Heritage Potpourri

Heritage Potpourri- East and West

At Ajanta and Ellora caves, you marvel at ingenuity of frescos, their richness of colour, their perfection of technique that survived over a millennium. And then you wonder, how, within just sixty years of independence we could destroy such priceless heritage to an unrecognizable eye sore. There is more decay visible there, than art.

We may flaunt our secular flagship with pride and condemn all religious institutions, the fact remains, great Indian art and architectural wonders were preserved in their original form only in some old temples. In the name of God, at least, we care to preserve few remnants of our human glory. The glory that did not descend as a divine boon but was created by hard working anonymous, ordinary human beings. The perfection of sculptures in some of the temples did not make me feel proud of our past, it made me realize how low we have fallen from the standards of perfection we adhered to till a few hundred years back.

Forget about those loose electric wires hanging outside posh shopping addresses, shoddy leather covers in luxury trains, poor alignments and fixings, in the only certification of hope India could get in the recent past, the IT sector, present chairman NASSCOM, G Natarajan has commented, that, of the 20 lakh IT engineers, only 20 per cent are employable. And we know, we haven’t yet hit the rock bottom of not only of our inefficiency, but, our intolerance for competence.

And then I encountered a heritage of a different kind. On visiting William Randolf Hearst castle on the West Coast ( San Simeon, California) - I was surprised to observe, not a single artifact preserved in the castle was produced by the local artists or craftsman. At best, the castle was like an assembled potpourri. Hearst, the media baron had collected everything that went into making this so called castle on his visits to Europe, Asia , Middle East and Africa. Sculptures from France, doors and ceilings from Italy, tiles from Egypt, some lacquer work from Mexico and so on. Yet, the way they have preserved and present the castle to bus loads of tourists everyday is an eye opener ( you pay $27 for a visit).
I was bored and amused at seeing this vulgar nouveau riche assemblage. Bored, because the castle lacked grandeur and finesse we have seen in our forts of Rajasthan, amused- by their immaculate organizational skills. They do know how to showcase even a fake castle to perfection.
We, apparently do not have a very promising future, we are incapable of showcasing a grand past.