One of the first structures that humans must have learnt to build as they settled down from a nomadic existence must have been walls. Walls have been with us since the dawn of civilisation and maybe our even intrinsic to the idea of one. Many core tenets of what constitutes a civilization rest on the structure of a wall after all.
The sense of community is essential for a civilization and an idea of an “us” essentially needs a concept “them” and often the connotations depend on which side of a wall you call home.
A civilization also entails a relative peace and cooperation. An assurance that the members of the civilization won’t be subjected to arbitrary violence and looting. That they may have a chance at prosperity. The underlying principle being the concept of property. That you would have ownership of property. And that what you own won’t be arbitrarily stolen from you. And walls have always been the markers of ownership. Land was enclosed within walls, grains stored behind locks that control access through walls, and perhaps most importantly, a home of one’s own being an ideal encased in walls.
A civilization by providing freedom from the paranoia of the wild also provides a haven to the human mind to express itself. Here too, walls became on of the first canvasses of artistic expression from cave art to hieroglyphics. From carvings to mosaics.
As something so essential to what makes us humans, walls can serve as mirrors too reflecting truths about us that we tend to overlook. They reflect the complexity and nuances of our existence by themselves coming in all shapes and sizes. They offer us precious insights into our civilizations in general and communities in particular.
This might not hold true for all houses I am sure, but I have noticed that the walls of our houses have got taller over the years. One doesn’t have to be old to know this. Walk past any of the older houses in any part of the country and you would find that the older houses that not been altered have walls lower than the newer ones. Maybe a sign of people receding from their neighbourhoods. In the poor locales of the cities, it is difficult to separate one wall from another. Here, the walls have remained thin even as elsewhere you find thicker and thicker walls. The walls here are not too far apart, abutting claustrophobia inducingly narrow lanes. Maybe these are a show of solidarity in difficult circumstances. As if to say, we are in this together. This is all the land we have and the thicker I build my walls, the smaller my home will be. Maybe then it’s no surprise that the sense of community is the strongest in these areas. Maybe the walls do have a magic power in them.
There’s one more place where the sense of community remains strong even as humans increasingly become an island of one, and that’s in the well-off gated communities of the city. The walls between houses here are tall, thick, and many feet apart as the wide streets open into boulevards. Then does the magic theory of walls fail here? I don’t think so. Here the other force of the magic of walls is at play I believe. The magic of “us”. By enclosing themselves in tall imposing walls which are in fact often barbed, the well of members of the gated communities retain a sense of neighbourhood. Nothing unites humans more ferociously than an idea of “them”.
As I move away from the heart of the city, unplastered brick walls start popping up on the landscape, these get progressively lower too as you move further away. While the reason for a brick wall may be more economical than philosophical, I do find a certain poetry about them. A brick wall has a certain hope to it. That this divide is not final. It’s incomplete.
Venture into the idyll villages of the country and you find walls not much taller than the people. These walls let people look beyond them. Maybe to stand by and engage in long conversations with the other side even as you repeatedly remind your counterpart that you are in a hurry. You know, those conversations where you turn around to walk away only to turn back again to say something that just occurred to you and then carry on the conversation for an hour more. Maybe these walls also say that these walls are only to mark what’s my own and not to what I wish to disown. That I still belong to the community and do not wish to disown who surround me.
Travelling back to the city, walls serve as even starker mirrors. The most dominant wall paintings are those of political parties and politicians. A sign of a society that has delegated its voice to its representatives and is no longer invested in having a voice of its own. There is hardly any art on our walls that is not sanctioned by the local municipal body or by advertisers. Where the public artwork does shine is in the Rorschach-esque red splatters of nicotine. Maybe a sign of a society that no longer finds consolation in art and expression, but which has resigned itself to any fleeting high that it can chase for cheap.
Maybe the walls flooded by people who offer part time jobs show that the education system has failed many and many of those that it hasn’t failed have been failed by the economy, forced to work two jobs. The flooding of our walls with the posters and leaflets of gold medallist astrologers purporting to fix all our problems in 48 hours show a society that has no faith in the systems in place. One which does not believe that hard work will help it lift itself up. And of course, the many black and white photocopied papers that cover our walls and the poles beside them advertising easy and quick completion of the passport application (and often linked to this, the PAN Card application) probably tell a tale of a land which anyone who can, would like to leave.
On the rare occasion that you do see a graffiti one the wall, they tend to be about confessions of love. The highest ideal the rebels in our society can espouse seems to be romance. No sloganeering of revolution, no satire on government, and no expression of truths. These are indeed writings on the wall.
One can only hope that walls get shorter and thinner. Maybe one day we will learn to build windows too if not doors. I still hope one day to cross a wall and see a call to revolution on it. A wall that speaks the truth. A wall that doesn’t produce art that is curated by a bunch of bureaucrats but art that comes from the people. I hope we take a pause from time to time to peer into the mirror that our walls are and reflect deeply.
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