, my helmet or my car.

If you don't have community interaction, then it is like being a soap in a soapbox. You are clean and smelling fresh but you are always diminishing."

Children undeniably are a big part of society and play a big role in neighbourhoods. Kaikini says the spread of the apartment culture might actually benefit them.

"In apartments, children play more together because everyone is there. But in a layout you tend to pick and choose. And over-cautious parents take away something that is natural. A child is a child and children will have a childhood in any place. They are innocent and non-judgmental."

ANAND SANKAR

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