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The Lost Paradise

‘…the reason, he said, was that Turks never wanted to be Turks, they wanted to be something else altogether. This was why they’d gone along with the “dress revolution”, shaved their beards, reformed their alphabet. Another less garrulous shopkeeper explained that his customers didn’t buy dresses but dreams. What brought them into his store was the dream of becoming “the others” who’d worn that dress.’
- Orhan Pamuk/ Chapter Six: Bedii Usta’s Children

Walls have manifold benefits. They are the most powerful and blatant weapons of ensuring one’s encroachment upon and annexation of spaces. Any newly built boundary wall or the bare walls of a freshly painted building become property of the political party or the marketing industry that rules an area. Over night, you will invariably notice at a corner of such a wall a nearly discreet graffiti, reading ‘All Walls ___’ followed by four arrows indicating all the four directions on earth. The blank space, needless to say is where the political party signs its name.  It will be used up a little later for its own campaign. The connotation of these tiny signifiers is clear to us all – every inch on that wall space is now owned by the signatories, alienating the real owner, who virtually now becomes the disclaimer of his own property. Worse is the marketing industry. It straight away uses up such spaces for graffiti promulgating its products ranging from undergarments to insecticides.

Thrice a week I travel for three and a half hours to Burdwan, away from the city, where I teach at a college. Twenty five years back, this was a place where I used to stay with my aunt at one of the Nurses’ Quarters provided to her, studying at a Convent and playing with my mates on the green grass that stretched extensively below our balcony with our two roomed flat over looking it. Every morning we would take long walks along the impeccably pitched paths that were fringed with the orange dust, so typical of the somewhat rugged South Bengal. The rustic breeze, making its way from the nearby village, often smelling of mud and cow dung would brush our faces. With countless birds dwelling in the monstrous trees that formed a thick canopy overhead always reassured us of the pristine life we enjoyed there.

My first trip, twenty-five years later to the same place left me speechless. All the way from the city’s largest junction, the greenery and tiny, picturesque huts, through which the railway tracks cut across and which had so far been the city dweller’s cynosure is now traversed by brick houses, the dwellers of which now literally ‘paint their houses red’.

This is going to be clearer if one looks at the images with this article. The owners of our dream huts now let them to the marketing industries. Their walls are no longer merely ‘protective coatings’. They are spaces let out for ad campaigns. Each four walled cubicle is now wrapped in a jazzy red or yellow blanket, featuring ‘Lux Cozy: baniyan and underwear’, ‘Madhukar atta and sattu’, ‘Minu Sarees’, ‘Rupa Frontline: briefs, drawers, vests’, ‘Ambuja Cement: the greatest compressive strength’. Their vibrant hues standing in complete contrast with the greenery around. The areas around the Porabazaar, Gurap, Dhaniakhali Halt, Jhapandanga are worse.
 
Cast your eyes anywhere for an unadulterated view of the pristine village, you are sure to find, peeping from behind the hedges, a cluster of such painted walls that have lost their identities to the same products. Not ever can you think without Lux Cozy and Rupa Frontline. They are into your dreams now. Every moment there is one new building being let out to the painter who paints it red all over. Every moment there is a usurping of space. They are everywhere. Like a contagious disease they spread. The germs multiply every minute. You stand before it only to witness that your paradise is lost, every second.

In the city, the worst affected are the heritage buildings. The owners/dwellers, unable to bear the exorbitant costs for maintaining these palatial buildings (which now turn out to be rather ungainly for them) let them out to such enterprises. A heritage school building at Kestopur in Kolkata now only have its name peeping out of the countless hoardings that wrap up the entire front wall of the main building, as it happens to a vantage point for ad campaigns owing to its location at a prime junction – the four point crossing. The palatial building of the Nan brothers, popularly known as the ‘Ghari bari’ owing to the huge tower that house the great clock at the four point crossing of Manicktolla, is a heritage building now. It was an important landmark not only because it has witnessed the Bengal Renaissance, but also because its dwellers are among the Bengali intelligentsia, till date.  However, you can hardly make out the dwellers from the narrowest slits of the balcony. For the rest of it has been devoured by the hoardings that proudly proclaim themselves.

Four months back I started counting them. Then there was one building in every five. Now there are seven out of every ten. The fact that the owners let their dwellings out is not only because they get paid every month, but also (and worse still), they take an immense pride in getting their houses painted, featuring the most popular brands. I wonder, how does, then, a product motivate us? The answer is probably what John Berger says in ‘Ways of Seeing’ – ‘…it (the product) says that your are not enviable, but still can be.’ We dream of not becoming ourselves. We dream of becoming ‘the others’ and the smarter ones. For that we not only take pride in putting on the popular brands, but also want our dwellings to display it in the loudest possible way. That is how we want to feel we are enviable. That is how we want to be identified – an entire race, a people, a nation.