What is emerging, where
once the bungalows sprawled, is the densely-packed high-rise which, at the
pretentious upper end, even as it replicates the postwar model of cheap
housing, disguises its humble origins in fancy names redolent of California and
other glamorous locations. After all, Gurgaon Heights does not have the same
cachet as Malibu Mansions, even if the nearest beach is
a million miles away…The gated community is a hybrid between the memory of the
colonial Civil Lines and American suburbia – well-kept lawns, tree-lined
avenues, tasteful and discreet individual houses that are secure enough in
their privileged community not to need high walls, except at the margins. This
anxiety is intrinsic to the idea of the gated community..
Of course, the
colonial bungalow and the gated community are both mutations of the one
apartheid model. In the post-colonial gated community, the “whites” and the
“blacks” both wear the same skin tone. But for the rest, the relationship
between the bearers of privilege and their ‘bearers’ is essentially one of
apartheid.
What is new, however,
is the fear that underlies the greedy embrace of glamour. For an improbably
long time – I adduce the Bombay cinema of the 1950s and early-60s as evidence –
there was an amorphous social-democratic aspiration, a Naya-Daurish longing,
which softened the bitterness of stark inequality. A Kishore Kumar could still sing “chhota sa ghar hoga, baadalon ki chaaon mein” (Naukri,
1954), and sound plausible. Well, something happened on the way to the present
and that hope disintegrated. There were those who warned, even back then, that
this social democratic promise was deception, was a fraud – “yeh azaadi jhoothi hai, iss desh ki
janta bhookhi hai” – but for all that, the hope was real.
But for all that,
the emergence of the gated community is proof of the realisation that that tide
of anger building up outside the gates will soon be too turbulent to be
casually excluded. Elite imaginations are, traditionally, slow to
notice it.
Read more at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com /articleshow/86525228.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
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