By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem
Just a few days ago, even as our annual Dasara festivities came to an end, SOM published a front-page report which said that the ornate stone balustrades that had been erected along our so-called Raja Marga of dubious fame in our city, had collapsed in not less than fifty-seven places. This periodic collapse of portions of the very expensively fabricated granite balustrades has been an ongoing process and it began even as the work of erecting them was still underway! This speaks of how ill-conceived this over hundred crore rupee project was and how shoddily and hastily the work was done by an unholy nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and engineers, all hand in glove with one another, only to make a quick buck. And, this they did at the expense of helpless citizens, some of whom cried themselves hoarse that the whole project was completely flawed and therefore unnecessary to beautify a city that was only crying for some much-needed attention to preserve the beauty that it already had. I was one among them, having written two full length articles, more than a decade ago, about how very impractical the whole exercise was and why it should have been shelved before starting it, instead of being executed at great cost only to be abandoned midway as was done most unceremoniously. The result is that huge heaps of the debris of these crumbled stone balustrades can today be seen at the MCC Zonal Office near Pathrakartara Bhavan off Thyagaraja Road. Granite, as most people know, is no doubt a very hard kind of stone but it is also extremely brittle. While any structure built with it can bear an almost unlimited amount of load that is placed on it vertically, it is next to useless in resisting any fracturing force that is exerted on it sideways. This basic property of this very abundant and commonly used building material is something that has been known even to our most humble and completely unlettered artisans, who by their common sense alone, have left marvellous examples of their amazing engineering abilities over the centuries, starting right from prehistoric times. Forts and citadels across the world and free standing massive Hindu temples in particular, across our country and also at the Angkor Wat site in Indonesia, most of which have been erected without any kind of cementing material, tell us about the great skills of those who toiled to create them.
