Taj, an SMS wonder

Hello and welcome. Thank you for voting the Taj Mahal into the new wonder list. This was probably the first time a building bowed down and pleaded for your vote. A Europe-based TV entertainment company plans to redraw the Seven Wonders of the World based on popular vote.
The company is all set to shoot a series on the new tourist spots with the advantage of mass participation.After all who wouldn't want to watch the wonder one SMS-ed for? The populist patriotism drummed up around the Taj begins and ends with the Idiot Box, doesn't it?
Shah Jahan is not likely to approve the dumbing down of the Taj into the hands of the masses most likely to vandalise it with their Sunday picnics and least likely to recognize it if it came knocking on their door at meal time. Nor Mumtaz, the second wife of the Emperor to whom it is dedicated. The Taj was one of the high points in Mughal art, and as global a venture as one could expect under the circumstances, with its materials and master craftsmen coming from all over Asia.
The project was begun in 1631 and was finished in 1653. Some 350 years on, why is the Taj still in the news? Because it is high culture, a way of looking at things that doesn't give a damn to what the masses think. The value and equity of the Taj through the clamouring centuries is not about how long it took to build, how many thousand labourers slaved at bringing it into being, or how many million rupees were splurged on it.
Those are numbers, an eternal source of sensation for the common man. The value of the Taj is its phenomenal self-indulgence.
It's an emperor recalling his love. It is an artist contemplating eternity. It's a megalomaniac's conviction that the world spins around him. The Taj is a museum of one man's mauve moods. It's totally bereft of utilitarian values.
Lesser institutions, such as public conveniences, coach stations, malls exist for the comfort of the crowd. The New India, the rising software superpower of the world, is utilitarian to its fingertips. According to one estimate, this country, for instance, will shop at 300 more new malls by around 2010. Malls are the modern monuments dedicated to the peanut-crunching crowd’s endless need to consume.
And the average Indian consumer's idea of high life is perhaps a Bollywood movie followed by a Chinese meal tasting like a Punjabi dish.
A recent report by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the middle class numbers will explode from a current 50 million to 583 million by 2025. Indian enterprise is geared for the demand. The mall boom is only one index of its preparedness; the mushrooming restaurants and growing links in the chain of multiplexes are other markers. But lost in the juggernaut of birth, copulation, consumption and death is the cry of the lone boy, or girl, who aches to see a painting in an art gallery, to listen to a concert in perfect acoustics, to visit a state of the art museum of science or art, a library he is at home with.
He would have cried out in vain. In the last 20 years or so of liberalisation and growth, fat forex reserves and soaring GDP rates, neither private sector nor public sector has come up with a single investment towards the creation of beauty. Ergo, Taj comes alive in the heart of the grossest shopper.
Remember the illustrious, beautiful and successful Leni Riefenstahl, the official cinematographer of Nazi Germany? As a critic later said, "She lacks the highest, most important quality: soul". Indian enterprise, private or public, is remarkably like Riefenstahl. It has got everything going for it except soul.
The absence of museums, art galleries and libraries in a landscape littered with shops and stock exchanges is an index of the closing of the Indian mind. Voting for the Taj is easy. Building one will take more than punching a button.