Moving to a new structure – home, office, school or even prison – is exciting by itself. It’s like ringing out the old, ringing in the new except, here, the shift involves not an annual cycle but brick-and-mortar space, not time. Today’s scheduled shift from the old Parliament building to the new one holds similar frisson for all and sundry – no matter what some may have to say about the new building and move in public. A large part of the excitement is the buzz by nostalgists, who will immediately start missing the old Parliament house. ‘Remember when…’ is a refrain that visitors of the new Sansad Bhavan will hear quite a lot and, for a long time, paradoxically just as the old Parliament Building becomes a part of India‘s collective memory.
On the more amusing side, much will be now made of how ‘this’ one is more modern and contemporary (read: better) than ‘that’ one, in an attempt to contrast a lovely example of (Western) 20th-century architectural aesthetics with a (still-Western) lovely 21st-century one. The real purpose of such an anachronistic comparison isn’t aesthetic but political. Old Parliament House is not being abandoned. But the building’s change of purpose can bring forth resident ghosts who, till now, have been invisible Parlok Sabha backbenchers. These purana parliamentary phantoms may now out.
