Bargaining with Thugs

I have come here today to tell the story of how the last week has been a haze of cold, steely anger because I am in a beef with people who have been unresponsive to any and all conversation I’ve been trying to have with them. The foremost of them all is my housing society’s secretary who chopped down three 25-year old trees from right outside my window because he wanted to build a parking lot for two-wheelers. 

One day in October 2025, I came home from office, and found that workmen with large machine axes were shopping down two Ashoka trees, and one fruit tree. I ran to the security guard and then to the society manager’s office to ask why this was being done. In my book, chopping down trees that have outlived our teenage hysterics is a crime. Turns out, the legality of our municipality thinks the same way. The next day, my society’s secretary met me and assured me that after he builds the parking lot to accomodate the growing number of two wheelers, he will beautify the flower bed, and re-plant the three trees.

That was October, 2025. We are now in April 2026.

He has done nothing of the sort. Every time I try to follow up on the trees he was supposed to plant, he either responds with a new priority he’s taking care of (painting building, repairing mosque, building an ugly-ass gazebo), or he doesn’t respond at all. The temperature has been 40 degrees in my town this week. 

So, imagine my horror a few days ago, when I returned from office to see that he has deployed more workers near the remaining flower bed and has approved some more “development” of an unnamed nature. When I pinged him to ask what he’s planning to do next, he didn’t repond. He let it go to radio silence. I spent 3 days trying to reach him, and I received no response. It was just him reading my message or seeing my phone ring.

The reason I am writing this down is because of what a frolleague told me yesterday. In another context, she said “Did all this happen to me or was it a bubble in my head?” I am not making this up, and I don’t want to be gaslighted by anyone. I am so sick and tired of people “in power” behaving as if the opinions of the common folk are trash. As if they “own” the world and every shit truck in it, including our lives. After this entire sequence of events that has been going on for seven months now, I finally came to the end of my rope with my society’s secretary and manager. I submitted a written complaint on the municipality’s online portal. I called the Head of the Garden Department in my town and spoke to him. He asked me to submit a handwritten complaint in the office. 

And now, dear reader, I am exhausted. I am tired of the sheer audacity and indifference of these men. I am tired of having to rage and request. I am aggrieved and spent. This is a microcosm of what is happening in my country, and the world, as well. People think they can destroy nature for short term gains, and disregard voices asking for the bare minimum. Those trees may have been old, but they afforded us shade, they weathered rain. They were home to birds, bees, and shadows for cats that lived underneath them. They provided cooling to our eyes. And now, they have been removed by an insolent, arrogant man who thinks that a blue metal shade is exactly what we needed.

To be honest and fair, it is not even the parking lot that bothers me. It is the reneging of his word, the fact that he cannot be trusted to do what he says, and that he recently cut down a section of plants and palm trees to build a gazebo in its place. Tell me, reader, how can I trust this person to do the right thing? How can I trust him to build for the community and for posterity? 

The funny thing is that he’s not the last specimen who has done this in the recent past. I’m starting to get a sense that people are not having a dialogue anymore. Most conversations are one-way with the narrative being decided and impressed by the one who has the most power. Be this my gym owner, who has not responded to my questions to him for over 3 weeks or my client who has been bull dozing his needs on us without even as much as a discussion or even the corporator who came to our house asking for votes but now she’s got her hands tied. 

We live in an era of thugs. And I have spent a lot of time bargaining with thugs.

I know that we live in an era of corruption, or that life is unfair, or that “we should only care about ourselves”. All this is well-meaning advice that people give me, that the Internet has made commonplace. India, specially, is a country where people might live in close quarters, but we have been taught that we don’t have enough, so we should only think about ourselves and our families. This is why resources are not equally divided, available to all, and a few have a lot, while the rest have too little. 

I write this because in the future when the tide turns, when I know that I will fail in getting these trees planted, and when the municipality will not show up to do its job, I need to know that it was not “in my head”. I will not be hoodwinked into believing that I was the delusional one, or that I was somehow wrong in asking for a bare minimum of three fully grown trees.