Looking back or looking ahead....

A few days ago I began reading Dalrymple's book 'The Last Mughal'. Dalrymple's love for Delhi oozes from every sentence and he grips your attention from the very start. A lot of what he has written raises several questions and thoughts. Even as he writes the introduction, he laments the destruction of the old relics of 1850's Delhi. He writes:

I find it heartbreaking: often when I revisit one of my favorite monuments it has either been overrun by some slum or container park, unsympathetically restored or reconstructed by th Archaeological Survey of India or, more usually, simply demolished. NInety-nine percent of the delicate havelis or Mughal courtyard houses of Old Delhi have been destroyed, and like swathes of the city walls have disappeared into memory. According to historian Pavan Varma, the majority of the buildings recorded in his book - Mansions At Dusk - only ten years ago no longer exist. Perhaps there is also a cultural factor here in the neglect of the past: as one conservationist told me recently: 'you must understand', he said, 'that we Hindus burn our dead.' Either way, the loss of Delhi's past is irreplaceable; and future generations will inevitably look back at the conservation failures of the early twenty-first century with a deep sadness.

I am torn about whether to sympathise with the author's view that Delhi's old havelis should have been preserved or to shrug it off. Can we afford to make space for a century old history when we barely have space for the present? Perhaps technology could have let us store away in "full 3D" the narrow streets of Delhi. But how would we capture the smells of spices, the dust, the heat, the essence of that history in bits and bytes? Is it really best that we "burn our dead"?

I feel the loss as keenly as he does. Yet I don't know of a way out.