Topic: To understand the most important characteristics of a society, one must study its major cities.

Just think how one can know about characteristics of society? The probable answer would be by studying lifestyle of people of that society. Yes this tells that study of major cities of a society will certainly give much more knowledge about characteristics of a society. Rome in Rome to know Roman Society. Do you know how we came to know about Harappa, Mohenjo Daro etc? The excavation in Pakistan gave insight to their City structure and people came to know about their lifestyle and ultimately about characteristics of this society. To know about Gujarati Culture, society it will be better to stay in some regions of Gujarat for some days. Analogically for any society staying in regions of their residence will yield much information about that society. Explaining how study of major city of a society will give such information in following points. Nepal is nice example. In Nepal people wake up 9:00 AM and everything is shut by 7:00 PM. This shows they work for a quite short span. Apparently it shows people there are lazy. Think about food market of a city. It will help to know what kind of food residents of a city consume. This ultimately gives characteristics about food in that society. Coming to Clothing market of city, the type of clothing available in market shows what kind of clothes people of that city, society prefer. That will give knowledge about clothing of those people. One more interesting observation, look at their houses built. This will make you understand how the culture in housing is, some reasons for specific structure gives general information about weather in that region. Temples in cities will give you details about religion and what God the people of society believe in or worship. Also much information about history can be acquired from houses and temple and other structures built. But In all this there is one assumption that in a city only those people are living who belong to a particular society. But now there is Globalization. There are many people migrating from one place to other, as far as another country. So under such cases there will be a mixture of lifestyle characteristics in inferences of

study of their major cities. The most suitable example for this is Mumbai City, where there are people from almost each society and religion of India. In conclusion, as far as rural areas are concerned and cities where there is not much migration is concerned, the study of these areas will reveal about characteristics of that society.

(424 Words of essay, Time : 28 mins.)