Just another dawn for Flora Fountain

Great architectural works have always been one of my favourite subjects to shoot. It is not just the work itself, but the people who have built it, the thought that has gone into its making and its impact on the environment around it that I find just as fascinating. I have my roots in South Bombay, and walking out of the overpowering VT Station (now CST) or running about on the area by the Gateway of India make up for images from my childhood. As a kid, these places were just that – functional places for us to use, or as ornaments for us to gape at with awe. We took them for granted then, and in a way, we still do. I hit South Bombay one morning, this time to spend some time to capture Flora Fountain, a work of art, almost negligible in its purpose. But stunning all the same.

My knowledge of Flora Fountain as an architectural piece is straight out of Wikipedia. However, it pains me to see this splendid  work of art as something that has been crying for help for years now, almost as though Flora, the Goddess of Spring has been jailed by the coat of white oil paint.

What Flora (am I permitted to take this liberty?) does need is perhaps some regular scrubbing and oodles of TLC, and she will do just fine. If only I were allowed to simply roll my trousers up and step into the so-called pool around it, I would. Is anybody listening?

I find it amusing (and depressing too) that we are yet to build anything just as striking in the post-Independence, modern India. Indeed, we have been too busy to decorate our buildings with motifs and embellish them with anything remotely pretty, let alone create something like Fountain. The least we could do is maintain what we got so easily.

Despite having silently borne the effects of insensitive handling by the changing powers-that-be, the attractiveness of the structure still manages to hold attention. The grime has not dulled the beauty of the mythological figures that surround Goddess Flora perched right at the top, and the lions at the bottom of the arches look just as ferocious as real ones do. Oh they would, wouldn't they? They are keepers of a woman so beautiful... so what if she has been relegated to a memory of an era gone by?