Letter from Brasilia

As the plane rapidly starts flying down and you get ready to disembark, you see a small part of the city with high-rise state-of-the-art buildings and modern monuments, and surrounding it a vast area of single storey tiles-roofed buildings all around.

You alight from Varig Airlines, Brazil’s national airlines of 79 years, at Brasilia, the current new created and extremely planned capital city, shifting the previous headquarters from the extreme southern city of Rio to keep the northern poorer part of Brazil happier.

As you drive past huge buildings and on wide, clean, spotless tarred roads of a ‘developing nation’ in its capital city, you all of a sudden realize that the city is created on Western and more particularly American model on one hand, and on the other, it is a city of some individuals here and there, but no ‘people’ as such to call it their own.

And, as you meet the Secretaries of Ministries, a few ministers, and visit the Senate and meet its Vice President too, the realization further dawns that Brasilia is a town-planner’s marvel, architect’s wonder with several thousands of powerful individuals, without any mass of people who can call it their own city with a distinct culture.

The aloofness, the pompousness, the ‘systematic approach’, the structured life and living ARE its culture today.

Ironically, the single illustrious architect and town-planner of Brazil who had built this city and its landmark buildings, Mr Oscar Niami, is a left-wing professional and had wanted to create a people-centric transparent city with large spaces, lots of greenery, usually glass-walls of buildings (including the huge Presidential office), avoiding any loss of constructed space in frills, etc.

On the positive side, the capital city and its ministerial buildings are extremely well-planned, as if a master-scheme of the town-planner has just literally risen above the ground straight from the drawing board.

The green and grey ministerial buildings look exactly the same, and unless you look at the metallic names of the ministries on their front walls, you will not be able to distinguish one from the other.

Then the most significant thing to see is the spotless cleanliness in each department of the government, the Senate and the Parliament, the paperless-ness of the offices, the evident e-governance practices, the lack of stringency in security and the aura of confidence and friendliness all around. And, all this when contrasted to our ministerial environs in our Delhi offices, the stark difference is all the more evident.

Move around seven to eight kilometers beyond the city centre, you come to a sea of poorer colonies of single storey buildings, and another twenty kilometers later, the entire area around is vacant land, water, some jungles, et al.

Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, the first of the BRICKS countries with a strong infrastructure and a promise of being Latin American economic giant, was created in a large vacant land out of nowhere, in the heart of the country, with a debt so huge (do not know the exact figure: different estimates are there) that till today the nation and the common man are smarting under a debt-trap.

A modern Tughlaqi creation? A master-plan of American business lobby to sell a dream and all steel and cement of the dream to the largest nation in South America and keep it permanently indebted to itself?

June 15, 2006