DISCOMFORTS OF CITY LIFE

 

 

                                DISCOMFORTS OF CITY LIFE

            Cities are full of several kinds of facilities which are aspired by all and sundry. But they are only one side of the coin which is better than the other side which is full of stress and strain, sickness and stress, noise and clamour, , pollution and breathlessness, loneliness and isolation, costliness and financial strain.

            Whenever I ask a citizen who has migrated from the healthy environment of rural life, are you happy here, his invariable  answer is ‘no’.

            The American writer Nixon Waterman (1859-1944) says in the  last stanza of his poem Far From The Madding Crowd :

            Sometimes it seems to me I must

            Just quit the city’s din and dust

            For fields of green and skies of blue;

            And, say! how does it seem to you?    

 

            In two other stanzas of the same poem, he says:

 

            Not real still stillness ----just the trees’

            Low whisperings or the croon of bees;

            The drowsy tinkling of the rill,

            Or twilight song of whippoorwill.

           

            ‘T would be a joy could I behold

            The dappled fields of green and gold.

            Or in the cool, sweet clover lie

            And watch the cloud-ships drifting by.

 

            In his poem titled The Task written in 1785, the English poet William Cowper (1731-1800) said:

 

            God made the country and man made the town.

            This poem highlights the beauty of the countryside and the ugliness of the city life.

            It also points out “the inherent superiority of the natural world over the artificial constructs of human civilization,”

 

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G.R.Kanwal

2^nd June 2026