Statue. Over.

                                                         

The word ‘great’ and its derivatives usually apply in positive contexts: great people, great work, great art, great holiday, great fun.

We know that great people walked the earth at different points of time and helped it take shape.   Last year or so, there was a question in my boy’s practice SAT he had broken his head over and had asked me help. Something along the lines of “can the actions of average people have an effect on the course of history?”   If that were a week back (March, 10), I’d have redirected him to the newspapers that carried front page reports and pictures of the ‘million march’ in Hyderabad by average people.  Average college kids, motivated into greatness…greatness with a connotation we are not used to. Greatness at it’s destructive best.

A word of caution:  ‘Million march’ by no means indicates that a million took part in it as its organizers would have us believe.  Or may be they follow a different numeral system in which they refer to a few hundreds as ‘a million’.  A few hundreds at best, by the usual numeral system, participated in it.  A few hundred self styled torchbearers of a cause that millions (millions in the usual numeral system) do not support.  The cause of a separate Telangana state. A euphemism for “the cause of unemployed politicians and their vested political and business interests.”

The ‘million’ average common people marked an event in history. Motivated into a greatness of destruction, they went vandalizing humble tributes to some of the greatest contributors to Telugu history and literature. The statues of great Telugu writers and great Telugu kings of the past aesthetically erected on Tank Bund on the Husseinsagar Lake. Average people trying to mark an event in history. Can they effect the course of history?  No, this does not answer that SAT question completely.

This act of vandalism that shocked and outraged Hyderabadis, brings back pictures of the dynamited/C4-ed Buddha figures of Bamiyan that the world was outraged at. However, the same world celebrated the destruction of Lenin’s or Saddam’s statues.  I remember an aunt who had once inverted a small metal statuette of Lenin, her husband had showcased in their living room, to pound some garlic on the kitchen counter with the rounded head of the statuette.  We found it hard to stop laughing. She was cooking a spicy curry and there was power cut in the middle of it, so she could not use the electric mixer/grinder.

When I was a child, we used to play a silly game in school called ‘Statue’. When you say “Statue!”  to someone, this person should stay still in whatever position s/he is when you said that and continue to be so till you say “Over!”  Now I wish we’d played this game with those when they were going to destroy those statues. A drive along Tank Bund will never be the same again. The statues are over.

There were agitations and bandhs in the run up to this million march.  On one such day, my car ran out of fuel, and the agitators forced all  fuel stations to shut down. Autorickshaws had a field day. I paid Rs. 500 to get to work, and Rs. 400 to get back home from work.  Ridiculous.

The Hussainsagar lake is jinxed for statues?  Earlier, in 1990 Buddha statue fell in the lake by accident.  There is a rock called Gibraltar rock in the middle of the 400 year old Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad.  Many years back, the Chief Minister at that time, wanted to have a statue of Buddha on the rock.  The multi-million project and its modalities: the when, why, how, who etc were greatly disputed by the politicians. Finally decisions were taken, executed and after two years, in 1990, the much awaited and much-hyped, the world’s tallest monolith of Buddha (in white granite, 18meters, 350 tons) was ready for installation. One morning, it was to be taken to the rock in a boat.  Thousands of people gathered around the lake to watch the process.  The whole of Hyderabad was eagerly waiting for it to happen. The lake is quite a small one, and it is barely a five minute boat-journey to the rock. But during that short journey, the boat somehow tilted and Buddha plunged into the lake!!!
 
Eleven people on the boat fell along with the statue, and one of them drowned.  Buddha lay stoically under water for a year or more, while the politicians again fought over who should take him out and how etc. Apparently, we didn’t have the technology and a Japanese company got the privilege. (I think they attached deflated floats to it and then inflated them, causing it to float.) The statue was out, but not before it was badly damaged.  It took several months to touch it up.  In 1992 they carried it to the rock again, and once again people gathered around the lake and watched with nail-biting tension. No. They didn’t drop it this time. So after costing the government a few more millions, the troubles of Buddha were finally over and he was successfully installed where he stands tall today. If I remember, they had called the Dalai Lama for inaugurating it, on Buddha Purnima day in May.

As I’m previewing this article, I suspect my whining about the woes of statues in Hyderabad may not hold much water in the backdrop of what is going on in Japan, even though the statues themselves met a watery grave.  Nevertheless I say “over” to this post on statues and  hit ‘Publish Post’