Skip to main content

Disney is coming to Sabarmati

 Imagine a statue of Nathuram Godse welcoming tourists to Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat. What is being planned for Sabarmati by Narendra Modi is quite as bewildering as that. Having killed the soul of Jallianwala Bagh with the renovation of the historical site, Modi, with the Chief Minister of Gujarat, is all set to convert Gandhi’s Ashram into an Indian version of Disneyland.

A sum of Rs 1200 crore has been set aside for the project. Apart from modernised museums and a modified amphitheatre, the Ashram will now have food courts and shopping complexes besides a parking space for 200 cars. Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in a prominent public place in Ahmedabad, sculpted by none less than Kanti Patel, will be transferred to the new Sabarmati. That’s a clever strategy for reducing the visibility of the statue!

The sparrows and squirrels that now share space with human beings will vanish with their habitat-trees.

Human beings were already dispossessed of their lands for the construction of the Sabarmati Riverfront Park when Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat. The remaining few human beings will be thrown out from the area now by the current new project. Gandhi will move out by himself, I guess.

Hriday Kunj

Gandhi’s beloved residence, Hriday Kunj, will also vanish when Bimal Patel’s firm, HCP Design, Planning and Management, will bring its bulldozers and earthmovers to the 54-acre land. This is the same firm that is building the Central Vista in Delhi, Modi’s pet project, a palace for himself – a project which felled 1838 trees from the world’s most polluted city.

Modi usurps Gandhi at Hriday Kunj

Modi dared to replace the Mahatma in Khadi India’s calendar in 2017. He dared to sit on the same veranda of Hriday Kunj where Gandhi used to sit with his charka, yes the same one Modi usurped. The irony becomes shocking when you realise that Modi is an RSS man, the same organisation to which Naturam Godse belonged.

Recently Modi bhakts evicted Nehru from posters of freedom fighters. Will Gandhi be now evicted from his own Sabarmati? One thing is certain: Gandhi won’t like the Disneyland that Bimal Patel will build in Sabarmati. Who cares, right? We are in a new India, one which is Disneyfying history itself.  

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanSeptember 2, 2021 at 6:48 PM

    Hari OM
    Shocking. I had not heard this news before reading this. I am aghast. That photo had also escaped my notice - and all I see in it is mockery. That Godse is now being 'worshipped' by RSS and other strong nationalists is beyond bizarre... and I see nothing on the diplomatic horizon to demonstrate that other world powers are paying any proper attention to what is going on, to have a word in his ear, "look here old man, this just isn't cricket..." ai-yoh... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 2, 2021 at 7:20 PM

      The current India frightens me because a vast majority of people including some of my own friends are supporters of all that Modi is doing. India is moving in a wrong direction altogether.

      Delete
  2. Pooja MahimkarSeptember 6, 2021 at 1:57 PM

    I didn't know about this and this is just horrifying. The Jallianwala Bagh pictures upset me deeply. I remember visiting the place a few years ago and just walking through that lane made me tear up because it made me feel real and imagine the things that happened there, the new pictures barely summon any emotions

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 6, 2021 at 4:50 PM

      Perhaps the most grievous tragedy is that all these changes have ulterior motives whose impacts on the nation's psyche are going to be long-lasting.

      Delete
  3. Rajeev MoothedathSeptember 6, 2021 at 10:57 PM

    These days news persons do not cover these things widely and so much is happening so fast that most people do not know of the many steady changes being made...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 7, 2021 at 5:03 AM

      One of the tragedies in India now is that popular news media have become lapdogs. Others are driven underground almost.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
16 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more