रंग ना डालो शामजी गोरी पे Ranga Na Daalo/Daaro Shyaamji

पेहरी नयी रे नयी सारी Pehri Nayi Re Nayi Saari

सखी सहेल हसत रे देई गारी Sakhi Sahel Hasat Re Deyi Gaari

कैसे हो खिलाडी मानत नाही Kaise Ho Khilaadi Maanat Nahi

बरजोरी न कर जावो मै तो हारी Barjori Na Kar Jaavo Main toh Haari

Lyrics credit: Tejaswi here

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In ghungat mode:

Emerging for a conversation:

Standing on one of A’s shoelaces:

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-Chhattarpur Mandir Road, in Mehrauli, Delhi, appears to be devoted solely to farmhouses and hotels that specialise in hosting weddings and related events. As you drive down, you see signs on lamp-posts directing you to “Sachin and Meeta’s Shagun,” “Ankit and Puja’s Sangeet” etc.

-I hate competitions and want everyone to win something, so I usually can’t bear watching them. However, I have obsessively been watching Carnatic Music Idol 2011 on youtube, despite not understanding any Tamil. Nonetheless tried to pick up what the judges were saying. I am a bit disturbed by certain aspects of it, but am really impressed by how much coverage classical music gets on TV in the South unlike the North.

-I had a facial last week. The beautician said, “You have remarkably supple skin for your age.” Didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment, be outraged or to revise my own self-perception of my age as not being that old. Settled for taking it as a compliment and another indication that we needed to get on with the baby making programme soon.

-Watched a couple of episodes of Wife Bina Life on Star Plus, after not having watched that channel for ages. It’s been shot in some gated community in Pune (forget which) and every house has the same sort of nameplate. The last name of the family is displayed on the houses thus: Parekh’s, Kadam’s, Shinde’s etc. Aargh.

-My snowdrops have finished blooming, the gentle primroses are peeking out with their little egg yolk centres on display, the hellebores are blooming, the yellow forsythia is adding sunshine to the gray light and the almond tree has little pink buds. Love the build-up to spring though it’s still freezing.

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Bangalore has everything: fair male strippers for hen nights, shopping arcades with Hugo Boss and Montblanc, apartments that are rising at a ferocious rate. In the heart of the city, I noticed a large area of land had been fenced off for a development calling itself “Brigade Gateway — Bangalore’s first lifestyle enclave”.

The perimeter road was surrounded by billboards promising a future paradise on Earth, where every need would be met.

Once complete, the lifestyle enclave would have private security, a hospital, its own school, a health spa, a hotel, a food court and restaurants, all sealed from the masses.

One billboard showed a man in jeans walking his dog beside a lake in what looked like North America, with the caption in English and the bouncy Kannada script: “Stroll alongside a serene lake.” Adverts promised a helipad, sculpture courts, a bamboo grove, patrolled private roads, fountains and “a better quality of life”. You could buy a luxury apartment in Brigade Gateway with a fitted German kitchen. “Each wing will have two high-speed passenger lifts. Uninterrupted power supply (we have back-up generators to generators!) will ensure that you need to take the stairs only if you want the exercise.” The wisdom of the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto was quoted in evidence: “True architecture exists only where man stands in the centre.”

It was quite a promise. I wondered how it was being put into effect, and joined a line of labourers as they advanced glumly onto the 40-acre site for the morning shift. They wore yellow hard hats, and some carried tiffin boxes. Although there were bright signs promoting the need to have boots with metal toecaps, most of the men were wearing plastic sandals. The place was a mess of mud and gravel. The labourers had to work on buildings that rose to 30 storeys, and safety nets had been slung around the higher reaches, though in a random way that offered no anticipation of capture.

I asked a security guard from Madhya Pradesh — we’ll call him Dhruv — how many people had died there that year (this was in October 2008). His answer was, seven or eight. He stressed he was only talking about his own section of the site. He was unsure how many people had been injured — casualties were usually sent straight back to their home villages.

