Through the lens of a chaotic family visit, Leeladhar Sharma Parvatiya explores how India’s population explosion erodes the dignity of daily life.
The Suffocation of the Modern Commons
In the modern landscape, the simple act of traveling from one city to another has become an exercise in survival. When I set out to visit my friend Babu Shyamla Kant in Haridwar, the reality of our demographic crisis met me at the railway station. The platform was a sea of humanity, a dense thicket of bodies where the concept of personal space had long since vanished. To secure a place on the train was not a matter of purchasing a ticket, but of physical endurance. People clung to the window bars and climbed onto the roofs, risking their lives for a few square inches of space.
This desperation is not an anomaly; it is the new baseline. When we see passengers perched precariously atop moving carriages, we are witnessing a breakdown of discipline and safety forced by necessity. The infrastructure, despite its expansion, remains perpetually breathless, trying and failing to keep pace with the sheer volume of people it is meant to serve. This is the first symptom of a society losing its shape under the weight of its own numbers.
A Household Under Siege
My friend Shyamla Kant is a man of integrity—honest, hardworking, and kind. Yet, his personal life serves as a microcosm of the national struggle. Despite his virtues, he has lived with a profound lack of foresight regarding his family size. Upon arriving at his home, I found a man drowning in his own domesticity. His small, two-room house was bursting at the seams with a 'force' of children. The air was thick with the noise and heat of too many people confined in too little space.
The domestic scene was a portrait of exhaustion. His eldest son, Deenanath, despite having completed his studies two years prior, remained unemployed. In a world where thousands of qualified candidates scramble for a single vacancy, merit becomes secondary to the statistical impossibility of being noticed. The joy of a large family, often romanticized in traditional circles, reveals its darker side when those children grow into adults for whom the economy has no room. The household was not a sanctuary, but a site of constant, low-grade crisis.
The Illusion of Progress
One might argue that our cities are growing, our hospitals are multiplying, and our shops are better stocked than in decades past. Indeed, Haridwar has expanded, and new colonies have sprouted where there was once empty land. Yet, the paradox remains: as quickly as we build, the crowd grows faster. I observed this at the local tailor’s shop and the ration depot. Despite the increase in the number of service providers, the queues are longer than ever. The tailor cannot finish a shirt on time because he is buried under a mountain of orders; the ration shop runs dry before the end of the line is reached.
This suggests that our problem is not merely one of production or supply, but of a denominator that refuses to stay still. When the population grows at an exponential rate, the expansion of services becomes a treadmill—we run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. The result is a permanent state of scarcity, where even those with the means to pay find themselves waiting in lines that never seem to move.
The Toll on Health and Vitality
Perhaps the most distressing consequence of this overcrowding is the visible decline in public health. At Shyamla Kant’s home, the children appeared pale and malnourished, their faces lacking the vibrancy of youth. In an environment where clean air, pure water, and adequate nutrition are divided among too many mouths, illness becomes a permanent resident. My friend’s wife was perpetually exhausted, her health broken by the demands of managing a massive household in a cramped, unhygienic environment.
When these families seek help, they find the hospitals resembling beehives. Doctors are overwhelmed, unable to provide the focused care each patient deserves because they are treating a literal army of the sick. We must ask ourselves: can a person truly be healthy in a world where they are constantly breathing the stale air of a crowd? Without the basic requirements of space and sanitation, medical science can only offer a temporary bandage on a deep, systemic wound.
The Necessity of Individual Restraint
The tragedy of the 'man lost in the crowd' is that he is often the architect of his own displacement. We blame the government, the lack of jobs, and the failing infrastructure, yet we ignore the role of individual choice in the population explosion. If we continue to view large families as a matter of fate or a personal whim without considering the social cost, we ensure a future of perpetual struggle. Every additional person added to an overstressed system reduces the share of resources available to everyone else.
To save our dignity and our future, the focus must shift toward population control as a primary civic duty. It is not enough to survive; we must strive to live well. This requires a conscious decision to limit family size so that every child can be fed, educated, and given a fair chance at a productive life. If we do not master our numbers, the crowd will eventually swallow us whole, leaving no room for the individual to breathe, let alone thrive.