The Landscape of Excess

I was intrigued to hear a strong buzzing sound under an electric pole while walking on the pavement the other night in New Haven. While I wondered what created this buzz, my friend Anwar walking alongside me informed me that it was the sound of the excess current flowing through the wires. The sound was enormous, as if a thousand honey bees came to attack you at once. In the same imagination of the attack, Anwar further said that if that wire, by any chance fell on a human, it would burn him/her out in mere seconds. As much as I was convinced that it was the noise of electricity, I was also amazed by the immensity of the energy it carried. The excess was immediately evident in brightly lit up campus, the illuminated buildings, as much as the pavements and the roads. In fact this instance merely strengthened my perception of the abundance that a developed country like the US enjoys, well evident in Yale's campus.

Coming from a developing country, the display of excess in US for me is generally exacerbated. The over rationing of energy and resources in most aspects of American culture is overtly evident. An everyday experience for a person like me in the US is navigating through a landscape of excess, and also wondering about its potential wastage. There are so many examples one could count where such over-investment of resources is disappointing. 

The lights in the Yale School of Architecture never go off - they illuminate the building 24x7 throughout the year. In addition, the building is mechanically ventilated and the temperature is more or less maintained throughout. The windows of the buildings remain fixed, and closed, unlike earlier when they were openable. The light quality of most classrooms and studios are mechanically controlled. You can blind yourself from the outside at any given moment and switch on a dimmer. Each desk has a private lamp, in addition to the brilliantly lit studio. 

Each station is equipped with a double monitor computer screen, and the whole space is enabled with wifi, along with the ethernet connections on their CPUs. A typical scene in addition to these screens would be to find students reading through their i-pads and browsing facebook on their phones. Big and small screens inundate the entire studio space, overflowing the whole world into your eyes. This is primarily enabled through the resources made available to everyone at Yale.

A popularly exploited the facility from the library is the Borrow-direct: a service that essentially allows you to call for a particular book from any other member library in the North-East region in the US in case it is not present in your own library. Students, invariably use this service many a times without bothering to find if the book is actually available within their own premises. They wouldn't wait for the books to be recalled if issued by another patron. They simply call for it from another university. Borrow direct vans run along the different universities in the north east shifting books physically from one place to another based on urgent patron requests in different places. One of my program mates once revealed: "I don't bother to look into the Yale Orbis Library Catalogue, I just order it from Borrow Direct." 

The enormous receptions after the weekly Thursday lectures at the School are another display of the richness of Yale. A wine and drinks reception in the art gallery generally follows the talk, where students and faculty are invited for an elaborate socializing session. Caterers feed the chaotic crowd within the gallery and snacks on the table are kept to go along with the different varieties of alcohol. The left over from this session often is discarded. For example, I once saw the caterer winding up the session to collect the bowls of left snacks, and promptly throwing them into the dustbin! She did not even think twice before dumping them away...

But I believe this is the general rule for most of the eateries here in the US. Coffee shops, bakeries and restaurants throw away all their left over unsold, unconsumed stuff. Their law does not want to chance the risk of getting people ill off consuming old food products. A large amount of food thus goes into the dustbin every night. While the beggars remain homeless and unfed outside, the shop owners are casual in performing their dutiful jobs. For them, being on the right side of the law is more important, not obeying which would deprive them of their sources of livelihood. The vast amount of coffees that go into the gutters is disgusting. They make mistakes freely and those are even paid for. Under the pressure of time and work, if they ever get a wrong order for a coffee, they promptly dump it into the waste bin. Such orders are not preserved for any customer who may later favour for it. 

It is the vast corporate chains of these shops to whom such amounts of waste do not matter in the differential economics, and eventually make it permissible. Capitalism, in most instances, looks at the larger scheme of things. The everyday does not really figure in capitalistic processes, everyday is not the prerogative of capitalism. 

People in the US are brought up in such culture of abundance and excess. To them it is absolutely normal to throw out a glass of freshly bought coffee if it is not as per their taste. Resources, when in such large quantities that the hint of scarcity is not even an faraway imagination, are absolutely taken for granted, and even wasted further. I have been living in this overly resourceful landscape for two years now, and I cringe at every moment when in the architecture school, people throw away huge chunks of model making or printing material without even giving a second thought to pass it to a poor school near by. To be able to make such donations, special drives are conducted. Thus, they don't happen by themselves, rather need to be formalized through another agency.

Coming from a culture of the developing economy, perhaps I was unable to enjoy, or even exploit this excessiveness. I perhaps didnot know what to do of so much resource - may be I was dumbfounded! Was I truly able to indulge in this luxury of Yale? Did I exploit its resources enough? May be it's too late to ask this question. And now, even if I didn't, I certainly paid for it. A life time of money that goes into maintaining this prestige, reputation and glory of Yale, accrued through enormous installments of wasted resources. I may not be completely wrong in attributing much of such phenomenon to the US. It is a place where people live in the oblivion of abundance. A lot more stories, need to be written for such landscapes of excess.