Style and opulence are much like oil and water for they never really melt into one other to come together successfully and creatively. Unfortunately, an upwardly mobile urban India has opted for opulence?the flash and shine rather than style, making much around us garish and often ugly and disconnected.
There are those who have brought traditional designs, patterns, colours, skills and expertise into a contemporary space, to deal with changing demands and realities, attempting to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity with sensitivity, thereby enhancing the natural growth into fresh new realms. But, there are hordes of ?fashion designers?, ?stylists?, ?event managers?, ?architects? and ?interior designers?, who pick bits and pieces from here and there, cut and paste them together to create, unrelated to the environment, space and time, pure ugliness.
Andy Warhol was stylish. He broke new ground with fine, changed aesthetics that fit into a modern society and became the trigger for what followed. Well before that, the Bauhaus School influenced the middle of the last century and that ?style? continues in varied forms even today. Those creations, innovations, experiments, call them what you may, were the result of much creative and mechanical thinking and practice.
Corbusier and Kahn, as two examples, designed buildings and furniture that make a statement even today, with the Corbu reclining chair bag. Isamu Nagouchi?s paper lamps invaded the world crossing endless cultures and traditions. Designs such as these and many more in the same genre have survived. For that reason, and because of rooted fundamentals, carefully crafted ?styles?, anchored in their time and space, have lived through centuries, sharing the landscape with fresh creative inventions.
In India, much of our contemporary design has been imitative and so has not made an international impact, or been able to compete with the best. However, our traditional skills remain special and fine.
In the rush to become ?westernised? and ?modern?, we have absorbed the worst because it is easy to ?copy? the uninspired and simplistic rather than the classic and sophisticated for which you need to study and comprehend the why?s of shapes, sizes, balance and suchlike.
That requires hard and detailed work, profound quality control where nothing makeshift comes on to the retail market. This long gestation is far removed from the quick fix and quick buck syndrome that urban and middle India is drowning in. Rural India remains connected and a suffocated old-fashioned India is fading.
The post-Independence architecture that dominates our cityscapes speaks volumes about the deterioration in aesthetics and lack of comprehension about the environment, weather, habits and culture in the shaping of modern, human habitats. No civil norms are adhered to or enforced by the municipalities. Apart from the ugliness, the living conditions are inhuman and unacceptable.
Open drains, filth, zero garbage collection and disposal, all make everyday living hell. Western gear donned by men makes them look like caricatures from third-grade Hollywood films, as they strut about, uneasy in tight trousers, forever fiddling with themselves in an effort to feel happy and comfortable in their alien garb. The polyester shirts, the wash-and-wear variety, are not washed regularly and exude the worst possible odours that pervade our public places.
Why not kurta pyjamas? After all, the weather pattern in India differs dramatically from the cold of the West where they have to wear what keeps them warm. Women, thankfully, are not as absurd in their dress except for the anorexic types on page three, in their short skirts looking completely nondescript and bland.
Hopefully, a new generation trained in architecture, design, town planning et al will enter the fray and change the course infusing energetic dynamics into creating a landscape that will represent the vitality and new sensibility for this millennium. Sixty years of government domination in all aspects of life and living stunted the flowering of a new aesthetic.
Hopefully, that forgettable, crass and tasteless phase is on the verge of being over and out. Our generation and the one before us that lives on must let go and step backstage.