progress in the dead of night.

from my quiet reading corner, i can hear the constant humming of machinery outside my window; a bright orange light pierces through the curtains at fixed intervals; the occasional(but loud) sound of men shouting. i take a quick glance to the left. my black Casio alarm clock tells me it's 3.23am, otherwise known as 0323 when one is in green(or any other colour of uniform for that matter). i put down Aravind Adiga's "White Tiger" and walk over to the closest window to investigate. it's quite a sight actually; progress in the dead of the night; Bangladeshi workers sitting atop big yellow machines that level the hot bitumen, like a farmer riding his buffalo; gently guiding it to plough the land.

"wow", i mutter quietly to myself, clearly unfamiliar with and in awe of the spectacle outside the window. but as the nights go on, i must say that it is not uncommon to see sights like this; foreign workers toiling late into the night while everyone else is sound asleep. now i finally understand why it is so easy to forget; to forget where all these structures came from and how these buildings came into being. it's easy to forget without constant reminders, that i must admit. after all, we are human. and as humans, forgetting is easy, remembering is hard; the former can be likened to trying to keep tiny grains of sand in your hands from falling through the little gaps between your fingers while the latter, quite simply, is all about letting go; the tiny grains of sand, faces and names and what not.

and this, i suppose, is the price of progress; a society that operates very much like clockwork, gears turning about and all for days on end, but no one, not even for a single moment, ever stops to think about who oils and replaces the gears in the middle of the night and who it is, that keeps the clock running.