MALA FIDE
From having been on a safari in Ranthambore, driving through Jaipur en route to Delhi was a treat and an unusual surprise. The entire city has been transformed into an open air art space with paintings of the Jogi community - that lives in the area around Udaipur - adorning nearly every billboard, hoarding and bus stop. It was a joy to witness a city in India do something as dynamic and out-of-the-box as this. This effort to generate a sense of pride, ownership and belonging is what builds the base for inclusive politics and an administration that is accountable to the people.
Hopefully this venture will continue for a while, showcasing other contemporary artistic expressions of the people. How wonderful it would be to visit other extraordinary, historic cities where the past and the present are captured on canvas or through the camera and presented to both residents and visitors.
This brings one back to the reality of how neglected all our cities have become over the last few decades. It is a shame to see the treasures of the past fighting public and private vandalism to survive. Cities and their buildings, which embody culture, tradition and a vibrant history, have been poorly protected and defaced by the very people who are tasked with conserving them and the ethos that they represent. The inept babu has ensured that public monuments remain isolated from their stakeholders, and that the reinvention of public spaces and historical sites never happens.
A lot of money has been wasted owing to regressive mindsets. The people in charge remain entangled in red tape. They are incompetent and use a redundant bureaucratic 'machine' as an excuse to stall ideas and imperative change.
Gross neglect
A radical shake-up of the administration and its municipalities is the first step in the restoration of our culture. It is not a difficult task if the head of every relevant institution is ordered to deliver within a tight, unrelenting time frame, in keeping with new, sensible parameters. In this exercise, public-private partnerships are essential. The babu and the skilled specialist could work together and, very quickly, trigger the change and show results. On enquiry, I was told that converting Jaipur into an art gallery, open to the people and the sky, was an idea that occurred only four weeks ago. The city administrators executed the idea effectively. This goes to show that joint ventures and partnerships between government agencies and the people are the way forward in other realms as well.
To rekindle a sense of ownership and pride, it is important to restore the vitality of our museums. If every district identifies a building or a monument that symbolizes the area's history, and if the administration forms a public-private initiative to conserve the monument for the community, India would be able to lift thousands of such sites across the sub-continent out of a morass.
We ape the West in every other, upwardly mobile aspiration, but sadly not when it comes to replicating the energetic management structures of its cultural institutions. Great cities and stunning towns that lie scattered around the globe have all been accorded respect and dignity by the governments in those nations. We have put a barricade around structures and places that have been identified as 'national treasures', and have relegated them to a place of neglect, suffocated by babudom and archaic rules. Great ruins that should be restored and celebrated, are decomposing and dying under the 'protection' of the Archaeological Survey of India. Kalibangan is just one example; there are many more like it that are lying unattended.
