Character assassination of the City

The universally famous pink face of Jaipur is fading fast. The once gay and rosy city is turning pale covered with other odd colours, not with time, but by the civic vandalism wrought by the indiscriminate hands and aesthetic tastes of the people who have emerged now to live and prosper in its mansions. For their own whims, personal fancies and monetary considerations, no less accentuated by official apathy, they are out to assassinate the character and distort the very personality and ambience that has continued to make the capital one of the most prized tourist centres of India. 
The elegant forms and graceful features of Jaipur’s uniform facades are surely disappearing, one after the other, from its bazaar scenes. The tapering columns, scalloped and plain pointed arches, well-proportioned brackets and projecting balconies, domes – squat, square, octagonal, rectangular and curvilinear – with eaves or ‘chajjas’, latticed windows and perforated screens in stone or lime plaster are such other shapely things which gave to Jaipur architecture a slant of its own, are yielding place to all sorts of accretions and impositions of modern structures, their trabeated colonnades and ill-proportioned, ludicrous looking, inharmonious details. Coming up as they are, they are divesting this city of its uniformity, symmetry and orderliness – that essential beauty which enchanted an observer at first sight. With them, it is cultivating a split personality like any haphazardly grown town or city.