Late one night in early September this year, a young relative of mine drove to the Delhi international airport to pick up his girlfriend, who was arriving from a Western land. She had threatened him with consequences if he met her without a bouquet of flowers in his hands and sweet words on his lips.

Having forgetfully failed to fortify himself with the flowers during the day, the young swain was nervously inventing excuses as he drove towards the airport.

Right outside the airport entry, he was therefore delighted to see an illuminated flower stall. Equipped with a suitable bouquet he turned onto the airport entry road, where a queue of cars waited to pass the police dogleg. The officer at the barrier was putting his head into the passenger window of every car.

Came the young relative’s turn at the naka, and the officer put his head in, saw the flowers on the front seat and without explanation picked them up and took them away. Asked why, the officer said only “Chalo, chalo,” and waved the young man on rudely.

With a line of impatient Delhi drivers waiting behind, the young man obeyed, unhappily.

Not 50 yards on the young relative noticed a man running after his car and gesturing. So he stopped, and the pursuer ran up to his window and asked, eagerly: “The policeman took your flowers. Do you want to buy some more?”

The answer was, of course, “No, thanks,” but as he drove to the parking lot my young relative found himself thinking:

Scam?

As if there wasn’t already enough reason to fear and doubt rather than respect the police, this past week offered a fresh bouquet of police crimes. ContentSutra lists four random instances from around the country, two of which happened in the Delhi region. Read the rest of this entry »

When travelling one is always on a search for the memorable experience. It may be a vista of snow peaks or a moon-sickle of sand, a good meal in warm company or a treasure-filled museum. Whatever precisely it is, it is something you take back with you to your humdrum life and work, and hold on to, when the holiday is over. Something of that joy and release must survive to remind us of how good we are away from the daily nonsense. In its simplest form such a memento is just that: a keepsake, an aide-memoire, a souvenir.

Since I am unencumbered with a fortune, my souvenirs are usually super-cheap, and usually on paper — maps, to be precise. In any new town, I try to purchase a map of the locality. Sometimes the search (impromptu and laid-back, it’s true), is fruitless. In tiny Foligno in autumn 1998, which to me was just a place to change trains on the way from Rome to Perugia in Italy, I asked at the railway station newsagent for a map. The nice-faced man behind the counter looked at me in surprise and said, a trifle helplessly, “We don’t have one. This town is too small.”

Now this was surprising, because every little place in Italy which boasts some history has a stiff sense of pride and a powerful local feeling. And Foligno, despite its modest size, is ancient, older even than the Buddha.

Denied a map of Foligno, I am left with a memory as a souvenir: my friend and I walked out onto the street, which led straight from the station forecourt into the heart of the old town. This was passeggiata time, the slice of evening when the Italians ditch their work gear and stroll or stand about in the chief piazza wearing their best clothes and accessories.

What a sight! Foligno was far better dressed than any other town I had seen. How unreal it was to walk through a town where nobody seemed to be working, and everyone looked like a millionaire, or a millionaire’s girlfriend. Even the dogs were beautifully dressed and groomed, and all were kept on such a tight leash by their masters and mistresses that they had to stand straight, or be throttled. In the neighbourhood of such perfection I was quite content to be drab and travel-stained, secure in my inferiority.

I then formulated the following Rule of Italian Culture: “The smaller the town, the better-dressed the people.” I suppose there was also the underlying memory of the Lucknow of my childhood, where chikan, chiffon and fine cotton suits were the norm among the classes. It must be a universal rule. How many people in their 20s can claim to have divined a universal rule of sociology all on their own?

Anyway, that was the memory I saved from Foligno. On a recent trip to Uttarakhand, by contrast, with no local maps to be had, I had to content myself with an eye-catching pebble. Its mica surfaces are winking at me right now from this desk.

Crowded and bedraggled as it is, there’s something uncommonly pleasing about Darjeeling. Having spent a few days there recently, I was able to meditate on how beautiful views and cool weather offer ample compensation for narrow, slippery walkways, running drains, taps running dry, and damp and poky accommodation.

