Lost in The Concrete Jungle

Recently, I visited Shanghai with my family. I was to attend an infrastructure conference on transport policy (the World Conference on Transport Research). As is usual with my visits to conferences with my family, I spend a considerable amount of time at the conference, till the time of my own presentation. After this my attention wavers off and I only attend select sessions which are of importance to me and which are directly related to my subject of interest. Hence, my family gets a significant amount of time early on to see the place on their own, and then I join in. During this visit, my two sons were 11 and 9 years of age, and studying in classes six and four respectively. As this was school session time in India, we had sought special leave from their school for them with an assurance they would collect data, information and facts on China during the visit, and present the same as reflections to their class and to their school.

On the third day, while we were traveling in taxi, my younger son (9 years, Class IV) made an interesting observation. When asked about his reflection on Shanghai and what he would write about it, he remarked, “See there are so many identical twins, and also so many clones. But, I feel sorry about some of the lone ones, and I am sure they must be very lonely”. Wondering what he was referring to I poked him to elaborate. He pointed towards the Shanghai skyline, and asked me to note. Most buildings came in pairs. But, many buildings had multiple replicas of themselves, and many could mean any number like five, ten, or even twenty when we counted. However, there were still many buildings which were one of its kind, standing lonely and all by themselves.

A nine year old, lost in this big concrete jungle, had created life out of inanimate structures and give them a new meaning. From that time onwards, and till the end of our Shanghai trip six days later, we identified thousand of mono-zygotic (similar) and di-zygotic (dis-similar) twins, taller and shorter siblings, armies of clones ready to attack, and we also felt sorry for those lonely individual building which had no company.