A tale of two cities’ parks and empty lives
While I was leaving Chandigarh after many years of teaching to join the University in Delhi, I was almost in tears as my Delhi-bound bus passed by the city's beautiful Rose Garden. This is where I religiously went for my morning walks all these years and befriended many trees as I saw them grow from shy saplings to audacious adults.
Mornings used to be divine and peaceful and the time spent there was serene and meditative. I have issues with (architect) Le Corbusier's fetish for uniformity and concretised order in town-planning with its undue accent on sectorisation, but I never ceased to admire its secular legacy as reflected clearly in the parks of Chandigarh.
In the urban space, parks are usually public places meant to provide healthy recreation and tranquil solitude to people, away from the din and bustle of city life. If urban life is characterised by its complexities and atomised social ethos, parks are microcosms that give one a sense of a city’s social kinetics and its changing cultural profile.
"Metro time" is the new unit of distance in Delhi and this is what eventually determined my residential location in one of the "societies" on its periphery. I was overjoyed when I was told by the property dealer that there is a beautiful and sprawling park nearby.
The shock over the monthly rent evaporated for the moment. The next morning I was in the park. It was indeed a beautifully planned area, hygienically maintained by the state government.
What however struck me immediately as unusual and a little intrusive was the presence of a large number of small religious congregations all over the park, owing allegiance to various Babas and Matas, with flex-banners proclaiming their identity.
Representatives from these groups distributed pamphlets and tried to woo morning walkers and stray visitors. On one occasion, a representative almost forced me to sit and listen to a discourse and later cajoled me, albeit unsuccessfully, to donate money.
Most provocative was the sight of a group of old men sitting under a peepal tree. A banner of "Ram Kutir" hung between two small branches of the tree. This banner disturbed me and sent me into deep introspection. Why is there such an urge for an identifier?
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| Social exclusion is inbuilt in the design and architecture of Delhi's societies. (Photo credit: India today) |
Why does one need a banner to meditate under or to chant the sacred name of Ram? What forces people to coat the sublime with the obscenity of flex banners? Have the city’s parks become the victim of processes operating outside? There is something so elevating and beautiful about a motley group of retired people coming together, singing, sharing and laughing. But why this banner?
I realised that the cacophony of the pseudo-sacred world inside the park was heavy and limiting. The answer had to be sought in the larger socio-political and cultural milieu of the city.
It appears that the periphery of the city of Delhi emerged, buoyed by the real estate boom, in the late 1980s and 1990s. Metro rail connectivity buttressed this growth and its value skyrocketed to astronomical levels, adding to what social geographer Neil Smith calls "gentrification", whereby lower rent spaces are converted into high rent spaces through strategic reorganising of urban space for newer capital-intensive development.
The decline of the rural in the neighbouring states did not just facilitate the flight of rural capital and labour to the urban, but also some of its moribund values and normative structures. Simultaneous growth in the service sector generated employment opportunities and thus created a huge class of tenants for these newly built residential enclaves.
Clearly, the genesis of these new areas of Delhi owes more to sheer mercantile compulsions and business logic than to any long-term organic spread or evolution in tandem with the larger socio-cultural core of the city which has been more diversity-friendly.
As a result, everything, including culture, is manufactured and homes are mere investment items, a "property" as they say which has only sale-resale value and no emotional value attached to it.
Today, the urban landscape in Delhi is divided between mainly three categories of residential localities, namely DDA flats, "societies" and unorganised slums. Sociologically, it is these "societies" which are most interesting in terms of operation, the life world and subcultures that they spawn and exhibit.
"Societies" are usually a collection of multi-floor apartments and are relatively higher on the rent structure compared to DDA flats as the former claim to be better organised, managed and safe. Most importantly, they mimic the organic settlement like a self-sustained village community and feed on the fragile and frightened psyche of rootlessnes and insecurities of the people.
Segregated from each other by boundary walls, these "societies" have one thing in common - they all have their own abode of god in their campuses. God and goddesses have been enclaved and made part of glossy brochures by property dealers as yet another "facility". The primordial imprint of caste and community is literally written on the gates of these societies.
Social exclusion is inbuilt in their design and architecture. They stand in utter disregard of the basic tenets of modernity and show scant sensitivity to our shared cultural ethos of religious pluralism and diversity. Banners, pamphlets and hoardings of religious gurus and babas dot the locality.
The genesis of our fixation to objective markers such as banners and posters perhaps lies in the vacuous life that we lead, bereft of any engagement with sensitive human faculties. The technology of consumption and the market have entered our homes and robbed us of our natural agencies.
Crass mercantilism has infiltrated the domain of religion and destroyed its spiritual kernel. As a result, we seek solace, identity, happiness, stability and rootedness outside our homes, through these banners and in the company of these babas. Parks are mere helpless mirror images of the larger society and its dynamics.
I continued my walks amid the cacophony. Sitting in an obscure corner of the park one day, I saw a tiny squirrel playing with pebbles, bathed in the glow of the rising sun. I was reminded of my grandmother who had told me the story of a squirrel who had helped Ram construct the setu to reach Lanka.
Till today, this story remained etched in my memory as a profound lesson in humility and a sublime metaphor to indicate the richness, beauty and immense possibility of a dialogue, provided we shun our inflated egos and treat each other, even animals, with respect and dignity.
Religion can be emancipatory if we see and feel it in the twittering of a bird and in the innocent brush of a butterfly on our faces, naughtily interrupting our yogasana. Parks are public places and public includes everyone. Let’s keep them clean by purging ourselves of parochialism and bigotry and of course the banners so that they look and sound welcoming to all.