if ( City > Town/Village ) printf(" :) "); else printf("What the hell??");

Warning: Kindly do not make the mistake of taking any hints from the heading as to where this discussion went. It is adulterated heavily with my own opinion. But then...I barely speak in class. :)

Having read Shriyaa's post on "Develoment", I find myself extremely discouraged because my ability to express my thoughts in the form of words is not even close to being as good as hers. Also, as unfortunate as I am, I was allocated the task of writing the summary right before exam week which is why I may not be able to do justice to it. But I'm going to keep the promise i made to myself and try nonetheless.

In the last class, we continued the discussion that had been initiated earlier about the pros and cons of living in a city and a village or a town. As a topic for discussion this one's definitely an improvement, in my opinion, over "If you had the power, what would you like to do to change the society as a whole?" considering the fact that the no. of words that came out of my mouth was the third highest in the room, following Sriram Sir and no points for guessing, Devbrat Rathore, in that order I might add. ;)
After an hour of thinking up points in favour of both cities and towns/villages and slowly elaborating each one of them, what we had( by "we", I mean the 12 people in the room whose brains were actually processing all the information...Pulkit slept through half the class and doesn't qualify :) ), looked something like this...

Cities :

1. More job opportunities and money which eventually leads to a better standard of living.
2. Better facilities for healthcare, sanitation etc.
3. More options for entertainment and pleasure like theatres, malls and eateries.
4. Exposure(?) : That's what it says in my notes but I'm not sure i remember what it was about. Help yourself. :P
5. The kinds of work are diverse.

Towns/ Villages :

1. Comparitively lower levels of pollution of all kinds.
2. Safer to live in. Sir wasn't entirely convinced about this one and hence decided to rethink it. So he went to the person who originally suggested it and that person, unfortunately, was me. To be honest even I wasn't entirely convinced about this point when i blurted it out. But thanks to Devbrat, who gave an example from his own life that lasted 5 long minutes, Sir finally accepted it. Devbrat recalled that when he was living in Bhopal, he once saw a thief in his colony and shouted for help but got no response. He exclaimed that if the same thing had happened in a small town or a village, everyone from the neighbourhood would have gathered to help him.
3. Stronger relationships exist as the people live in a close knit society and interact on a daily basis. They share all their happiness and sorrows with each other.
4. The environment is cleaner and greener than in cities.
5. With lesser work load, emotional support and a general sense of well being, the stress level is automatically reduced greatly.
6. Towns and villages are peaceful. Life is not too fast and you get time for yourself and your family.

After listing these points, the task assigned to us was to analyze how crucial each point was, to figure out what direction would the scales tilt in.

Starting with towns and villages, we examined that pollution directly affects the physical as well as the mental health of a person. Sir asked us to imagine going to work in a city with immense air pollution and horns blaring all around. Someone(Kaushik I think) pointed out that if the money was good, it was not that big a problem. So we ended up not marking pollution as an extremely crucial factor.
Safety, as we realized after some debate, was a result of stronger relationships with the people around you which meant both these points were pretty important. Check!
Environment also turned out to be a crucial enough factor but some might argue that a city might not necessarily be less greener than a town or a village.
Coming to the next point, we were asked to examine whether we'd give up the good money and facilities for a stress-free life to which I happily gave a textbook reply that it is dependent on the level of stress. If the level of stress is high but not so high that it would drive me crazy, I'd go for the money. Check!

On the other hand, the most essential factors in favour of cities, according to Sriram Sir, were Opportunities/Money and the kind of work. No one argued.
At the very end, we compared the crucial points in both cases and reached the conclusion that we cannot clearly say that living in cities is better than living in towns or villages or vice versa. The opinions would differ from person to person. Hence, heading justified. ;)

Writer comments : This small report may seem to be too self centered and pointless. For the former, I'd say that I'm not too visible in the other posts, so I thought that this may be my only chance. Also, I'm writing almost a week(that too exam week) after the class so the so-called "exam pressure" could have affected my memory. There's no justification good enough to get me out of trouble but just this once, I wanted to do this for myself and not just because I had to.