The City and its Zones

It is the city for you if you are preparing yourself for a war.As in any war,the most important quality is to stay alert and this city that will teach you to keep yourself on your toes.Because as you walk through the city,you must be careful that you do not trespass on some new zone or the other.You may not realize that the No-Parking Zone is also not meant for taking a stroll.Or that there can be no picnics in the lush lawns making up the Special Administrative Zone.That when you make plans to waste another weekend lazing at the beach,you will discover that the entire waterfront has been converted,almost overnight, into a Special Economic Zone.You will be ashamed of your Saturday afternoon joblessness as you retreat from the SEZ ,admiring in the rear-view mirror, the reticent man in the distance-immersed in navigating his forklift car around the 100 foot shipping containers.As you pull up your car to take a leak by the highway,you will suddenly be reminded that now,to take a pee,you must go to the Special Ablution Zone.A strange nostalgia is felt for the once naive and adolescent city whose gutters gratefully drank arcs of your piss.

As you drive back home,you are hungry.So you steer into the Shopping Zone and then into the Pastry Zone.Today,you forgo your favourite variety of Black Forest and choose the other pastry with clearly delineated bands of blue,green and yellow cream as if it were sliced off from a map of this beloved Zoned-up city of yours.Is it a coincidence that the confectionery calls it City Special?

Indeed,it is a city that makes you want to organize your own messy life.Where you want to go back to your room  in the fifth floor of Majesty Tower in the High-Security Housing Zone and decide that now it is time to set your own life in order.So you clean up the ugly clutter of books on the floor and organize them ,like pallets in the warehouse,in the bookshelves.The shoes go to the shoe-rack zone, the millions pens converge in the pen stand,the clothes strewn on the bed are rehabilitated in the cupboard.And your study table is cleaned up-looking no more like a hawker's spread containing myriad colourful and defunct wares but more like the clean slate that awaits the wisdom of the future.











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