By Amit Sen Gupta
God will soon arrive, many experts argue, illegally, violating legal norms, ethical norms, social norms, and flaunting his opulence and wealth to the whole world. This was LK Advani's pet project. Apparently funded by the garish Guju rich. The sprawling Akshardham temple on the banks of Yamuna, which environmentalists claim will lead to an environment disaster. It is apparently illegal, and has been manipulated on the banks by powerful people, in time and space and land where no one is allowed to build even a brick wall. Especially the poor, who are routinely bulldozed. It's an architectural masterpiece of the class divide between god and the poor. Huge fences separate the massive building with laws sprawled across the eastern horizon, as if it's apartheid country. A true reminder of why the poor multitudes should know their place. A flyover has been built specially to help future pilgrims and holy men to visit this god's abode. Below the Nizamuddin flyover, across the trajectory of this divide, overlooking the temple, are the slums of the poor. Mostly Hindus. Maybe Muslims too. But who cares. The only religion of the poor is poverty. And poverty is not a blessing. So what does their god think about them? Their living spaces? Their daily lives? Their children's habitat? Their sanitation systems? They godliness? Their sense and sensibility? Across the magnificent lawns, there are these typical tarpaulin structures. Where the workers who are building this godly masterpiece, go back to sleep after a hard day's work. Surely, they sleep peacefully. Working hard. Waiting for God. Waiting for Godot.
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