top of page

By:

Sagari Gupta

24 March 2026 at 7:46:04 pm

A Notice Is Not a Wall

India has no shortage of building rules. The problem is making sure they produce safer buildings. The recent collapse of a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan area, which killed six people and trapped dozens more beneath the rubble, brings into sharp relief the precariousness of the city’s built environment. The five-storey structure, housing a boys’ paying-guest accommodation near Delhi University’s South Campus, gave way while repair work was still under way. While the precise cause of the...

A Notice Is Not a Wall

India has no shortage of building rules. The problem is making sure they produce safer buildings. The recent collapse of a building in Delhi’s Satya Niketan area, which killed six people and trapped dozens more beneath the rubble, brings into sharp relief the precariousness of the city’s built environment. The five-storey structure, housing a boys’ paying-guest accommodation near Delhi University’s South Campus, gave way while repair work was still under way. While the precise cause of the collapse remains unconfirmed, what is already clear is the lethal cost of allowing buildings to be altered, crowded and repaired without adequate regard for structural safety. Building-collapse investigations generally look at structural weakness, unapproved floor additions, removed load-bearing walls and overloading. Those are engineering questions. The policy question that sits above them is the gap between output and outcome. Delhi’s municipal system, like most regulatory systems in India, has been built to measure and reward the first. It has almost no mechanism for verifying the second. The person who decides to add a floor or convert a house into a PG is rarely the person inside it when the structure fails. That mismatch between who takes the risk and who bears its consequence is a textbook negative externality, and it is why market incentives alone will not fix unsafe construction. Land is expensive, formal housing is out of reach for most young workers and students, and demand for cheap paying-guest accommodation near college campuses stays high year-round. A house becomes a PG. A floor built for one household starts carrying three. The extra income is immediate. The structural cost, if it arrives, arrives later and lands on someone else, split between tenant, neighbour and municipality. Death Traps Structural collapses killed 8,756 people across India between 2018 and 2022, close to five deaths a day, a figure that surfaced in Rajya Sabha proceedings drawing on National Crime Records Bureau data. That is not a data gap. India has building bye-laws, approval procedures and municipal enforcement powers already on the books. What it lacks is an implementation architecture that closes the loop between identifying risk and removing it. Put simply, a notice proves the state has produced an output. It does not prove a structural assessment was completed, that residents were evacuated, that repairs happened, or that a certified engineer signed off. It proves paperwork exists, nothing more. Closing that gap is a design problem, not a resourcing one. Every high-risk building should carry a case number and a named officer accountable for it, with fixed deadlines at each stage: inspection within a set number of days, a structural assessment where required, a decision on repair, evacuation, sealing or demolition, and verification of compliance before closure. The named officer should change with the stage, so responsibility cannot sit with nobody in particular. An overdue inspection should automatically flag the officer holding it. An order left unimplemented past deadline should escalate on its own, with the reason for delay logged, whether that is litigation, an uncooperative owner, a capacity shortfall or an evacuation still pending. This turns an enforcement record into an audit trail. That record should sit in public view, within legitimate privacy limits. A ward-level dashboard showing how many high-risk properties are under inspection, how many have completed structural assessments and how many remain unresolved gives a councillor, a tenant or a journalist a way to verify whether a case is moving, rather than take an official’s word for it. At present, issuing a notice ends an official’s obligation. Under an outcome-based system, an unresolved case stays attached to the administration until the risk is addressed, realigning the incentive from documentation to resolution. The same logic applies to unauthorised construction. A booking is not enforcement. A demolition order is not a demolition. A sealing order is not closure if the property reopens later. The administrative chain should end only once the physical condition of the property has been independently verified, not when a file is marked complete. There is also a straightforward fiscal argument. The Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund pays a standard ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh for every death in a building collapse - a rate applied most recently after the Thane collapse this July. Apply that rate to the death toll in the Satya Niketan case and the ex-gratia payout alone crosses Rs. 12 lakh, before emergency response, hospital treatment, policing, lost working days and litigation are counted. Prevention requires spending before anything visible has gone wrong, which makes it a harder budget line to defend than a rescue operation. That asymmetry, not a lack of resources, is why prevention keeps losing inside the state. The Satya Niketan building had an owner. It had tenants, students renting rooms inside it. Someone should have flagged it for scrutiny before repair work began on a Sunday afternoon. A notice is evidence that the state has seen a risk. It is not evidence the risk has been removed. Only a verified outcome closes that gap, and until the system is built to track outcomes rather than paperwork, the next notice will tell us as little as this one did. (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

Why We Really Watch Screen Adaptations of Ancient Epics

A still from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
A still from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

If you have read epic poetry from ancient Greece or India, whether in translation or in the original, you’d know that the heroes in these great epic poems have their vulnerabilities. I’m not talking about physical vulnerabilities that ultimately prove fatal for them: Achilles’ heel or Duryodhana’s thighs, for example. No, but I point to the heroes’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses, understood within broader psychological, behavioural, emotional, and social contexts, arising primarily from their many attachments as human beings. Also, by ‘hero’, I mean that which is commonly understood: A brave, charismatic leader of men, the first and foremost among many; followed, respected, even feared, owing to their strength, courage, skill, and wisdom.


Bleeding Heroes

We find Lord Rama, the hero of Valmiki’s Ramayana, crying inconsolably when he discovers that his beloved wife Sita has been abducted in the forest in his absence. We see Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, quite unable to hold back tears at the mention of events of the Trojan War in a bard’s song during his stop in Phaeacia. The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan, in his latest offering based on Homer’s Odyssey, emphasises this particular aspect of the ancient Greek epic. Nolan interprets Odysseus in a way that leaves us with an impression of the legendary Achaean hero as a star-crossed, struggling, almost modern man; albeit an important one who once held a powerful position – perhaps the inner life of a significant modern-day politician or a Fortune 500 CEO.


