FIFTH COLUMN

Mediocrity

By C K Lal

When the struggle is for survival, compromises are not only understandable, but also natural. After all, beggars can hardly be choosers. But the culture of compromise has so permeated our consciousness that even those who can afford to choose opt not to do so.

In our everyday conversation, we routinely use expressions such as ‘nearly good enough’ and ‘will do.’ I personally find “Good enough quality for a Nepali” comment the most offending. Why would anything that in not good for others, should be good enough for us?

The tailor gives an imperfect fit and grins with “For we Nepalis, this is sufficient.” It’s not just the barber, the shoemaker and the water that forward such usual excuses. Even doctors, lawyers and architects resort to it when they have to hide either their insincerity or their incompetence.

After a long slump, construction activities in the valley appear to be on a recovery path. New houses have started to come up once again. Unlike previous boom-times, this time round there is a preponderance of commercial buildings. They are, in essence, public buildings. Therefore, their architecture should be of interest for all of us. The city we live in are shaped by them.

Unfortunately, the architecture of new buildings that are coming up appears to be uniformly mediocre. Goethe once said that architecture is frozen music. Buildings that are mushrooming around us are visual cacophony that creates confusion and irritation in our minds.

Apart from the plethora of shuttered shop-fronts here, there and everywhere, the worst offenders are the so-called high-vision halls meant to screen Hindi potboilers and their poor Nepali clones. Like cinema, architecture of theater is an art form in itself. By looking at our cinema theaters however, nobody would believe that statement. They are, nearly all of them in the valley, modified godowns.

Commercial complexes are no better. Monstrosities of Kamaladi, matchboxes of Ranmukteshwar, and the chaos at Putali Sadak make once weep. Arniko must be turning in his grave by the sacrilege being created in his hometown in the name of architecture.

Things are not any better on the fronts of package design, layout of periodicals, architecture of bridges, design of road junctions, arrangement of shelves inside shops, or even chairs in restaurants. Truth to tell, they are all uniformly ugly.

This is quite a contrast to the dignity of neat earthen floors that even the poorest of us maintain in villages. Inadequacy of resources is not the main reason. At most, they are convenient excuses to hide the mediocrity of city-dwellers that are yet to become urbane.

Physical poverty is hard to bear, but the poverty of the mind that nurtures mediocrity makes that even worse. Our insecure elite has to grow out of it mediocrity if it is to provide leadership to society. Their tastes betray their confusion. Once they achieve clarity, the skyline of our city will start to change.