Photo above: I managed to scour the internet for a blurry shot of the graffiti, supposedly by Daku. (April 2019, Source: Reddit)
It was my first time in Bombay and I was apprehensive of this new city, one I’d only read and heard of before. I had flown in for an interview and was due back to Bangalore the very same day, so I wanted to take in as much as I could. After shedding the jacket and the airport air conditioning (what was I thinking, it was October in a coastal city), I booked a taxi to take me to Fort. Of all the things I saw along the way, these words, white against grey, on a pipeline across the Mithi river, left a lingering discomfort, aside of course, from the waves of blue tarpaulin and metal roofs beating rhythmically and starkly against the shore of the blue tinted glass skyline. The taxi was moving and so I couldn’t pull out my phone in time to snap a picture of it.
That was October of 2019, five months after the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won the elections and six months since the graffiti went up. It questioned the accountability of what Narendra Modi was touting as part of their pre election campaign : #MainBhiChowkidar (I am also a watchman). Though the question is timeless, the temporal nature of the art and my professional future, made me doubtful then, of ever seeing it again.
It’s been two years since and I am writing this as I pack up, to move back to Bangalore. The irony of it all is, the prescient question remains on that pipeline -concealed, glaring at you despite its weathering. And that I, the week before I leave this city, discovered its concealed existence less than a kilometre from my house.
The rhetorical question, “Who Watches the Watchmen?“, is a translation from a Latin poem Satires by the Roman satirist Juvenal who lived around 100 AD.
… I know
Satire 6, 346–348
the plan that my friends always advise me to adopt:
“Bolt her in, constrain her!” But who can watch
the watchmen? They keep quiet about the girl’s
secrets and get her as their payment; everyone hushes it up.
Although the poem is based on marital fidelity, Juvenal writes about the culpability of enforcers, people with power and control, and wonders who they are answerable to. Juvenal’s morality as a person is as dubious as our leaders, but these words he wrote ring true about the characters entrenched in our modern political structures. If we hark back to May 2019 and all the events that followed until now, the question evolves to, who is being guarded? Because while actual custodians of justice are being imprisoned, repressed and killed, others are flaunted for purporting an illusion of justice. The 2019 election campaign was a trailer with an encouraging banner to put on hats of vigilantism by an arbitrary government, and we are living through the movie – actors, directors and all.
namratanarendra.com 
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