Walking along a rainy pavement in a town with a Jamun (Syzygium cumini) tree on the side with steam rising from a foodstall hawker boiling beans to sell triggered this thought in me that the city is indeed an organism. A giant one with a huge footprint on the planet.
You could watch a city closely and sense it breathing; wind and fresh air in, dust and smoke out.
It drinks too, from rivers, streams, lakes, and through bore-well straws inserted into the water table and spurts spent dirty water, also called black- or grey-water.
It eats besides healthy grains, vegetables, fruits, fish and meat, dozens of combinations of these, and excretes solid waste, euphemistically called night-soil.
Corporate offices and industries comprise its heart and the busy streets and train lines of the city are its arteries and veins, blood vessels that get clogged when the heart is working hard.
Money travels as blood through the city from the lowest economic strata to the highest echelons through a complex web of transactions, almost never in the reverse direction.
This ever-expanding super organism certainly needs to go on a diet and loose some weight if it has to sustain though. It has to stop growing both vertically and horizontally.
The air needs to improve by including more parks and trees within, and reduce the number of vehicles to declog its arteries and veins. The spent water needs to be treated before being discharged into water bodies and water table. It needs to eat healthier food with fewer chemicals.
On another note, perhaps this organism needs to have fewer mitochondria, i.e., fewer humans, the ones that produce energy to run the city. But we have surpassed that number decades, if not centuries, ago!
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