The Red Queen Effect....

I went home for a couple of days this last weekend… one of my close friends was getting engaged and it was happening at my hometown… It was a good thing because I got to meet my parents and stay at home as well… and it was a really short visit by any standards ….

But this post is not about how short my stay was or what I did during my stay… this post is about how the small sleepy hometown that I am a part of has changed so much – the right word here would be ‘evolved’ – I was literally taken aback… not that I did not expect it to grow or develop … but the pace at which it is getting there is amazing to say the least…

The town that I belong to in Kerala was more or less referred to by my folks as a place for retirement… in the sense that it quiet, calm, serene and what not… it was the place that I grew up… went to school in, did my graduation from… and all through the course of my studies when I was old enough to think and act for myself, there was just one thought that kept running through my mind… getting out of this old boring place and going to some major city to make my life… in literal words…

This time when I went back for those couple of days, I was taken aback to see umpteen changes that had happened over the past one year or so… gone were those hangouts that we used to go to.. Those bakeries, ice cream parlors… stationery shops that we were so used to buying our notebooks and numerous textbooks, obscure shops in the town that we bought stuff for our college fests, dances and birthday celebrations, cosmetic shops that we used to frequent, apparel shops that were our favorites… most of them have undergone major changes… paths that we tread over the years have been replaced by tar roads, trees have been chopped off, …. It feels like only a vestige of the old town that I was born and brought up remains…

I am happy for all the development that’s taking place and all that… but on the flip side, what used to be a small, quaint, little town is now taken over in the race for globalization, development and expansion… traffic is again increased… new structures, malls, shops, …. Everything new and traces of the old ….

Feels a little weird..!!!.... dunno why though… :-)

I guess like someone said…

If you don’t like something change it;
If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

PS: The Red Queen Effect -->

Term used by biologists to describe the evolutionary necessity to evolve faster than one's competitors, predators or prey. It was adapted from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ where the Red Queen points out to Alice;

“It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”