is everything new necessarily progress?

I left my hometown Dombivli in 1991 and shifted to the city. But my entire childhood was spent in this sleepy town. I lived for twenty-two years in the town and the first fourteen years of those, in a small chawl with sixteen tenants where everyone knew everything about everyone. Yes… it was one of those places that we read about in books these days and say, “How sweet!” But we didn’t think it was so sweet those days… Electricity failure every three days, water supply only two hours everyday, clogged drainages… No maintenance of the surroundings and many more issues made us curse it often. As children, though we enjoyed the greenery around, the waterfalls in the neighborhood and small beautiful houses that made the area quaint, we always dreamt of a better life with modern amenities, fulltime water and colored walls. Except for two families in the vicinity, no one had television… or for that matter even a refrigerator. And then came change in the form of progress. A builder bought the property from our landlord. The builder was suddenly our manna from the heaven. The blue print to a new building complex unfurled amidst great excitement. We all looked forward to the new world of cement and concrete… of self-contained flats that would save us from the prying eyes of our neighbors. In a period of two years our lives had changed. We were now living in the world that we saw on television. New house, new taps, new fans, new lights and yes all the amenities… My father bought us television; a refrigerator and we even installed a water heater – the ultimate luxury. Our copper boiler went into the attic. The new mixer took over from the black grinding stone… and slowly we all slipped into the `modern’ life that we were secretly dreaming through our childhood. In this din we completely ignored the fact that our builder who’s blueprint involved only five buildings had got a sixth building constructed in the area where a garden was meant to come… But so what? After all he had helped us so much… he was allowed to be greedy! And that was just the beginning. The year was 1983… The new era had begun… There would be no more old problems… It’s twenty-three years since then and I have come to spend a couple of days with my parents in our flat… It’s raining heavily outside and the entire city has come to a stand still. I sit at the balcony with a cup of tea and can’t help but wonder what had changed really. The water had clogged everywhere in the building owing to its faulty drainage system and was overflowing, almost threatening to flow into the electric meter box… The fuse had been plucked away by the electricity board for the fear of a short circuit… The water problem had reached a crescendo and for the last ten years there has been only two hours water supply… power cuts were the order of the day. Life had truly come a full circle. We are facing exactly what we thought was left behind twenty-three years ago… with lesser greenery than before, with lesser clean air than before and with much lesser contact with people whom we called our neighbors… My father, who has spent more than sixty of his seventy –five years, is tired of the hardships and has agreed to a recent proposal by my brother to sell this flat and move into a township in Thane where he (my brother) has bought a three-bedroom apartment. There is a garden, swimming pool, jaccuzi, gym… everything in the complex. It seems like an ideal place for them… Just the way these flats seemed when we lived in the chawl. Sounds pessimistic but does progress necessarily make things better? Do the solutions to your present problems always make your living better? What about the new set of problems that come with them? (Or the same problems just in new clothes?) In one of the old essays by P.L.Deshpande, the great humorist from Marathi literature, an old man advises his son when the son decides to jump jobs, “Listen my son… Just because the second one looks good, never leave the first! All jobs and all women are the same!” When you look carefully, this seems true of most things in life!