Being a condemned Delhiite, my thoughts turned inevitably to the home city. Here in central Delhi are umpteen ministries housed in awful Socialist-style blocks, crammed full of peons and paper and divided up into a warren of cubbyholes and passages — while outside is the open sweep of the so-called Central Vista. No wonder you see lower-rung civil servants taking extended lunch breaks on the grass. Is it possible that this cramped architectural perspective has some relationship with the cramped policy thinking that came out of these edifices?

Newer government buildings to house new or newly expansionist ministries and departments, however, offer a different paradigm. These state-funded monoliths can afford to have what no privately developed office building can: plenty of space, both within (i.e., broad corridors and chambers) and without (i.e., lawns, which furnish the necessary setback for the appreciation, from the citizens’ street level, of the vertical acres of tinted glass and imperial pink sandstone). They also start with the paper-limiting advantages of computerisation. Could it be that this lavish gift of space will contribute to a slight opening up, a greater responsiveness, in official thinking?

(To give one small example, when the post office once housed in the generously proportioned Eastern Court on Janpath was shifted to a cramped and dingy single room opening onto the unlovable middle lane of Connaught Place, the friendliness and helpfulness of its workers — the employees moved with their office — took a palpable dip.)

The new defence buildings — administrative offices, officers’ clubs, hospitals, research headquarters — offer by far the most promising prospect. There, the tradition of “the commanding officer has the last word” is an asset, because, paradoxically in a military setting, it preserves the potential for an individual’s ideas to have a visible effect on the final outcome. That element of quirkiness, sometimes even downright bad taste, is actually rather attractive in a government building.

Of course the military has always had spacious institutional quarters — like the cantonments. But now, for the first time in a long time, it is building itself significant new space. Concomitantly, there’s a hint that there’s some new thinking also going on — slowly, painfully and creakily, of course. Is it possible that the two go together?

(1) Here in Delhi traffic tickets tend to arrive in the mail at least a month, and often a few months, after the alleged offence took place. On almost every occasion the alleged offence was committed at a time and a place where our car was not. Every year we receive a ticket relating to an unlikely offence allegedly committed on the suspicious date of March 31. The alleged offence is never severe — jumping a red light, taking an illegal right turn, speeding, not wearing a seatbelt — and attracts a fine of something like Rs 100.

I heard about someone (for the gossip-wary, this is a source just once removed) that she has had her traffic tickets cancelled by the simple expedient of having a friend in the traffic police shift those tickets to some other car license plate number in their database — any one, just so long as it is not her own.

(2) On 18 June I parked my little car as usual in the municipality-authorised lot a stone’s throw from Delhi Police headquarters and a short walk from this newspaper’s office. The parking attendant gave me a ticket and I paid him his Rs 10. Come evening, when I returned to collect my car I was told it had been towed away by the traffic police. The parking contractor had been waiting for me so that he could take my keys and recover the car from Daryaganj police station. Why was it towed? I was told by the attendants that this was because the local traffic cops had not received their monthly monetary subvention from the parking contractor. So a traffic cop came and picked up one car, which happened to be mine, allegedly as a means to harass the contractor. The attendants urged me to “write about it”. (My car does not bear a “press” sticker.)

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Case (1): The ticket system needs to be totally overhauled. Protesting a wrong ticket is an impossibly inconvenient process; the fine is low, therefore one grimaces, pays and forgets. But it’s an unjustly obtained revenue stream, wide open to abuse. I want my traffic tickets to arrive within a week of the offence and carry a photo of my car committing the offence (or the name of the ticketing officer, if it wasn’t a camera-caught offence). Yes, traffic cameras are expensive, but as even relatively law-abiding Washington, DC, found, a sizeable investment in cameras and systems yielded an immediate and huge income in traffic fines. The city earned back its money within several months, as I recall, and everything earned afterwards and since is gravy.

Case (2): Parking policy is a mess. Rs 10 for a whole day’s parking is an absurd indulgence, but one which, not being lavishly paid, I am grateful for. The contractors’ attendants are very useful because they watch our cars while we’re away (yet petrol vanishes from my tank). Having individual contractors, though, is a problem, because it opens the way to abuse. I can’t think of any good solutions. But perhaps we can bypass the problem by making parking totally fee-free. Parking zones should be very brightly marked (we’ve needed more intelligently designed street furniture for a long time now) so that any illegal parking can be noticed and the owner ticketed or the car towed under the transparency safeguards in case (1) above. The lost revenue can be made up by boosting fuel prices and instituting a respectable annual car-owners’ tax.