Tossed about by the elements, Nolan’s Odysseus jostles with his fate, fighting temptations within himself to regain the position he has lost. The choice of Matt Damon to portray Odysseus’s character seems particularly deliberate in this light, because Damon has the characteristically glum and introverted modern countenance to pull off a brilliant The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Nolan seems to have little interest in the Odysseus that the ancient bard Homer highlights throughout his epic poem – the wise and wily strategist Odysseus, the princely Odysseus, the godlike Odysseus. His choices align with a typical modern tendency to render ancient literatures and histories ‘relatable’ to us Moderns.


But do we Moderns probe into ancient lore only to ‘relate’ to its characters and events in our own way? Do we just look to map our personal frailties, failings, or follies onto those of the epic heroes, thereby deriving some psychological reassurance, affirmation, or even consolation by leaning on them? Do we watch a film or TV adaptation of Valmiki’s Ramayana, or Homer’s Iliad, to see a reflection of our own vulnerabilities in the conduct of a Rama in exile or an Achilles at war? Maybe some of us do, and maybe all of us do so to a certain extent; but it doesn’t seem likely that this affirmation-seeking and consolation-searching is the be-all and end-all of our craving for ancient epics. For if that were our primary expectation, we need look no further than nineteenth-century literary monuments for TV and film adaptations. From that century onwards, we have a literal explosion of both narrative fiction and fine historical accounts of epic scale, centred on individuals and nations much closer to our own times, propensities, and value systems – and therefore much more prone to our vulnerabilities, and more thoroughly relatable to conditions familiar to us.


Many such modern epic-scale fictional and historical works have been adapted for films and TV with great commercial and critical success: Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gandhi, and many more. We should have been satisfied with these alone, without ever bothering to wonder how the heroes of the Bronze Age – or perhaps even further back in time – lived, loved, and led their lot. Film and TV adaptations of modern classics like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali would have been sufficient if our needs from narratives had been limited to looking into the story-mirror and discovering only ourselves there, even if merely a part of us was reflected.


Neither does it suffice to say that the human condition and its existential challenges have remained more or less the same across vast swathes of time and space, despite a sea change in our material and social conditions. Those who think it sufficient imagine that Achilles’s wrath at Agamemnon, or Rama’s anger at Samudra the sea-god, is nothing more than a natural reaction to their wounded ego or honour, or a frustrated objective they held dear – much in the same way our contemporary celebrities or leaders, would react under similar practical circumstances. Therefore, they claim, we watch adaptations of these epics to compare and exchange notes, unidirectionally as it were, with the ancients. If indeed this were true and sufficient to satisfy our hankering for stories, we would bother ourselves with nothing more than biographies of a Napoleon or a Churchill, or popular historical works on a Netaji Subhas or a Messi, turned into some clever feature film or a documentary TV adaptation. In fact, there is no dearth of such material out there. Mind you, it is several degrees more difficult to construct the world of a Treta or Dvapara Yuga, or the Bronze Age for that matter, than creating a nineteenth- or twentieth-century setup, even with cutting-edge VFX, AR/VR and AI tools at one’s disposal. And yet, several filmmakers have ‘heroically’ ventured to adapt ancient epics and legend-laced histories. Nolan’s The Odyssey is by no means a unique specimen of its kind, just the latest one in a long succession of live-action and animated films and TV series based on epics.


Epics Matter

What, then, do we Moderns really seek in a screen adaptation of an ancient epic? What is it that still makes us so deeply invested in them, that we get agitated if they fail to meet our expectations? Two things above all: Firstly, we look for that trait in the epic hero’s character, which, despite all his vulnerabilities, would redeem him, and in turn redeem us, the modern viewers. Secondly, we look for a certain quality in the way an epic has been narrated, either on paper or on the screen (but especially on the screen), that would capture our imagination, our very being, and allow even the most rational reader or viewer among us to suspend all disbelief for as long as we engage with the story – leaving us with an exalted, high-spirited feeling by the end.


We Moderns are in no way unique in expecting these things from ancient epic. In every age, people have lent an eager ear to these epics, even in their adapted versions. This is why we find a Kalidasa composing long poems and plays based on Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata, a Shakespeare producing the tragedy of Troilus and Cressida against the backdrop of the Iliad, a Goethe penning Achilleis and Iphigenia in Tauris, a Nikos Kazantzakis authoring a modern epic sequel to the Odyssey, and a Rabindranath composing odes to Valmiki and Rama, as well as plays and dramatic dialogues based on subplots and characters of the Mahabharata. Each of these adaptations is a milestone in the world’s literary landscape, attesting to their wide popularity across generations. More importantly, each of these works is an interlocutor in an ongoing conversation between the past and the present within its respective literary, theatrical or filmmaking tradition. They are proof that ancient epics are no dead scrolls, but very much alive and kicking.


Despite an overabundance of great literary works produced in the last two centuries, people’s thirst for ancient epic narratives remains unquenched. The tremendous box-office success of Nolan’s The Odyssey, and the mixed yet intense public reaction it has generated, ranging from adulation to outright denunciation, testify to this public thirst for epic narratives.


Redeeming one’s humanity by hearing or watching how the epic hero of yore once redeemed himself, and lifting one’s spirit from a state of hopelessness and meaninglessness to a more vigorous plane of existence – epics are unique in serving these deeply spiritual needs of all humans, no matter how many times those epic plots may have been told and retold.


(The writer is a Kolkata-based educator, writer, researcher and musician who discourses through the spoken and written word with the aim of rekindling the Indic consciousness in a postmodern, neoliberal world. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page