WHEN PARLIAMENT WALLS ARE SPLATTERED WITH GRAFFITI

LAST week, in his inaugural address in the new, state-of-the-art parliament building, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, in words to that effect, that the vision of a new, grand India cannot be done on old canvases. Just hours later, Ramesh Bidhuri, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Tughlakabad in Delhi, verbally sprayed that visionary canvas with graffiti.

- CP SURENDRAN

In the mean dark streets of India's big cities, on the walls of tunnels, in the washrooms of schools and trains, in places where we are the most alone and, ironically, the most free to exercise our right to speech, graffiti takes over. And I am talking about graffiti at its worst. We begin to express ourselves in terms of extreme judgements.

Our rejection of the unfair world-in fourletter words.

This kind of graffiti I'm talking about never explains the process of thought. It usually consists of monosyllabic conclusions. Abuses. An expletive is an opinion at its purest. It is condemnation of a person or thing at its most basic level, and beyond reconsideration or redemption-like social media lynching, the hashtag being the graffiti sign. It is the version of truth that suits your inclinations. The world is an echo chamber of whatever we would like to believe in.

Often, graffiti as a word or a drawing could be a bare wish or the equivalent of a dire, if wishful, sentence. It is the 'writer' as the executioner. It was in a school bathroom that I learned a classmate of mine would like me to be roasted in hellfires. My name was equated with an expletive on the wall. Below that was a body, a horizontal line with a bulbous head, resting uneasily on vertical lines, a makeshift pyre.

Verbal communication began over 150,000 years ago and evolved into written language 6,000 years ago. Graffiti as an aspect of the imagination has stayed with us through all those transitions. I mention these esoteric beginnings of speech because I believe we are possibly going back to them.