At the heart of the site I entered one of the apartment blocks. The staircase was half-built, and I was able to climb nearly to the top. All around, across the skyline, grey shells were rising. These were two- and three-bedroom apartments, and workers from West Bengal were running pipes between them. They said they were paid Rs150 (£2.17) a day, but that the contractor or gang master who employed them took one quarter of their salary illegally.

I watched as these men dragged and winched and hammered and drilled. The quality of the construction was fairly good, but I was puzzled by a boxroom on the outside of each apartment, less than two metres square, accessible only from the common staircase. Was it a storage or wiring closet? No, it was the servant’s room. Each apartment would need a servant, and this was where he or she would be living, without windows or fresh air.

Back at the main gate I asked Dhruv where the hundreds of labourers lived, and he offered to take me to a “housing colony”, as he was nearing the end of his shift. Three big companies were responsible for the main construction project. We went to see the accommodation that was used by the workers of one of these, Simplex Infrastructures. It was off a road about 15 minutes’ walk from the construction site. Indian cities are full of slums and bad housing, but this was in a special category of its own.

It was reasonably easy to get inside. Dhruv had assumed that, because I was white and quite smartly dressed, I must be on official business, while the guard at the colony let me in because I was with Dhruv. The place stank of rotting food and latrines, and amounted to little more than a network of paths awash with dirty water, which led to sheds made of wood and corrugated iron. This was where the labourers lived for months or even years at a time. They came originally from Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and had been recruited in their villages to come south as workers. They told me a contractor was holding their wages and taking a large cut. But, as a listless teenage boy from Buxar named Prem said: “What can we do? We can do nothing. My family don’t even know where I am.”

Prem showed me inside the sheds. There was no electricity, so I used the light on my mobile phone to look around (the cheaper Indian mobiles usefully contain a flashlight). The concrete floor was lined with thin plastic mats, like beach mats, each one about the size of a single mattress, and at the head of each mat were some folded blankets and washing utensils. “Is this where you sleep?” I asked Prem, who was wrapped in a blanket and shivering with fever.

“Two persons sleep on each mat,” said Dhruv.

Two? At the same time?

“Yes,” said Dhruv. “We sleep close together.”

Above the mats were lines of rough string hanging across the shed. Little pictures of deities and religious places were propped in the webs of string. Each man had a length on which to hang his clothes and possessions. This was his sacred thread, the nearest thing he had to privacy. It was not difficult to imagine the atmosphere in the colony each evening when the workers returned: the hunger, the exhaustion, the arguments, the fights, the stink of sewage, the trips to cheap drinking dens and the brothels by the nearby garment factory, and the nightly return to the shared plastic mat. I was outraged by the conditions here, because they were so easily avoidable. This was not an embedded social problem where any solution might throw up a host of new complaints. It was not a case of intractable poverty, or of bosses who were unable to pay their workers more. The cheapest apartments in Brigade Gateway were selling at just under Rs10m (£145,000), and for the cost of few square metres, for the cost of a servant’s closet, these migrant labourers could have been built proper accommodation. When I asked Dhruv if all the workers at Brigade Gateway had to live in such conditions, he said this colony was probably the worst. Some other housing colonies had bunks with mattresses.

I contacted Simplex and asked some basic questions about arrangements for their workers. Nobody wanted to be interviewed. Eventually they responded through a third party: “Mr French’s letter is a little embarrassing for us, and I don’t think we’ll be making any kind of response. He says he has visited our site, and yet the only thing he would like to know is how much we pay our labourers. He has no interest in the structure, or how it is being built… He is writing about India and I do not understand why he needs to know how much we pay our labourers. How is it related to his subject matter? So, we would not like to respond.”

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Angkor

Kalpish Ratna (a pseudonym for two people, Kalapana Swaminthan and Ishrat Syed) have expressed the same desire in the DNA:

Wouldn’t this be the perfect solution for Ayodhya? Call a truce and make it No Man’s Land. Without human contamination, nature will reassert itself. It is the best apology we can offer to the land we have wounded.

Shake off the dead hand, step back, and let the grass grow.

Link

It probably won’t happen, but dreams can live on.

ETA: This view is of course problematic legally, and if implemented, would probably set a bad legal precedent, like the actual judgment.

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