ROAD RAGE

Google Earth was a tool used by an artist I met recently to provide the underlying idea for a huge canvas he is preparing - it's roughly square and covered with small abstract rectangular blocks, representing city life seen from an aerial perspective, but what transforms this art work, is the network of red lines, representing roads, which he called 'lines of rage', as the towns, without facilities to support a growing population, become clogged with traffic of every description - auto rickshaws, cows, carts, dogs, bicycles, motorbikes, lorries, cars, all hooting - a stream of life jostling for an inch of space, elbowing the other person out of the way, no time to stop and think, everyone getting there no matter what.

Adding to the confusion are the ubiquitous road works which dismantle whole lanes of traffic as a million workers, mostly women in saris, dig huge holes in the ground with their hands and then traipse along with a wide basin of earth sitting elegantly on their heads, to be gently lowered onto a heap somewhere else.  Finding the road completely blocked by an impromptu mountain of earth, the traffic shudders to a halt for a second before the intrepid at the head of the line go over the mound, others follow and after half-an-hour the mound has been firmly trodden down by a million feet and vehicles, until it is a makeshift road again.  Money, to keep these projects in an endless state of incompleteness, seems to be no object.

As India builds a new global image with her burgeoning economy, concrete is being poured not only in the cities but in the countryside too and a Mumbai artist was particularly stricken at the loss of green meadows that she had known as a child.  Now steel rods project from concrete casings in the middle of nowhere,  like the flagpoles of medieval turrets, proclaiming territory, civilization and progress, as India gears up for a transition from a rural to an urban culture.  But is there a guiding hand in all this development ? 

For Mahatma Gandhi, the spirit and the soul of India rested in the village communities. He said, "The true India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its seven hundred thousand villages. If the villages perish, India will perish too."