Many years ago, sitting in a charming little café perched like a contented cat atop Malabar Hill, my wife and I made one of the wisest decisions of our lives. We decided to get married. The café, quite naturally, took full credit for this life altering moment. Every year thereafter, we returned faithfully to the same spot, ordered the same food, and looked at each other as if we had just invented romance.
And now, the café is gone.
Obliterated with the efficiency of a bureaucrat stamping a file. In its place, has come a municipal structure.
So there I stood the other day, looking at a pile of rubble, trying to remember where exactly I had proposed. Was it near that broken brick or slightly to the left of that cement heap? Romance does not survive well under excavation.
This, I am discovering, is happening everywhere. Roads are renamed, cities are rechristened, buildings are redesigned, and history is politely told to vacate the premises. We are living in a time when memories need planning permission.
What surprises me most is the confidence with which people in authority behave. There is a certain swagger in the way decisions are made, as if the city was handed to them by their great grandfather along with a set of keys and instructions saying, “Beta, do whatever you like.”
But somebody needs to tell them, that they are not owners. They are just custodians. The real owners are time, memory, and the millions of stories attached to every corner of a place.
Even my church, where I got married, has not been spared. The pulpit area was redesigned by a committee that clearly had no idea of aesthetics. The new look is completely unfamiliar.
Of course, history itself is not innocent. There are places where temples lie buried under mosques, and even under churches, each layer telling a story of power, conquest, or belief. It was wrong when it happened then, and it would be just as wrong to repeat that instinct today. If anything, history is asking us to pause, to learn, and to preserve, not to erase and rebuild as if memory were an inconvenience.
Because correcting the past by wiping it out completely is like solving a family argument by burning the photo album.
You may remove the evidence, but you also destroy the story.
Perhaps what we need is a small board outside every office of authority. A simple reminder. “You are here temporarily. Please do not disturb permanent memories.”
Because in the end, we are not owners of anything. Not of cities, not of roads, not even of that little café where two people once decided to spend their lives together, because yesterday afternoon, if the cafe had been there, and we’d been able to go there to celebrate those precious memories again, maybe I would not be shouting those words with such anger, to those in power, ‘You are only custodians, and we who are part of history are the real owners…!’
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Robert Clements is a newspaper columnist and writes a daily column, which has graced the pages of over 60 newspapers and magazines, from a daily column in the Khaleej Times, Dubai, the Morning Star, London, and in nearly every state in India, from The Statesman in Kolkata, to the Kashmir Times in Kashmir to the Trinity Mirror in Chennai.
Memories!
on the other hand the argument is embrace change! It’s inevitable
Happy anniversary
C’est la vie
Although we know in most cases it is unnecessary but change is inevitable
Sure, ‘it is the life’ Joseph. But change if it happens should be with wisdom.
Best decision ever, Bob! God bless your family ❤️👍✌️
Thank you Liza!
Bob, Sorry for your loss. I hope the memory survives.
With a wry smile I notice that the illustration you have used has in it, an Aurangzeb Road placard – one of the most controversial road reanames in recent memory.
Yes names will and MUST be changed. Histroy will not be rewritten, but we will recalim our heritage and our pride.
Will you find a HItler street in Haifa ,or in Munich for that matter? Will you find a Goebbels park in Paris or in Dortmund ? NO. An Emphatic NO. And if our temples were destroyed and mosques built on them by marauders, then if the local Hindus want their temple back then the local Muslims should hand them over the property and help them rebuild the temple rather than resist them.
Why were the temples destroyed in the first place? To build mosqes ? Of course not. Surely there was plenty of empty land avaiable to build a mosque neary or elsewhwere. Why destroy beautiful temples ? It was to oppress, and demoralize the Hindus, and follow the command in the Quran to forcibly convert them, or failing that – to KILL all Kafirs.
Reclaiming the ancient temple sites, like Ram Janmabhoomi, and rebuilding these temples will help to revive the spirit of the majority community. Sadly , under Congress rule, too many laws were passed that carried forwrd the legacy of the Moghuls – giving unfair advantge to a specificf minority ( so called ). This has to end.
The Cathedral of Cordoba and Hagia Sofia are prime examples of such reconversions. And the renaming of V.T Station is another. Sadly the colonial mentality still survives after 7 decades primariy because we did not get rid of the British with force, otherwise every street and building name would have been restored to its original name right then in 1947.
Now that it is finally happening – better late than never – we shoudl welocme it. As far as I am concerned, we are reverting to orginal place names far too slowly. How can we connect with our history if the names or ancient towns were converted to names eulogising our opressors? A rechristening – though it may sound incongrouous for me to use that specific word – is in order and welcome.