Pragati Maidan: How the future was cancelled

Last evening, I stopped to take a look at Delhi's newest, saddest, ruin. The gates of Pragati Maidan were locked, but I could see quite clearly the higgledy-piggledy pile of triangles that were once the Hall of Nations. All those old school pink pyramids will soon be gone. They, like this piece, like many things, were an exercise in futility.

The Hall of Nations, and the other buildings of the Pragati Maidan were put up to celebrate 25 years of Indian independence and inaugurated in 1972, just in time for the Asia 72 Trade Fair.

It was home to an annual calendar of expositions and fairs, most notably the World Book Fairs, where I have spent many an afternoon over the years, and the Auto Expo, which I'm told people used to enjoy.

Technically, the buildings of Pragati Maidan were a standout of Indian modernism, the brainchild of Raj Rewal, and feted as a truly Indian addition to the architectural lexicon.

I will not pretend that Pragati Maidan was my favourite place to hang out. It was not at present the beating heart of any great cultural movement. It was seldom used and poorly maintained. But it stood for something - a weird ancient dream, the last dreamers of which are now dying.

Perhaps, it was a foolish dream, that vision of progress under the stars. The world looked very different then. From those platforms, maybe one day, rockets would rise. Green revolutions, white revolutions, space travel, flying cars, undersea colonies.

Those dreamers also took, foolishly, as some kind of postulate, that in the future, there would be no more of the old medievalism - obviously, there would be the eradication of caste, secular amity amongst faiths, equality of women, a basic economic equality, the brotherhood of man. What children they must have been, that generation.

I wish I could be sure that we're going forward. But there's this dull and inevitable sense that the future has been cancelled. There are no Concordes in the air anymore. We don't have space elevators. We don't even have orbital stages around our own planet! Manned missions to anywhere have been pushed indefinitely.

Look back into the past at the world we were promised - Frank R. Paul illustrations, Buckminister Fuller domes. Arthur C Clarke promised us Moon Base Claudius (estd 1994) in 2001.

As late as the early 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson forecasted colonial missions to Mars in 2026. It has always been the riskiest of businesses - predicting the near future; but it is undeniable that we have been let down. We got none of it. We got smartphones and cat videos and endless debates about whether Aurangzeb/Sardar Patel/Madame Blavatsky were good or bad people.

Those pyramids coming down reiterated very clearly what our decision-makers value, and the axes on which they measure value. Raj Rewal called them "aesthetically illiterate" and I would add to that the charge that they are entirely deaf to symbolism.

Sometimes we keep things around (say it calmly and patiently, this is not obvious), even non-performing assets, or struggle to repurpose them because they mean something. Tangible cultural 'heritage' is not a technicality, a post you tiptoe around, a body you take an NOC from. It is the sum of what we receive from our forebears - that which was valuable to them.

What those pyramids stood for was the optimism, hope and dreams of our grandparents - a generation that came out of world wars, Partition and famine, and genuinely wanted utopian futures for us.

More than the pyramids, I will be personally sad about the Hamsadhwani Theatre. For my parents, when they were young, the Hamsadhwani theatre was where they would go to watch art films on the open air screen. For me, it was where I would go every winter for many years for two days of screaming rock at the Great Indian Rock Festival. It was also incidentally where I had my nose broken - some idiot had brought a helmet into the mosh pit.

Often I have stood in the courtyard of Sher Shah's Qila-i-Kohna mosque and looked north. Below me: the Talaqi Gate of the Purana Qila which has not been opened in 500 years. The Qila-i-Kohna is a newspaper toss away from the Bhairon Mandir. At the corner of Pragati Maidan is the hillock of Matka Pir, and across the street is the tomb of Abdul Qadir Bedil, the Persian poet who is revered across Central Asia but little known in India.

The dome of the Supreme Court - yet another set of promises comes to mind - rises from the trees.

In the far distance, the coal conveyer belts and chimneys of the power plant by the Yamuna. At the heart of it - Pragati Maidan - the pink pyramids, and massive ramps and staircases, like a Mayan city made by humanists. All of this is the Delhi I recognise and love.

When those concrete triangles fell, it was just one more sign, not the first and not the last. I only saw the tail end of that vanishing dream of Modern India, whatever it was worth - Doordarshan, All India Radio, Ambassador cars.

God knows there was plenty wrong with it, and we're not likely to forget it, but they built some magnificent things. Perhaps, they were Potemkin Villages, intended to distract from terrible realities, but the realities haven't exactly been demolished with equal ease.

This country we live innow is new and disturbing, proud and arrogant, drunk on money and the methodology of transactional dealing, comforted by monolithic identities, lulled into compliance by dreams of luxury and ease.

Everything will have escalators, everything will be air conditioned. One can hope against hope that also means there will be mandatory disabled access and the provision of basic healthcare.

Last evening, standing at that locked gate, I could see the future shambling towards us. It will look like three malls in a row. It will be large, air-conditioned, private, anonymous, and basically, really boring.

Also read: Dilli, meri jaan: How I survived a brutal attack in a public park