The hubbub about hubs

Salute the hub
"Vizag to become an electronics hub"! Every morning we open our newspapers and our heart leaps with joy to learn that Vizag will soon be a city of yet another hub. The old 'City of Destiny' tag is out and the 'City of Hubs' is in. A hub by definition is the central part of a wheel into which the spokes are inserted. Incidentally "hubby" is a term derived from "hub" as he is generally the centre of the home and eminently suitable for piercing with spokes.Apparently any self-respecting city should be a centre, a pivot, a nucleus, a core; something around which everything revolves. A lowly spoke or rim or tyre won't do. We must be a hub!
Happy hub
Since we lost our opportunity to become capital city, several Vizagites have become depressed. Public figures have figured out that the best way to keep us upbeat is to announce that Vizag will be a hub of something or the other. It is mandatory for public statements to mention at least one forthcoming hub. At the rate we are going, we may run out of hubs in the near future. Some older terms are being dusted off and put into circulation. On standby are terms such as "belts", "corridors", "regions", "zones" and "clusters". While all of them are promising, the flavour of the season is definitely the word HUB.
Hub-a-dub-dub
Some commonly used phrases are (take a deep breath now, this is a long sentence) "agricultural hub", "automobile hub", "educational hub", "film industry hub", "food processing hub", "health services hub", "horticulture hub", "innovation and incubation hub", "IT hub", "logistics hub", "manufacturing hub", "petrochemical hub", "pharma hub", "seed production hub", "software hub", "textile hub" and "tourism hub".
To make it sound even more exciting one can add the word "mega" to the sentence, for example "mega electronics hub". To give it an Indian context we could also call it "maha electronic hub". Think tanks are sitting around a table shaped like hubs and figuring out innovative new prefixes to hub.
A hub a day
City psychiatrists are reporting that there is an inverse correlation between hub headlines and the number of patients seeking help for depression. When hubs are announced, the numbers of patients decline and vice versa.
In view of the phenomena there is a move to make Vizag a psychiatry hub. Some hub fans are adding value to Vizag's hub status by reminding us that it is equidistant from cities such as Tokyo, Cairo and Moscow, around 5,700 kilometres.
In fact, some scientists suggest that we are at the very centre of an astronomical hub. It happens that we are equidistant from three stars, Proxima Centauri, Rigil Kentaurus Alpha Cen A and Alpha Cen B, all exactly 4.7 light years from Vizag. Excuse me, I have to go now, my psychiatrist is at the door with two burly men in white jackets.
(The writer is an environmental and heritage activist. He can be reached at sohan.hatangadi@gmail.com)