T N Ninan: Misshapen tribute

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

Cities are shaped by their architecture, their vistas and their monuments "" among other things. Delhi is therefore a lucky city.

Look in one direction from Parliament House, and you stare down Parliament Street, past the Jantar Mantar observatory and Connaught Place to the towers of the Jama Masjid in the distance.

Look in one direction from India Gate and you see Humayun's Tomb, in another direction, Safdarjung's Tomb. From there, the road is a straight line to the landmark Qutb Minar. Lutyens laid out the city with a sense of history; so the pre-Mughal Lodhi tombs became the centrepiece for the Lodhi Gardens.

After Lutyens' time, the Shanti Path that is the main artery for the new diplomatic enclave, points straight to the dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan.

The post-independence builders of the new New Delhi have both carried on this tradition, and failed to do so. Jagmohan has paid particular attention over the years to restoring the Purana Qila, freshening the Humayun's Tomb complex, laying out gardens next to the Red Fort, and so on.

Others, like Jaya Jaitley, have created new and popular public spaces like the Dilli Haat, and the architect who did that has just finished what's called the Garden of Five Senses. Yet, Delhi has also been overtaken by the DDA style of coarseness and lack of vision: shabby buildings piled one on top of the other, with roads too narrow to handle either the traffic or the demands for parking space.

The pre-historic resonance of Indraprastha therefore is recreated in an ugly and soulless sprawl that has been renamed the Indraprastha Extension. A once graceful city has visibly coarsened under this baleful influence.

Nevertheless, the powers that be have been keen to protect at least the heart of Lutyens Delhi, and a Delhi Urban Arts Commission has the mandate to ensure that the city's heritage is not entirely discarded or ignored. It hasn't always worked.

High-rise hotels were permitted where they should not have been, because one was owned by a Sanjay Gandhi crony and another got his seal of approval in the days when his word was law.

Which brings me to the point of this ramble, and what is called the National Police Memorial. Now, I didn't know that India's police no longer exists, and therefore merits a memorial. What comes to my mind also is the quip by a Scotsman when told that whisky was Scotland's national drink: What kind of country needs a national drink, he asked. To paraphrase him, what kind of country needs a police memorial?

Perhaps I am being unkind. After all, many policemen have died in the call of duty and the service of the nation. Certainly, I am grateful for what was done to curb Punjab terrorism, to take but one example, though I'm not sure I care to remember all the methods that were employed.

And perhaps it is only right that one park in the capital becomes their memorial. Why, for instance, should most of the memorials in the city be for dead prime ministers? The unknown soldier has a memorial at India Gate; why not one for the poor unknown cop?

Conceding the argument, I come to my more limited point this morning: When a memorial is being built, some care should be taken to make sure it is a graceful structure, located in an appropriate setting.

But if you see the monstrosity that is being erected in the heart of the capital's diplomatic enclave (a most inappropriate setting, since it is directly between the Indonesian and Sri Lankan embassies, with the Chinese and Norwegian embassies off slightly to the side), it testifies to something even worse than DDA coarseness, for what you have are four misshapen pillars holding up what looks like a globe at a geometrically challenging angle.

Worse, the view from Shanti Path which used to be of Rashtrapati Bhavan's magnificent dome in the distance, is more or less completely obscured by this utterly ugly structure that is being born.

In a city known for its geometric patterns of roads, the new memorial is not even aligned with this direct line of sight and visibly disturbs the symmetry, thus ruining the vista. I wish someone would stop the police (or whoever is in charge of this project) before the damage becomes permanent.

Fretting about the vista in one privileged part of one city may seem a trivial concern when matters of much greater import face the country. But it is through such issues that cities and people define themselves.