Yo hai Jila GajiyaBaad!!!

The Place is really as rustic as it sounds by the title of this post, and the irony is that we tend to picture it as this new up and coming hip city because of the other, very suave title it is associated with - National Capital Region(NCR).

Yes Ghaziabad is indeed very close to Delhi, and gets special attention from all corners because of that. The Industrialists come here to setup factories, builders build large colonies, with lines and lines of residential towers that are inhabited by the salaried middle class, that works for the industrialists or large corporations, and barely scrapes through after paying the high rents of these apartments. The same builders build posh malls and multiplexes that are crowded by the same middle class at the same exorbitant prices. And the common man contents himself by repeatedly telling himself that he is living in NCR, and the cost of living is ought to be this high when you live in a place of such importance. But, is it really?? And if it is, do the authorities do enough to justify the feeling.

Why does an 18 year old girl suffer after taking an auto at 8 pm in the evening, no she is not taking an auto from some secluded part of the city with no one around, she is taking from the gates of the poshest mall in the city with at least 500 people around her if not more. And this is not the middle of the night, all the shops are still open, people are hustling and bustling from here to there. She has taken a sharing auto yes, but what is wrong in that? was that her only mistake that night? it seems it was. Because she didn't know that it was a stolen auto and the 3 or 4 guys sitting in it were the thieves themselves along with the driver.
She was taken to the fields of the nearby village and gang-raped and left there crying for help, 3 or 4 hours before she could get any. I don't claim to present the exact facts here, I am no journalist covering this story, all this I have known from the news and local rumor mills. And its horrifying. For a common man living here, returning from work every evening, you look back at every corner you turned, you drive fast so you can get home early, you keep in touch with your loved ones so they know you are safe, the moment you reach home you call them and tell them everything is fine and you have reached the safe confines of your house.

Commuting after sunset has become a daily battle in our lives, and its not just because of this one gang-rape incident, its also because of the numerous other ones, like when they rob you of your 30k phone by just showing a knife, or they snatch a women's chain and drag her behind their bike just because she won't let go, when she does, she is left crying on the road with  a bloodied neck, or when they show you a gun, take your atm card, ask you the pin, one of them goes to the atm and gets the money and the other one stays with you, only when he has got the money and has come back does he let you go. There are numerous such stories that go unreported and the rest of the world doesn't even know about them, but we do get to know, because the victim is always someone related to some friend of a friend who is telling you the story. And we always get the feeling, are we next???

All this tells me that the Ghaziabad of NCR is still living in the shadows of Ghaziabad of UP, where lawlessness and crime is the order of the day, I am not saying that Delhi is a very safe place, but Ghaziabad is a little less. Maybe because of its close proximity to a major crime center of UP- Meerut. Or maybe because amidst all the glitter and pomp, the malls and the towers, the majority of the city's original inhabitants are still impoverished and live in slums, or temporary homes made out of the construction sites for Software technology parks, how ironic is that.

Well, the same city also inhabits the super rich, the wealthy farm-lords, who never pay taxes, because essentially they are farmers, but the inherited wealth is so much that you see BMWs and Audis parked in the muddy gullies of the suburban villages of the city.

Doesn't it paint a scary picture of the city, the super-rich in prosperity, the struggling middle class, and the frustrated lower class that's quickly turning towards crime. And a government that doesn't give a damn,(yes I have not said anything about the authorities here because I didn't want to make this sound like another government-bashing post, but really, they don't give a damn)
A perfect recipe for doom. Have we seen this picture somewhere before? wait a minute, this is the story of India, isn't it?

This doom can be prevented only if the authorities become proactive and take some hard steps, will they? or will they not?? I don't know. Maybe the Delhi Govt. should also take up some responsibility, this is NCR after all, we don't know if anything will ever happen, all we can do is hope, so here's hoping that Ghaziabad doesn't always remain Delhi's underprivileged half-brother, instead, gets some of his own share of the pie.