I was thrilled seeing the response to the last post I wrote for Udaipurtimes! Smart city needs smart people! It had more than 1300 Facebook shares which meant that there were something’s I had written there which struck chord with people who read it! And when they shared it, it meant they wanted others to read it, because many a items we feel like saying something but we don’t due to various reasons. 

That encouraged me to trouble my pen again and write down this one.

So, we belong to a society, a culture which has held its values for a long time. Wherever a Rajasthani/Udaipurite goes, he is respected because of the respect that we give to people in our culture. It’s that element of ‘tehzeeb’ or ‘ezzat’ that makes us different from the rest of the people.

This culture of respect has been the USP of our existence, reasons why we are loved across the world, which plays an important part in our tourism industry and which makes us proud, thanks to our ancestors, who, despite many odds carried on this legacy and tried to pass on to every next generation.

But off late we start to observe that we have sort of commercialized this culture and trying to draw too much blood out of the goodwill. I think that when one commercializes every other asset, keeping morals high, the goodwill grows, but when one starts commercializing goodwill, the decline starts.

The young generation, our generation, the digital generation is becoming more ambitious, more risk taking and more professional but it is also becoming more cold-hearted, more ruthless and less on moral values. Yes, this is a very generalized statement but this is how the air is smelling these days.

We are still very much on track and these are just the early signs of a little deviation from the beautiful mix of tradition and professionalism that has sustained from generations.

I just want to simply put on record that since we are going to be a smart city, we will be more developed infrastructurally, cleaner, smarter, more digital, more well managed but this will happen with all the smart cities and is already the case with all of the smart cities of the world. So what will make Udaipur different from the rest of the 100 smart cities in India and for that matter all the smart cities in the World?

Yes, you got it – our behavior because remember The World is Watching us!!

Authored by Siddharth Singhvi.

For more writings by the same author visit www.sid1988.blogspot.in