Architecture, Art & Beyond

Last time the friendly alien, Ford Perfect from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame met me I was busy urinating in the stinking public toilet of a Delhi suburb. His courteous greetings over the urinal partition and a large smile add to my discomfort initially perpetuated by the stench and the two men waiting behind me for their turn. And when he leaned towards me and said “”Hi I am Perfect”, my stream just froze in the middle. I zipped, flipped, tripped over the one step at the entrance and zoomed through the crowd as far and fast as I could. That was a good few years earlier. Now that I think of it; it was sometime in March and a large crowd of people were gathered outside a shop, peering into an ECTV, listening to a man wearing a turban deliver a speech in the parliament. Hmmm…. I remember it right, as I bumped into one of them and broke his concentration only to be showered by the very Delhiesque verbal expressions of annoyance.

This time I ran into him along the shores of the placid sea at the Diamond Harbour while sipping from a tender coconut. I did not recognise him since the last meeting had been pretty much siphoned to some obscure corner of my subconscious mind. He asked for a coconut to the burly man standing in the shop and then focused his attention at me. “This is a nice spot isn’t it? Oh! Hi I am Perfect, Ford Perfect”. I nodded and looked at him and just then a flashback in my mind occurred taking me through the events that made me squirm through the crowds of a Delhi street. Back to the present I gave him an enquiring look and said, “Ford Perfect as is from the book…..what was it….!!”. “Ya, so I have heard, someone wrote about me. Keep meeting so many people”, he replied. Besieged by this strange moment between reality and fiction, all I wanted then to happen was to see Rodger Rabbit hopping across the beach looking for a part to play, and I would have fainted in sheer disbelief. Well, while I looked around to spot any celebrity rabbit, to my relief there were none; Ford went on about the sunny beach and the golden sand. In my mind I suspected it was a prank so I decided to play along.

And playing along I did for the next one hour till ‘Ford’ decided to hire a cab to the nearest street junction where one rally would be rallying along among others like the puja pandals in the month of October. I enquired as to what exactly interested him, for a ‘space traveller – travelling through places and spaces of spans of history, engrafting into the unknown treaties that bind our emotions and motions and reflect the civilizations gone by for the future which lies in the galaxies unknown – a trivial gathering in a crowded city?’ ‘I just make notes’ he remarked. I realized that I squandered a chance to get my quote mentioned in his notes, now that I knew what it was. But he would not go without answering, some obscure interplanetary interpersonal code of conduct I guess.

‘Times change and with it trends and systems, nothing new in that’, he said. ‘The polity of politics converges into a different synopsis and dictates the colour of times. While communists get ousted in states as people finally free themselves from the iron fist. Lest they realise the new avatar is one but the same with the democratic mask. If only free thinking could be garnered by censoring and limiting tools of public opinion in public spaces, it for sure is a trail off from the democratic path. It is not unnatural for power to bring malicious self-righteous thinking, a tool to eradicate all things perceived incorrect in the myopic eyes of individuals, while playing the cards under the table at the same time.’ That left me quiet engrossed, my eyes fixated at the patterns in the sand, least I realized he was on the move towards the main road to the city. I gathered my thoughts and asked ‘Hey but you never told me what makes you attend the rally?’ While he was briskly walking away to reach his destination in time, he was generous enough to turn and respond ‘The Big Brother is still watching you, just that Big Brother’s wearing ethnic these days’.