Whitewash Them All: Buildings, Bodies and Dreams of the Young

A building collapsed in one of Delhi’s hubs for paying guests, Satya Niketan, on Sunday, September 6, killing seven (and counting) and leaving several others fighting for their lives in hospital. The city woke up, albeit temporarily, from its post-Cockroach Janta Party Jantar Mantar protest slumber. The usual blame game, the tweets, the suspensions continued as per the blueprint, ironically in a city where except for the areas where the rich live, no building follows a blueprint.

Fifteen years ago, I landed in Satya Niketan to pursue my dream. I was told that if I must succeed in life, I have to get out of my small town in Western Assam and study in Delhi. Sri Venkateswara College, I was told I should be proud I had secured a seat there. In Delhi’s peak heat, my parents and I spent three whole days finding a paying guest (PG) accommodation that could shelter me. In my three years in Satya Niketan, I saw all kinds of PG accommodations, some of which are now being displayed to you by the media channels. I lived in two of them. Yes, it was all the same even 15 years ago, when Delhi was under the chief ministership of Sheila Dikshit. Eight years later, when Delhi came under Arvind Kejriwal’s watch, I briefly joined my alma mater as a faculty member. Even then my students echoed the exact same experiences I had, except that their plight had become exorbitantly more expensive. 

So, let’s just address the elephant in the room – the real-estate mafias and the administration that nurtures them. They survive and flourish through every government, not just one. In my second year of undergraduate programme, my accommodation had received a notice – the demolition of the illegal floors began. Eventually, we were told to vacate as the entire building was being shut down. Major portions of our security deposit were not returned for reasons unexplained. The ordeals of the students you are watching now have been there forever. The PG/real-estate mafias of the national capital have no mercy, especially for students from the Northeast. I lost count of how many doors were shut in our faces because I was from Assam. But let’s keep the racism aspect of this whole issue aside for now.

The students who live in Satya Niketan survive on unhygienic street food as their daily meals because, first, the accommodations don’t usually offer meals, and when they do, they are so inedible that one is forced to survive on rolls and momo. Many of them can’t afford healthy food because their limited pocket money doesn’t allow it. All that money goes towards rent and the inflated electricity bills that come from tampered sub-meters. 

The sanitary conditions are beyond hazardous. Getting typhoid, dengue or malaria is part of the ordinary Satya Niketan experience. We had a joke back then: “If you live in Satya and don’t suffer from at least one of these, you haven’t really been accepted by the place.” In fact, this is true of many of the neighbourhoods in the capital where students from across the country come and dare to dream.

Also read: Delhi Hosts BRICS But Cannot House Its Own Students

But what do we, as a society, do when tragedy becomes so ordinary? We whitewash reality, both literally and metaphorically. Old weakened buildings, already on the verge of collapse, are painted over and presented as new to desperate, choice-less, budget-constrained parents and students. Much like the buildings, their dreams are whitewashed too. Young minds are trained to make their daily struggles seem ordinary; in fact, necessary in the pursuit of a white, shiny dream, much of which is sold for lakhs in the UPSC coaching centres next door. 

Dreams are handed out through unpaid internships as the dreamers are indoctrinated to believe in the promise of free-market. Dreams are sold through the twinkling, tall, fancy corporate buildings where the majority of these youngsters dream to work, only to return each night to the same-old cramped, poorly-ventilated and hazardous rented rooms in one of those dangerous neighbourhoods of the capital city. They dream of moving into a “society” (read: gated community) someday; and when they somehow earn enough to move into a DDA colony, survive paycheque to paycheque, they are made to believe they have made it big.

Dreams are sold to them as they doom scroll through LinkedIn, watching other people appear to be living the lives they were promised.

But behind all these glittering, whitewashed walls, there is a blackhole, where lie the remains of the dreams of those who dared to dream before them. And when these betrayed, dehumanised, numbered young bodies die as ordinarily as they lived their lives, their death is whitewashed too. Their bodies are covered with white bedsheets and declared ‘dead’ – not administratively murdered, not systemically murdered – just dead. While their loved ones wait for days with the hope that out of the rubble, their people will miraculously appear alive, the uncertainty, the waiting, the possibility that they may still be alive suddenly turns into a heap of white papers urgently to be filled in by the grieving.

With every collapse of PG accommodations, schools, university buildings, bridges and roads, we confront the collective collapse of a proud nation – an aspiring Vishwaguru that has become remarkably skilled at whitewashing its failures. We talk in big numbers while basic human necessities become unaffordable. We boast about Sabka Vikas while thousands die with empty stomachs. Every collapse is followed by outrage, every outrage by suspensions, committees and compensation, and then, inevitably, another collapse. We normalise corruption, normalise precarity, normalise the rising cost of living, normalise the collapse of public education and healthcare, normalise absence of public hostel facilities for students, normalise inequality, and so, in the same breath, we normalise death. 

The system that makes all this possible stands tall and strong, exactly as it was designed to. So here we are, a proud nation so invested in rising in the global PR metrics that it meticulously whitewashes the volcano of collapse beneath it.

Daisy Barman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management (GITAM), Bengaluru, India.

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