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Whatever it is, the traffic police and those who plan and build our transport infrastructure need to be efficient, responsive, transparent and responsible. There’s too much traffic on the roads, and too little logic and design going into managing it. What’s the use of always playing catch-up? Eventually, this transparency thing is going to become a significant local political issue.

Surveying the local skyline, such as it is, from atop my favourite local pedestrian railway bridge, one thing is clear: smokestacks are hot.

Looking southeast towards the Yamuna, I can see a variety of official buildings: the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the police headquarters and its neighbour the CPWD building, the DDA’s Vikas Minar, the Engineers India building, a slice of the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, the glass-box office building Metro added to its Pragati Maidan station, Indraprastha Power Station, and so on.

Not one is a pleasure to behold, from the childish, blocky INSA to the ridiculous olive-green PHQ (crowned with a fuzz of antennae like some giant bread fungus) and the scabrous DDA tower. Yuck.

But in the interstices of all this urban blight are a few pure and soaring forms which lighten the heart and thrill the eye. They are: smokestacks and electricity pylons.

In the evening each chimney wears a crown of diabolical slow-blinking red lights, and its head trails a long smoky mane. If the gray tresses tumble away towards the east you know that the wind is blowing in from Rajasthan and it’s going to stay hot tonight. If the heavy curls trace westward, however, you can hope that the Uttaranchali breeze will trim the temperature and ease your sleep — and indeed, the air will already be cooler upon your face.

Meanwhile, behind DDA and Metro the pylons lift their patient shoulders and march away towards East Delhi. Their burden originates from the Coruscant-like jumble of shiny metal and tubing that is IP power station, which stands out against the gray of atmosphere and building and the dusty green of treetops.

Given the opportunity to produce important and long-lasting public buildings in the ITO region — one of the civic cores of Delhi — every one of these architects (PWD or private) has instead made a monster. Unwittingly, these foolish buildings embody the flaws rather than the best purposes of their institutional residents, and make those flaws permanent.

But mere engineers, obeying mainly the rules of utility and rationality, have created functional artifacts which achieve nobility in every element.

Where the big institutional buildings confuse, alienate and disorient, the smokestacks and pylons sharpen the mind by making sense, and the eye by being simple yet iconic in form. Gone is the 1920s-60s notion of buildings as sculptural elements in a rational landscape, which at least produced visually arresting and intellectually provocative results.

Think of big, concrete structures like Chanakya cinema, the STC building, the NDMC tower, and many more which, even if they are not beautiful, are like the smokestack or pylon in that they have a distinct form that is related to their practical or propaganda purpose and does not aim to disguise it. Now, on the other hand, most architects seem to forget the big picture and just give us agglomerations of small units, in which the whole never rises above its parts.

I think this “architecture by numbers” leaves us consumer-citizens oppressed and stunned by all the untended, infernal variety. That used to be what intelligent architects did in big civic projects — consciously distill and represent our civic self to ourselves. Now they do it without thinking, and the result is both sad and revealing.

On my way home yesterday I paused for half an hour or so atop the pedestrian railway bridge at a minor local station in Delhi. Watching the people below in constant and reassuring motion, and caressed by a gentling, diesel-tinted breeze — now here comes the dreadfully trite thought — I thought: is it possible that India is globalisation-proof?

Not in terms of infrastructure and economics, certainly, but culturally? To the implied order of globalisation we happily oppose the multifariousness and extreme individuality of our cultural selves. We’ll buy your cars, in other words, and take your jobs, but we won’t become like you. Heck, we won’t even become like each other.

From my railway bridge, the view encapsulated this contradictory non-contradiction. Immediately below was the evening commuter crowd and the various pavement professionals who serve their needs. The place and the people were at once drab and extremely lively.

Beyond the station were the yellow-painted residential lines of junior railway officials — old and pleasant single-storey quarters, their uniformity defeated by the residents’ “customisation”.

Above the trees beyond the railway quarters, a glimpse of passing Metro trains, with their neat, contained, mathematical outlines and all their human cargo held within — nothing like the well-worn commuter trains at my station, each carriage with its fringe of passengers travelling al fresco.

