By Ellerine Dengdoh
Public safety announcement for the humourless:
The following text is a work of ‘Ironical Content.’ If you find the logic of this piece ‘concerning,’ do not panic. Simply stare at a duck until the feeling of having a sense of humour returns. Additionally, for those who spent the last month and a half drafting my eulogy, I hate to disappoint you. I was simply occupied with the Theatre of the Absurd, which remains significantly more coherent than the present geopolitical shambles we call ‘reality’. I am not dead, I am simply unimpressed.
A city is essentially a place where thousands of people gather to be irritated together, usually by traffic, weather, or other people who also regret being there.
But Shillong is not just a city now. It is a Smart City. A Smart City is a place that is officially more intelligent than its residents,(which is impressive considering it cannot move or think) because it has figured out how to spend crores of public money on buildings that don’t actually contain any public in them. One such building is the Polo Commercial Complex.
From the outside, it looks like a building. This is its most successful feature. Inside, however, it has achieved something remarkable: it has removed the “shopping” from “shopping complex.” Some have described it as “peaceful,” others as “empty” while a few experts have described it as “financially haunted”.
If you ask a local kwai seller, a taxi driver, or anyone who has accidentally looked at it, they will tell you it’s the world’s most expensive cupboard. Not because it stores things, but because it doesn’t.
The reason for its emptiness, I was told, is that the government has decided to set the rent for these shops at a price normally reserved for people who sell organs in the black market.
The shopkeepers who want to do things like ‘pay for food’ and ‘not be chased by debt collectors’, took one look and said, “No thank you, we’d rather eat grass”. This has left the grand Polo Complex in a state of Zen-like emptiness. It is the only shopping mall on planet earth that has achieved Nirvana, because it is free from the desire to sell anything. In many ways, it’s the most spiritually advanced mall on Earth.
The Government has successfully built a massive stone trap to catch some capitalism, but forgot to put some bait in it. Now they’re just standing around the empty cage wondering why they haven’t caught a single H&M yet.
Meanwhile, over at Ward’s Lake, things are going extremely well if you define “well” as “being slowly turned into something else.” The papers were full of it, so I need not explain.
For generations, the lake was a place where people could sit, think, feel things, or simply stare at ducks without being charged for it, which is obviously unsustainable in a modern economy.
The Government appears to have noticed this dangerous level of free happiness and decided to intervene. So the solution is obvious…..improve the lake by introducing commerce.
So, the lake is being improved, not because it was failing, but because it was succeeding incorrectly. It worked for people. Which is not always the same thing as working on paper.
This creates such a fascinating irony….in Shillong, we are removing ducks to make room for shops, while simultaneously providing pigeons and spiders with luxury housing in an empty commercial complex. It is unclear if the pigeons are paying rent, but given the current system, they probably can’t afford it either.
However, I remain optimistic, because I have a solution. A terrible one, but one nonetheless. We should simply swap them.
We could dig a massive hole in the Polo Complex floor and drain Ward’s Lake into it. Think of the tourism potential. You can pay 500 Rs to paddle a boat past empty shop fronts. It would be the world’s first ‘Vertical Pond’ and it could include a waterfall where the escalators used to be, providing a damp, expensive place for the government to “float” even more tenders. At least this way the paperwork will be waterproof when it sinks.
For the actual Ward’s Lake site, we should do the “Smartest” thing imaginable, we should pave over every inch of the place and turn it into a sprawling market. Paving the lake is an act of mercy; it finally cures us of the ‘distraction’ of nature and the traumatic experience of looking at a tree for free. Instead of rippling water, which is totally unproductive, we can enjoy the incessant screaming of fish-merchants standing on the exact spot where real fish once swam. That way the poor fish can finally be free of being admired by people who never intended to feed them properly anyway.
Ultimately, our “Smart City” has discovered the future of urban planning, and it is called ‘subtraction’. Subtract the hills and trees from nature. Subtract the poor from the sidewalks. Subtract the children from the playgrounds. Subtract the grandfather from the park bench. Subtract the fish from the lake. Subtract the ‘smart’ from Smart City and what do we have left?
The same Shillong we started with, just sadder now. The same rain, just lesser now. The same rivers, just drains now. The same people, just disillusioned now. The same State, just many many many crores poorer now…..
