The modern feasts with skyrocketing buildings, high glass walls and elevations may appear impressive to the architecturally dreamy eyes and a nuisance to the free-fluttering souls that dare to fly high in the skies supported by gales of wandering winds. I was quickly reminded of the Glass Bungalow to pry over wild games, the glass palace as a luxurious resort to peer at the royalty, the glass ceilings to feel connected to the black nights and the sheesh-mahals as objects of human marvel.

For the past two successive winters, I noticed doves and pigeons suddenly falling in my front lawns and leaving the earthly stage rather unexpectedly and suddenly. I tried to revive them with water poured into their beaks that were tightly closed to mock my attempts. Realizing that this was due to a windowpane in the south-west corner of my house where the front facing trees gave a real impression of a whole green world to be invaded, I felt morose. I had failed to hang curtains there from the inner side for an aesthetic effect that was murderous for others.

The current architecture in India is a blind and thoughtless imitation of the western styles rejecting sane conceptions of climate, lifestyle, demographic analysis and quintessential existence at the cost of urban landscaping. We have drawing rooms walled with glass that heats up during the day requiring more electricity to keep these cool. Not hiding our private affairs, the unkemptness of our homes, we fancy an ordered innerscape that lends vastness to our surroundings. The almost fixed glass windows of our bedrooms, kitchens and glassed bathrooms annihilate the very Indian notions of privacy of food, bathing and conjugal love. In a tropical country, we let the full sun in through glass ceilings and roofs in our homes and cars respectively. The glass rooftops for dining and pleasure with colourful beams and green foliage are other delights for the city spaces.

With so much glass everywhere not made opaque with thin films, curtains, designer blinds and chics has wonderous reflection effects. Any windowpane or a glass almirah can be suddenly viewed in some other room astonishingly and almost unaware. So are the people who suddenly appear invading places as wild spirits.

In contrast to it, our ancestral homes about half a decade earlier with rooms at the periphery with wooden shutters over the windows and a vast courtyard for free interplay of tree, climbers, birds, domestic animals, sun, wind and rain are serene and airy sans any transparent obstruction. The palaces of royal figures, the temple complexes, the community spaces, the havelis of the rich landlords and traders appeared majestic with the domes supported over slim round pillars, open corridors, gardens with brisk activity, fountains with soulful music and earthen diyas for a touch of divine radiance, mystic energy and dusky discussions.

The free flow of energy, love, light and wind is everywhere permeating all spaces. It reveals everything under the sun so that surveillance with drones or satellites doesn’t startle you with all private human activity strictly inside the muddy walls without torturing the maiden spirits and without sacrilege to any ascetic or divine spirit around.