Mind your marbles

Travel, some say, renders the exotic familiar. A tad optimistic though I find that I do remember a couple of homely encounters. Once, for example, when I was doing fieldwork in India, I was invited to a bhoomi puja.

'Bhoomi' is 'land' and 'puja' is 'worship'. The occasion was the inauguration of a new stretch of road in Ulhasnagar, a suburb of Mumbai. Nothing memorable about that, except that some of the locals begged to differ.

This included the mayor, leaders of political parties, and such - important men, so to speak. We prayed to Lord Ganesh, broke coconuts over the first cartload of tarmac, and rubbed red vermillion powder on the tools. I had never before felt so at home.

Malta goes gaga over inauguration rituals and their paraphernalia. Every few square metres of pavement, every sapling, every designer lamp post, has its own little slab of marble, marking the importance of the event and the identity of the visionary minds behind it. Truly, we are a plaque-mad society, to the extent that I had to explain to someone recently that the façade of the Presidential palace in Valletta is just that, rather than a cemetery.

If you cannot build a new whatever, you can always restore an old one. Our ancestors left us plenty of decaying stones to play around with and heaven knows we are doing justice to their memory. Besides, if we do run out at some point, we could always start restoring the plaques themselves. The marble industry has a bright future ahead.

As do the ritual specialists: like Ulhasnagar, our space ceremonies are not without their magic. Our marbles are generally blessed. Saplings should have no problem with the extra sprinkling, though what that does to lamp posts and tarmac is not known.

Most people would call all these christening rounds petty, and there is something to be said in that direction. The biscuit must go to the Marsalforn promenade. Hardly the longest in the world - I dare say there are more tiles on my bathroom walls than paving stones at Marsalforn. And yet, this hallowed piece of ground has so far required at least two bhoomi pujas.

The first, immortalised by a seafront plaque dated 1990, I think, was that of the 'inauguration'. So far, so standard. A few metres up the road, however, there is a second slab marking the 'rehabilitation'. It goes back to 2006 or so. By then, one concludes, what was inaugurated in 1990 was sleeping with the fishes.

The promenade is now in a very bad way, and a third plaque is in order. And, further to what I said earlier, the 1990 slab is also beginning to look rather shabby.

There's another thing which gets up people's noses. The plaques don't just mushroom: they get worse. Until a few years ago, they told politely of occasion, date, and minister's and priest's names. True, in some cases we got a dollop of silliness in the shape of the minister's degrees (and sometimes those of the priest) trailing behind their names.

As if that were not enough, most plaques nowadays feature an excerpt of the inauguration speech. Inauguration speeches being what they are, these gems do not exactly sparkle. On the contrary, they tend to replicate some old piece of irritating junk about handing the place back to Maltese families or such.

Which means we have to live with the plaques and the rhetoric splashed all over the place. The Vittoriosa yacht marina was spared - the Queen did not mention any families - until the Prime Minister came along. That's two plaques for you, and I'm not joking.

It is also doubtful to what extent the magic works. In the case of, say, St George's Square, no amount of airborne fairies and visionary tunes will gloss over the fact that the 'new look' is a monstrous kitsch bazaar, more stadium forecourt than historic urban centre. The party may be great but, come Monday morning, we're stuck with the stadium.

So yes, Prospero's wand has its limitations, but why not think of the charming side? Coconut milk and vermillion look rather splendid, as does ecclesiastical haute couture at a Valletta street corner on a cold December evening.

Then there's the history. We might go back thousands of years to classical times, when the founders of cities (oikists, for the record) performed strange rituals like going round in circles around the designated plot. Later, they moved to more practical things like the inscriptions we now have in our museums.

Closer to home, attaching names to places has a glorious pedigree. For one, we have a whole civilisation of temple-builders defined by what and where they built - Tarxien period, Skorba, and so forth. Then there's Wignacourt, de Valette, Cotoner, and the rest of a second generation that built an enduring historical personality in brick and mortar.

With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that the conquest of space is so important to our politicians. It's a time-honoured form of government by spectacle, where the first to plant their flag wins the cold war, irrespective of the merits or otherwise of the heavenly body.

mafalzon@hotmail.com