| So the reporter naturally asked why this couple was now on the point of selling up and purchasing a five-bedroom flat in an even newer development nearby. A five-bedroom flat is better than a four-bedroom one, they said, and raises status. |
| In recent times, we have been taught not to judge others' choices. Relativism rules absolutely; one's choices, we are told, are morally neutral, and do not reflect on us as "good" or "bad" people. |
| Yet how can one not judge? |
| Take heart, because the absoluteness of relativism is beginning to fade. An SUV is now a morally wrong choice. Wedding extravagance is beginning to tarnish. Handbags for half a million rupees are a sham touch. Five-crore flats handed over as "customisable" bare shells are making people giggle. |
| Behind this incipient change is something that Alain de Botton captures in The Architecture of Happiness. That something is beauty "" not as an arbitrary principle, but, as de Botton quotes Stendhal: "Beauty is the promise of happiness." |
| Urban Indians, so newly come to the wealth curve, are not yet quite aware of it, but more luxury doesn't make for a better life. Old money knows this, which is why the old industrial families who have cultured themselves over a few generations lead simpler lives than new businessmen millionaires. Money buys mental space, is what old money might say, and it should know. |
| De Botton reminds us that happiness is where we are at home. Given the opportunity, he says, we try and shape the spaces we inhabit in ways that allow us to feel relaxed and at ease "" to, in his words, "slowly resume contact with a more authentic self, who was waiting in the wings for us to end our performance". |
| This is the crux of his argument, that each of us has "many different selves, not all of which feel equally like 'us'". We aspire, in our various clumsy ways, to hold on to that "self" which seems to be the best of us, the most "authentic, creative and spontaneous side". |
| Perhaps this sounds as if he is speaking directly to his Western audience, with its finely honed anxieties about ageing and identity: but look around. Urban Indians are beginning to manifest a similar imbalance. |
| Instead of livelihood and providing for the next generation, identity, expressed in consumer terms (including consumption of religion), is beginning to preoccupy us: can we fill the hole in our hearts with our homes and possessions? |
| That hole is the alienation from our own cultural past, and, more generally, from the world of "authentic" materials, such as stone and mud, and ways of living, such as homes built on the ground and not 60 feet up in the air, joint families and community rather than nuclear kin and complete disinterest in one's neighbours. |
| This alienation de Botton sees in all kinds of artificial objects. We intuitively choose what surrounds us in order to compensate for its absence within us. We all know clearheaded people with cluttered homes, and twisted sorts with fanatically neat desktops. |
| So he looks at rooms, streets, buildings, furniture, household objects, art and poetry, with the intuitive eyes that reveal what a human really sees. The table that recalls a deer, the tap that looks unfriendly, the bridge that looks like an old woman, all these indicate what went on in the minds of their creators "" the ideas or the absences that guided their creativity. |
| Such a degree of sensitivity to his mundane surroundings, to my mind, can make an observer unusually vulnerable. De Botton admits this. Yet, his fearlessness in making such connections is in itself liberating, and should shake the Indian reader awake. What do our places, homes and cities, tell us about ourselves, about India, about what we lack now? The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life Author: Alain de Botton Publisher: Penguin Pages: 280 Price: Rs 495 |
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