Our Ugly WASTELAND
In his new book on architecture, culture and the state of our cities, seething with barely contained rage, architect Gautam Bhatia eviscerates the middle classes—our obsessions with money, prejudices and vanities, ambitions and pettiness, disdain of the public realm and our hatred of the other and each other. This is a book that instead of shying away from the ugliness around us, revels in describing it.
The book is divided into chapters, each covering the various horrors of the contemporary Indian city. With titles like ‘Consumptive Life’, ‘Parasitic Lives’, ‘Nowhere goes Nowhere’, they describe the landscape of our cities, their inequities, squalor and injustices. As an architect, Bhatia has an unerring eye for gruesome detail and he dissects these landscapes to show us what we always knew but pretended not to see.
The book is interrupted by ‘footnotes’ that seem to have little direct relationship with the main text. Instead, they tell satirical semi-fictional stories of absurdities that might as well be true, given the state of the nation we live in. These are also interspersed with drawings that run through the entire book evoking a landscape of an India today or tomorrow—desolate horizons with derelict remains of architecture or a pastiche of cheap, disposable images from pop culture marring our cities.
Amid the relentless pessimism, though, one can see the horizon of what Bhatia longs for—a city where the ‘public’ means equal access for all, whose development does not mean the ravaging of nature or the exploitation of the poor, and where justice, freedom and equality are ideals that we should aim towards.
In Delirious City, Bhatia asks architects to reclaim this mandate for the shaping of spaces for a better life, a mandate that was part of the imagination of the nation that the early modern state offered, no matter that it failed to actually deliver. He asks us to reclaim that hope, by refusing to give in to the exigencies of today and to claim the domain of imagination as a space where new futures, new alternatives can be imagined. ■
Amid the relentless pessimism and rage, one can see the blueprint of Bhatia’s ideal city