In the distance in the other direction, the police headquarters skyscraper — the police, rarely respected, sometimes lawless, and generally either feared or held in contempt; the DDA tower, falling apart like everything the DDA builds; the Indian National Science Academy, which looks permanently asleep…

There’s really no gap at all, in other words, between the rational perfection of the container and the natural imperfection of the human contents — except in the case of the Metro. Unlike elsewhere in the globalised world, law and the will to homogeneity are not sufficient to hold the ideal and the real apart. That’s an irrevocable, culture-specific thing. And culture usually wins; when it doesn’t, the price paid is very high.

The Metro brings this contradiction to a tingle-inducing peak: so neat, so clean, so foreign and expensive — how long can it last? It will be a constant struggle against habit and apathy to keep it looking good and running well. This kind of thing can only work because India pays for Delhi, and will continue to pay. It’s all maya, in other words.

All sorts of technological brilliance has gone unrewarded through human history. Who invented bread? The canoe? Lipstick and eyeliner? The saddle? Hair gel? Catgut for musical instruments? Shoe polish? Cured leather? The belt buckle? Vehicle suspension, which makes road journeys almost comfortable? Gears? Bullets? The list is nearly endless, and patent-free.

It’s easy to fantasise about how many of these technological advances came about, to invent clever or practical originary stories. Prehistoric man falls into pond, thrashes about, grabs round log but finds it impossible to sit on, thinks (or grunt-thinks) between swallows of pond water: “Dammit, if this thing only had a seat and an outboard motor…”

Or: prehistoric woman wakes up after all-night sacred fermented beehive eating ritual, sees swollen face reflected in water next morning after lighting sooty breakfast fire, and is so appalled that she rubs her eyes. Voilà, kajal. (This could even have been a man.)

If happenstance or immediate practical necessity is behind much invention, it’s no wonder that many of the most critical inventions are orphans to our eyes. Who knows, while adding a tweak to a tool that makes it more convenient to use, that one is thus enriching the technological inheritance of all humankind?

It’s quite possible that most of us have invented some little shortcut or efficiency tactic that might prove to have significant economic value to someone else. It may be a more efficient route between home and office, or a better kitchen storage system, a particular technique of cooking some stubborn comestible, some software quickly written up for oneself to serve a specific need (hey, lots of IT-enabled people do this for fun), some novel way of using a word or words that feeds new movement in the “coolness” industry… Again, the list is practically endless.

There’s just no way to foresee what will survive. That, and the near-impossibility of figuring out, in our highly viral world, where an idea actually started (if it even had a single source), is why, despite the explosive growth in published words (paper, TV, radio, Net, podcast, iReport…) and the tendency to associate oneself strongly with, and publicise, one’s own successful work — professional or recreational — I suspect the anonymous inventor is far from a creature of the past. And good thing, too.

(The photo above is from here.)

When the tide rose high at Mamallapuram, the tourist guides told us, small sluices used to be opened to allow sea water into the Shore Temple. Then the reclining Vishnu in the garbha-griha, lit by lamps, would appear to rest on a sheet of water.

That was in 1990, when the temple was still approached across sand and rocks. Then it was something elemental, and even as a child I could see that. Now the temple sits in the middle of a lawn, landscaped earthworks separate it from the sea, and a crazy-paved path fringed with ropes leads brazenly up to the temple entrance. And the temple has been reappropriated: families enter with the tawdry paraphernalia of worship.
Now the Shore Temple is modern; it is no longer capable of awakening the pagan roots of your soul. It is no more sacred than Parliament House.

Without a firm principle of primogeniture, Delhi sultans weren’t very good at establishing dynasties. And many did not last long. Knowing this, one wise sultan took no chances: he kept his son and heir away from the court, made sure the boy was educated well under the supervision of a respected maulvi, and that he did not develop any of the usual bad habits. Then, this conscientious father died. His son became the sultan, instantly forgot his studies, fell greedily into all the vices from which he had been separated, and in short order found himself sick and paralysed by syphilis. Eventually, a usurper took courage, entered the royal chamber, rolled the helpless young man up in his rug, and tossed him out of the window into the river below.