Our monuments, gardens, streets, walls, and even books in libraries have one thing in common. They are all defaced. I remember it was a pain navigating my way through a garden without touching a tree where a heart or some name wasn’t etched. It is the same story with walls of houses, inside parking lots, and even on the dried cement patches on repaired footpaths… pick up any book in a public library and there just around the place the title is supposed to exist in peace will be ‘Sumant loves Suman’. Etched in charcoal on the inside walls of the monument in Lodhi garden was ‘Rickie has been here’.
Come on, do we really want to know if Manu loved Manju or if Babu has been visiting the place? Do we want hearts etched mercilessly on every tree trunk? Do we want pages of books on the history of India be filled with inked inanities like ‘love’ and ‘hate’, or statements like ‘do not read this book’ or ‘I hate the writer’? Books with doodles that have nothing to do with the history of India can be such a pain. But the truth is that a defaced existence is what our walls, trees, streets, and books have… and this is the world that I navigate through every day.
When Francis Bacon wrote: ‘Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time’ he too was probably troubled by this menace. Yes, these forms of defacement are nothing but shipwrecks of time. Well, talking of wrecks, haven’t any of you noticed the way the civic agencies wreck a nicely laid road by digging through the width or the way the road-maintenance agencies patch pot-holes? My daily navigation through such defacement of public property is what makes me tell Specky, my wife, ‘Very soon we will have only defacement in the name of history and culture.’
She agrees, ‘You’re right. You’d better start writing a book on the history of defacement. You just might become a best-selling author.’
We smile and let it go… but the truth is that defacement does bother us. For those who are confused about all this hullabaloo that I am creating for a single word, let me add here that ‘to deface’ is a transitive verb that means ‘to spoil or mar the surface, legibility, or appearance of; disfigure.’ The adjective is defaceable and the noun is defacement. Now ask yourself if you wish to live a life in the midst of a disfigured world or will you seek a life that is surrounded by the myriad shades of beauty that nature anyway provides? Let me add here that even the moon despite its craters is a beautiful planet because those might have been made by showers of asteroids that might otherwise have hurtled towards earth. Those craters are probably a poetic reminder of a moon in its protective role.
I’m sure most of us will vote for beauty, flawless or otherwise, but not deliberately defaced by us. Only the other day I saw a little ruffian scratch three straight lines on the hatch door of a car and I asked, ‘Why are you spoiling the lovely paint on this car?’ He looked at me and whined, ‘I have made wickets and now I will wait until more people join my team to play cricket.’ I then explained to him that there were better ways to ‘make wickets’ to play the game… three sticks or even a stack of bricks might do a better job and then the wickets won’t just drive off the pitch in the middle of an over being bowled! But then, this is the way we learn the invasive art of defacing our world.
I want a world free of any defacement. I want to navigate through beauty and a city that will smile back and not groan because of etching and graffiti that vandalizes it. I do not want trees to tell me that love exists by displaying a merciless heart etched on their trunk. The word ‘environment’ isn’t always about carbon-footprints and ozone layer depletion… it is also about beauty on the streets, on our roads, inside and outside homes, and about everything allowed to exist as they were created to exist. Let us vote for navigation through a beautiful world.
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A defacement is not communicating love
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This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
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Arvind Passey
25 January 2016
