COUNTRY LIFE VERSUS TOWN LIFE | GOD MADE THE COUNTRY: MAN MADE THE TOWN | URBAN LIFE VERSUS RURAL LIFE | VILLAGE LIFE VERSUS CITY LIFE
God made the country, man made the town, What wonder then that health and virtue………………….should most abound
And least be threatened in fields and groves.” —William Owner
How right William Cowper was ! Life in a village or in the countryside is a life in the lap of nature. It is a life full of peace and pleasure. It is free from the hurries and worries of life. It is free from hypocrisy, competition and vulgarity. It is full of health and joy.
In an extremely artificial and mechanical life of today, country life has come to assume an importance of its own. The modern man, brought up in a city, is all the time busy in getting and spending. He is a worshipper of the goddess of wealth. He is completely dead to the beauties of nature and is out of tune with it. The glittering lights of the artificial lamps and the piercing music from the man-made machines make him dead to the beauty of a cold, soft moonlit night or the melodious songs of a nightingale. His entire life is full of artificiality. He cannot find books in running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything.
The village people lead simple lives. They have their own harmless recreations. They do not go to clubs or hotels. They just sit under the shady tree and gossip away their time. Some of them sing folk songs. ‘Village girls enjoy dancing and singing. They lead happy, noble and virtuous lives.
Life in villages, no doubt, has its darker side also. There are no facilities available in most of our villages. There are thousands of villages in our country that are still without proper facilities of electricity, drinking water, roads, schools or hospitals. There are no sanitation faculties and most of the villages are always exposed to terrible diseases. These are the reasons why a large number of villagers are shifting to the cities.
Life in cities has a charm of its own. It has several advantages. We have better educational facilities available in the cities than in the villages. Job opportunities, too, are more numerous in cities than in the villages. Again, town: life makes one more alert, more active, more wide awake, more energetic and more shrewd. In towns, people are less prejudiced, less narrow minded, less ignorant and less superstitious.
There are also some disadvantages of town life. First, town life is very tiring because of the helter-skelter, feverish activity and tremendous din and bustle present in towns. Secondly, town life is generally much more expensive than village life. Thirdly, fresh air is not available as much to a townsman as to the village folk. A man living in a town is totally cut off from the beauties of nature.
Keeping all this in view, it is ideal for a person to live at a place where he can have a judicious combination of the maximum advantages of both, the urban as well as the rural life. In other words, a house situated in a village, but conveniently near a large town, is an ideal place for living. One should try to have the best of the both of the worlds.