In Which We Build Monuments to Our Own Imagination

Amid the falling footpaths and collapsing ceilings that plague this year's Commonwealth Games venue, a source of joy has been overlooked.

Notably, the loss of India's homegrown arch.  Anyone who knows me knows that I maintain a healthy skepticism towards all forms of architectural idolatry, after all, even the Colossus of Rhodes eventually fell into the sea, his only eulogy a poem emblazoned on a little known obelisk mildewing away in the middle of New York Harbor.  Alexander's famous bridge to Tyre may have existed only in theory, and even the pyramids - all we have left - were probably built by aliens.  (But why, aliens, why?)

Nonetheless, men keep on erecting random hunks of metal in parks, roadsides and other public places, in the vain hope that history will remember them for inconveniencing pedestrians, if nothing else.

Over the past few weeks, I've noticed an unusual sight coming up in Delhi.  An arch, right next to the JLN Stadium where the Commonwealth Games will be held.  This majestically useless white structure, dividing two halves of a road that are otherwise exactly the same, was meant to be a symbol that India had finally arrived on the global stage.

Unfortunately, the workers glued it together wrong, and now the arch has fallen apart.  (As a high school student, I remember a physics experiment we did regarding impact.  We were supposed to build a contraption that could protect an egg when dropped from a great height.  The egg, inserted in this contraption, would be dropped from two stories up.  If the egg survived, so did the student's grade.  My friend Nick and I worked together.  When the time came to drop the egg, we watched in nervous anticipation, already accepting the egg's incipient demise.  When we raced to the bottom of the stairwell and opened up the container we had constructed, no one was more surprised than we were to discover that we were among the engineering elite.  Our egg had made it.  We attributed this event to God, rather than our inept science.  This story is, I swear, applicable to the Commonwealth Games construction.)

But now India's arch has fallen in.  Recently, some self-aware historians have lamented modern India's lack of self-built statuary, as if our arch-building prowess is somehow connected to our fitness as a nation to govern ourselves.

And this may be true.  But perhaps we should view the loss of the arch as a crisis averted.

Consider, for a moment, the history of the lovely, pointless arch.

Arches serve no actual purpose outside of a Gothic cathedral or a Roman aqueduct, and even there their usefulness is overshadowed by 'flying buttresses,' a building support that many a middle schooler remembers much too fondly.

The Romans, great colonizers, pioneered the triumphal arch.  They also kept slaves, committed pedophilia and set fire to Alexandria, some of the greatest social failures in modern human history.  Titus was allowed to build his arch only after sacking ancient Jerusalem.  Constantine I, by this standard, was an enlightened arch-builder, constructing his monument after he drowned one of his rivals in a river.  (To be fair, Constantine was more a lover than a fighter)

But since triumphal arches were intended entirely to stoke the populace's general adoration, they could in fact be considered the ancient world's version of the Bridge to Nowhere.

Centuries later Paris built its Arc de Triomphe to commemorate all lost soldiers.  It's in poor taste to mock the heroic dead, but a description of the arch's beauty might give anyone pause.  The artwork depicts "heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail."  Fighting naked is certainly heroic, although not recommended.

The other great arch-builders of history were the British - those free-building squatters - who took time off from plundering India's riches to construct monuments to their own greatness, in the process coining the principle that 'one man's arch is another man's treasure.'  Indians have lovingly preserved these British arches, many of which still remain at their original sites and are now tourist attractions.

Few other architectural constructions are more closely associated with the subjugation of entire races.  So perhaps the collapse of our own arch should be seen as a blessing in disguise.  Perhaps India hasn't arrived on the world stage.  Perhaps it's the design of the stage, not the arch, that needs modernizing.

(For those who care, I am mocking only the arch and the expensive glamour project known as the Commonwealth Games.  Overall, incompetent infrastructure is nothing to be proud of.)