A few years ago, I visited a newly-built mall in one of the leafier parts of Bangalore. It was packed with people, as you might expect, and the traffic outside was a crawl. After a bit, we decided to step outside for our lunch and found a Darshini (a local eatery) a few metres down the road. We sat down to eat and got into a conversation with a man sitting at the next table. (You can do that in Darshinis)!
He said he had been coming to the Darshini for several decades, since he was a child. He talked about how quiet it used to be, even very recently, and how the walk along the street had been a most rejuvenating and regular early morning affair. He talked of the clean-smelling air in the morning and the fragrance-laden one at night – experiences that had defined the neighbourhood for him for decades.
“Many of us used to gather regularly here at the Darshini every morning”, he said. “It was a very good place to share what was happening in our lives with our friends and neighbours.
“It is all gone now”. He looked really wistful. “Since the mall construction started, there is so much traffic and noise. It starts even before we wake up and doesn’t end until well after midnight. The air has become so dusty, first because of the construction of the mall and now because of the traffic, that we keep our windows closed all day. And nobody wants to come to the Darshini anymore, because you can hardly hear what anyone is saying.
“But what can we do?” he continued. “They bought the land. It is their right to do whatever they want to with it”.
He said this hurriedly, unprompted, as if he was afraid he might be seen to be questioning this right.
That conversation has haunted me for the several years that have passed since. It wasn’t just that this man’s access to silence, clean air and meaningful community had disappeared overnight. What made it deeply disturbing was his belief that that was the natural order of things — with no hope or right of redressal.
There was a time, a long time ago, when land and air and water and open skies and silence were shared resources. They helped us live, grow our food, quench our thirst and rejuvenate our spirit. We then figured out a way to make land a personal (and, therefore, transferable) resource by dividing it, perhaps because it was easy to divide. We haven’t yet figured out how to divide air, open skies and silence, though we are furiously at work trying to divide water.
But something remarkable has happened along the way. Because we haven’t been able to divide silence, air or water, we no longer know how, or indeed whether, to value them.
Someone clearly sold the parcel of land that the mall was erected on. He did it legally, according to accepted practice and socially-sanctioned norms.
But who sold my silence? Or was it always worthless, to be appropriated by anyone who chose to do so?
Was the feeling of support and belonging that I felt among my friends and well-wishers an illusion, not even worth a protest when it was snatched away?
And why am I so scared to say that the open skies and the silence are precious to my existence and my sense of meaning in life, not an incidental “buy-one-get-one-free” appendage to your sale of land?
Who sold my silence?
