Museums, landmarks wahin banayenge!

Reclamation projects are back in fashion. Not the infrastructural ones, of course, which need enterprise and imagination, and could - Lord Krishna forbid! - benefit people of all denominations. With Akhand Bharat still stuck in the MoU (memory of understanding) stage and the budget of that project having escalated since 1947, reclamation MSMEs are focusing on what they do best: focus on Mughal-era real estate conversion projects to, well, re-reclaim them. The business model for this, of course, remains the still-in-progress reconstruction project in Ayodhya. While such initiatives are incapable of being scaled up beyond the mandir-to-masjid-to-mandir (M3) value chain, it does provide a significant number of underemployed people employment.

But as votaries of scaling up, may we suggest reclamations with a bigger picture and bigger returns. Instead of focusing on perceived birthplaces of divinities that were land-grabbed by mere mortals, it could be worthwhile to turn birth and workplaces of more recent luminaries into landmarks. Far too many landmarks associated with great mortals - artists, writers, filmmakers, social reformers, sportspersons, etc - are unknown to the masses or/and are in shambolic condition. Reclaiming these janmabhoomis or karmabhoomis would be, as they say these days, civilisationally grand.