Content area
Full text
Nothing drives the imagination of the modern civilisation more than the idea of the 'perpetual'. In a cyclic, finite and limited world as ours, the idea gives humans hopes of eternal structures, of unyielding economic systems, of unlimited resources, of weather proof wall finishes, of the anti-ageing creams and of perennially available mangoes. Mountains are being carved out to harvest the steel on which our 'immortal' civilisation is being built. According to The Extinction Crisis, a social programme of the Center for Biological Diversity, Arizona, we now are on the brink of a mass extinction with 30% to 50% of the existent species heading towards it by the mid-century as we dig out hills for extraction of limestone for the cement that helps us build tall skyscrapers. Ancient forests are being destroyed to make way for a mono-culture of timber trees to generate wood to aid the race towards eternity. The breathing thatch is now being replaced by the cancer inducing asbestos sheet and the mud wall is being replaced by burnt brick, for the production of which 35,00,00,000 tons of cultivable soil is consumed in India annually and burns 2,40,00,000 tons of coal (The Times of India, Dec. 7, 2013). The rush of the idea of the immortal civilisation blinds the ecological and cultural limits that have bound Indian civilisation for centuries and helped it attain a state of permanent evolution rather than a pseudo-permanent existence.
The strength of the Indian civilisation lies in its belief in an all-pervading soul. The belief in the cyclical nature of the soul, an ever regenerating, ever improvising being, is what we have been basing our decisions on. The Indian civilisation described by Kumarappa (1984) as 'Natural Economics', is now challenged by a unidirectional, falsely permanent, an all promising and individualistic industrialised global economy. Such an economy suffers from what EF Schumacher describes as 'meta economic crisis', that is, a crisis in which absolute factual reduction and standardisation turn the wheel of the economy in such a way that there is no place for regional ethics and sociocultural diversity to exist.
Such a socio-political atmosphere gives rise to architecture that responds to it. It is, thus, not a wonder that Mumbai aspires to be a Shanghai, or...