THE ORIGINAL PIECE
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?
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Returning to the question
I wrote this piece after a conversation in a Darshini in Bangalore with a man who had watched his neighbourhood change around him. The mall had brought traffic, dust and noise into a place where he had once walked in the early morning, breathed clean air and met his friends. What stayed with me was not simply the loss itself, but the helplessness of his acceptance of it: “They bought the land. It is their right to do whatever they want with it. What can we say?” I was troubled by the thought that something could disappear from our common life without anyone having sold it, and without anyone having had the right to sell it.
In the years that have passed since I wrote that, the impact of those occurrences in our lives has only deepened. We talk more about what economists and planners call externalities – the costs imposed on others by decisions that our legal systems appear to vest in persons or institutions that don’t seem to care – but the noise, pollution, congestion and loss of open space are still only talked about, their costs rarely apportioned to those who cause them. However, the experience that prompted the original piece was about something even more elusive. The Darshini was not merely a place to eat. It was a place where people met, talked and knew what was happening in one another’s lives. Its loss was a loss of relationship.
Perhaps this is one of the difficulties of living in a society in which so much of what matters is increasingly treated as an individual transaction. Land has an owner, and ownership gives us a language for deciding who may use it and how. But the life that develops around land does not belong to its owner. A tree provides shade to people who did not plant it, a quiet street allows neighbours to know one another, an open space gives children somewhere to play. When they go, we lose neighbourhoods without moving from them, conversations while remaining surrounded by people, quiet even inside our own homes. Much of the change is not imposed by a single developer or decision-maker; it emerges from millions of individual choices, each of which may appear reasonable when considered separately. It may be that nobody sold my silence; we collectively exchanged it for something else without quite noticing what we were giving away.
There is also a question here about whose loss counts. The person who could afford it moved to a quieter neighbourhood, the car-owner left the congested street, the person who could work elsewhere escaped some of the consequences of a changing locality. Those with fewer choices remained right there, where the costs accumulated. What looked like development to one was dispossession to another, even when nobody took away anything formally.
Perhaps the question I would ask today is not only “Who sold my silence?” but “Who was responsible for protecting it?” We have become reasonably good at identifying private rights, but less comfortable with the idea that some things acquire their value precisely because they are shared. Silence, clean air, open space, neighbourhood relationships and a sense of belonging are difficult to own, difficult to measure, but that does not make them worthless. The challenge is to recognise how they arise and cherish their value before they disappear, because once they have gone, it is easy to be numb to the loss, like a frog being boiled slowly.
Responses
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