A capital city sans cosmopolitan culture

In recent times, road transport and bridges minister has expressed his frustration over the poor conditions of public buses on roads and highways. Lately, he has lamented that the vehicles are too ugly to look at. One could not agree more with him. Indeed, all buses---either on long route, inter-city and city buses---do not make the transport sector particularly proud when it comes to the impression they make at first sight. The city buses in the country's capital are nothing but a disgrace. Let alone the fitness of those vehicle, the lackadaisical behemoths appear to be an affront to the capital of a country poised to join the rank of the middle-income band.
One of the reasons why overwhelming ugliness and chaos do not upset taste and sense of the city's majority inhabitants is a woeful lack of cosmopolitanism. Refinement and sophistication are achieved through a process of evolution. In this city, the first wave of migration brought in a heavy dose of coarseness and uncouthness. Those could be awkward but hardly wilfully offensive. Also that was the time when money was hard to come by for developing the city's infrastructure. People were forced to use open space particularly for their short call of nature in full public view. Yet when a number of people responded to this call on the roadside or in a street corner close by a crowded market or bus stand, the scene was enough to produce a nauseating sense in any civil person. The city is yet to be free of such nuisances but it has become rare.
Gradually, the city started to develop and villages had to supply menial labourers including rickshaw-pullers. Thus slums started mushrooming and since those came up on government or khas lands, a parasite class came into being. At some point, political elements and these ruffians developed an underworld crime world. Politics also was marked by violence for about two decades. Thus power and crime found in each other a strong ally to prosper together. The rise of anti-social criminal gangs once divided the city into zones of their own. So powerful were the lords of the underworld that even the law enforcers dared not confront them.
When people's lives were on the line due to rising crimes, a special force had to be formed in order to take on the thugs. Even extra-judicial killing had to be resorted to free the city from the clutches of these goons. Some were killed, others fled beyond the border and it is reported at times that a few still control their criminal empires from abroad. But there is no doubt that the heyday of the underworld mafia dons is over.
The first generation of the nation's urban population with its roots in villages at least had the modesty to learn as much of cosmopolitan habit and culture as possible. The country's liberation war tempered their rusticity as they arrived for study or for changing their lot in the early days of its take-off. It was not easy to bury or mummify the 1971 genocidal past in the dark cave of mind.
In the intervening period evidently the city population has bulged and those of the first generation have been dwindling. In an environment of fear from anti-social elements and a rat race for survival for many and becoming filthy rich for some, there was little time for whetting the urge for socio-cultural refinement and sophistication. As long as thugs and bullies reign supreme, the tradition of courteous behaviour, humility and suavity---all of which go into the making of cosmopolitan culture, takes a back seat.
Meanwhile, the rise of an ultra-rich class with no family tradition, education and culture to back up has hardly made room for an enabling environment. This is an arrogant class, the money of which talks and talks loud. They may have rare collections of pieces in their showcases but hardly do they care if the footpath or the street close by is dirty or stinks. The concern today is to build an ivory tower to live in, the 'others' can go to hell. Thus appreciation for aestheticism is missing.
Dented, broken and misshaped buses with paint on their bodies long gone may be an eyesore to the road transport minister and a few other people who take pride in their birth in this land, the class with second homes abroad has no qualms about the ugly look of the mass transports. The metro rail appears on the scene as an anachronism but it has at least proved that commuters are increasingly becoming accustomed to using it, despite the fidgety and some uncultured behaviour some of the commuters demonstrate at times. This shows people deserve far better buses and service.