This is to update my blog "Hertage" dated Wednesday, June 22, 2011. I went and saw the "Heritage Museum" a few days back. Not very impressive as the maintenance goes. But what really got my goat was the furniture said to be "Heritage" furniture designed by Le Corbusier and his relative Jeanneret. The chairs and tables were so very ordinary and commonplace that one feels embarassed. Believe me really ordinary. I have seen such chairs in hundreds of government offices across the country. Yes only Le Corbusier and Jeanneret had not sat in those.
Come on let us stop kidding ourselves- a fifty year old ordinary commonplace chair does not become a heritage item just because some foreigner sat in and worked.
By the way, one should climb up to the Rashtrapati Nivas in Shimla, where the Indian Institute of Advanced Study is located to see what 'heritage' furniture means.
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Earlier Blog "Heritage" dated June 22, 2011
It is amazing to see how everything used or touched by Chandigarh’s planner architect Le Corbusier is being revered as a ‘heritage’ item. One fails to understand how the simple chair or the stool used by Paul Jeanneret, an associate of Le Corbusier becomes a heritage item?
The notebooks in which Leonardo Da Vinci used to scribble his notes and draw sketches of machines over 500 years back are surely heritage items. The pyramids constructed in Egypt thousands of years back are heritage items. But the 50 year old note books of Le Corbusier. You are not serious!
Let us see the dictionary definition of ‘heritage’. These are the “Valued objects and qualities such as cultural traditions, unspoiled countryside, and historic buildings that have been passed down from previous generations”. What are the heritage items are, for example, the remnants of the Indus Valley Civilization not the 50 year old stuff. What is a 50 year old article or a drawing in a country like India which has thousands of years of known history.
Let us now read this with The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958. This Act defines an ancient monument as a monument which is atleast 100 years old.
May be since Chandigarh is a newly built town and we don’t have any old building to show off our pedigree or class, so....maybe....
Come on, let us have some sense of proportion.
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