Height is a hype

I recently found myself on top of the world and looking down on creation, as Carpenters sang in the 1970s. My office is now on the 25th floor of a glass-cased tower that has red granite floors that are more slippery than shiny and overhead amber lights that make for great selfies. From my window, the majestic Red Fort is but a bar of brick work like on a gingerbread house; Ram Lila Maidan shows up as grey patches on which I can detect movement, but can’t say between man or monkey. The windows are sealed permanently, to prevent humans from tumbling out, intentionally or otherwise! Thus, I stand in my chamber, surrounded by a majestic view, that visitors gasp as they walk in but one that leaves me doubtful about the hype surrounding heights.

When Rakesh Sharma was asked how India looked from space, he famously replied “saare jahaan se accha”. But he was only visiting. Along with his team. More humans. The view is only meant for a visit, which is why etymologically visit and view take after the same root word videre (to see). The thing about views is that you cannot (or rather I cannot) live in it for long. One goes to a hilltop, enjoys the view and gets down to terra firma, giddy but relieved. One went up the Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building, and came back to life and living after looking at the city from a height. Most importantly, 1000 others are next to you soaking in the same view, seeking you out to take a photograph.

Imagine being alone in a room in a highrise, like a Rapunzel with neither long hair nor a prince at the end of it. On the 25th floor, where I spent the greater part of my day, I live with a bird’s eye view. I see eagles and kites circling the sky but not a pair of quarrelling mynahs or a pandemonium of parrots that swing on the electric wire. The circling birds add to the eeriness, occasionally disturbed by a telephone ring or notification beep, that adds a dystopian layer, mediated by the red eyes of the air purifier and the room freshener that squeezes itself every two minutes to releases a puff of lavender. Like me, it sighs, but with the functionality of lending fragrance. I play white noise on the laptop, to calm my anxiety of being divorced from nature, and sometimes switch to deep focus music that has water gurgles and birdsongs. Fake it till you make it as they say.

I have a personal grouse with height(s). As a child, I was not the athletic kinds. Running a race or jumping high into a sandpit were not my jam. Between PT and yoga, I was always the yoga person, forcing a reluctant thigh to sit like a lotus in padmasana or mimicking a cat’s spinal arch in marjariasana. I had rather stand on my head than do 100 push-ups like a maniac. The result was that visiting aunts would always warn me of “not adding height”. My brother on the contrary was the star of athletics, with a spiked shoes that tore his bags much to my parents’ chagrin. As the black tongued curses were to prove right, he ended up taller by 8 inches. Like the proverbial Complan siblings in the tele ad, I was the younger sister, who turned out shorter. I now make up for any perceived shortness with heels, those extra inches, first invented for men who rode horses, but which later became a fashion statement for women. The things one does for height.

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In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, America’s Bible on the smug pursuit of unabashed individualism, she says that every building is like a person, single and unrepeatable. But the high rises of every city, that is all granite and glass are uninspiringly similar, surviving solely on the hype of height. It rests on its capacity to tip your head back as far as you can, and scale each floor with your eyes, eyebrows raised and jaws dropped. Whether I am in New York or Bengaluru or Bangkok, glass crusted high rises are faithful clones of each other.

Skyscrapers, as they were originally called, immediately indicate ambition, success, and a place among the stars. Gurugram’s DLF The Camellias or Antilia in Mumbai are addresses that rest on how high they are above all else, man and beast alike. The reason real estate is called so, is because it is the most tangible expression of one’s status. It is the height one can afford, lording over the rest, a signifier of wealth and status. Lake-side, water-fronts, river-side, beach-facing, there are many baits on which the real estate corporations fish. No wonder that when these prime addresses flood in unpredictable rains and their Mercs drown in slush, the janta, tormented with jealousy clap with schadenfreude at their predicament.

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Many of us city-dwellers who live our lives in highrises, insulated from heat and dust and ugly views of slums cordoned off by handloom curtains and preaching sustainability through the hum of air conditioners, escape to our native place in what is clearly a Walden style retreat, one with the cicadas, civets, mongoose and spiders the size of your palms carrying white egg blobs. Equally popular are Ayurvedic detox camps, staycations, retreats and resort stays-- anything that reclaims the soul, held captive in modern day Towers of Babel.

There, we walk barefoot on soil (not artificial turf) moist with rain, tickled by the small blades of grass, fresh and vivid green in the monsoons. Real birds chirp, quarrel, and an entire colony of tailor ants feast on a fallen mango, carved by a crow in her hunger. There is no room freshener, a concoction of parabens and carcinogenic fragrances, but rain lilies and stray flowers one has forgotten the names of. In my own ancestral home, if I stand still for long, cleaving to nature, a millipede will smoothly cross over my feet as though it is a bridge or a highway in her millepedian world.

I am a naturalist, who prefers to live on the ground, along with the birds and the bees. I need to go stand next to a tree sometimes. Like Joyce Kilmer, I too think I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. I need the vivid colours and natural smells of flowers and fruits (even the rotting ones). I can live at best on a first floor, whose windows would have to wrestle with a stubborn tree branch, a naughty squirrel or a grey pigeon. Height is but a hype, short is sweet.