Communal living

We have all grown up in a so called 'middle class' upbringing. Joint families, jurassic age neighbors, teachers who have taught your uncles, knowing the number of wrinkles of everyone in your neighborhood..the works. And that's supposed to be Utopia.

Maybe it is. Maybe not. That's not the point. The point is, Hollywood (and then automatically Bollywood and then any wood) INSISTS that 'the golden age has gone'. The age of communal living, sharing, helping, adjusting, frustating...i dont know, i have run out of 'ing' words. But that's maybe because i have never lived in a chawl, or a 'para' or whatever vernacular a commune goes by.

AAAAH! The concept of the chawl! Where else will one find a potboiler such as a chawl, where everyone's worry is everone else's and every joy, sorrow, rage, madness is distributed and broken down in tiny little pieces, so that finally there is nothing left, apart from the numbing dreary meaningless existence where nothing really matters, where it all comes down to the lowest common denominator, who wakes up to fill the buckets, who gets the first shot at the virgin loo, who gets the first steaming loaf of bread from the yawning delivery boy. But then, at the end of day, if u havent done anything of the above, have failed to achieve each and every one of these magnificient tasks, well..the chawl is waiting. You go back, and find other people who are at your level, failures in all that they have attempted today, and cosy, comfortable and cushioned in the communal feeling..that fraternity of failed brotherhood, a brotherhood where everyone is happy, and no one dares voice their deepest, darkest insecurities, where brothers in arms perish together, happy for the warmth, succumbing to that numbing nothingness.

So..which 'chawl' are you in?