Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Dresden’s Frauenkirche: Modernists want to stop reconstructions like this. (pixels.com)

Modernists are trying to reverse trends in cultural-heritage preservation by subtle interventions in key standards of the European Union. Writing from Norway, Audun Engh of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU) warned me today that modernists are “planning to introduce recommendations that modernism (‘contemporary design’) should be a required style for new construction at EU-funded cultural-heritage sites.”

Mind you, that says “required,” and required in “cultural-heritage sites” – which translates into mandating ugly new buildings and additions in the most beautiful districts of Europe’s most beautiful cities. That modernists believe that this sort of change must be introduced means they recognize how preservation standards have shifted in recent decades. (Of course, they would not describe it the way I just did.)

One of the worrisome recommendations for the EU made by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments…

Image courtesy News 18

People, Persons, Citizens

When the idea of citizenship is wielded like a deadly weapon to deprive people of basic rights rather than to empower them, it’s time to think about the basis of rights differently.  While in the Preamble to the Constitution, ‘we the people’ resolve to secure to all its ‘citizens’ justice, liberty, equality and fraternity; Article 14 of the Fundamental Rights ensures equality before the law to all “persons”, not only to citizens.

The people of a land precede the creation of “citizens”, and we the people of India must think seriously at this moment in our history, about how justice is to be secured to all persons, and whether citizenship is an emancipatory idea any longer.

Consider the revealing and tragic irony of one of the accused arrested for his alleged role in violence during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA)…