Building a Home
The gospel message at its core holds out the promise of an eternal home for all who love God and who follow his lovely son our Lord. Being welcomed into a family, the household of God, is front and centre in preaching in India and in the work that WCF supports. Having a roof over your head is a basic human necessity and Hyderabad is in the middle of a huge house building boom. Advertising for these new housing developments enjoys a light touch with reality. The city is a building site. Every scrap of land has been commandeered for new giant concrete block towers. At the turning to our old house was a lovely piece of ground where lads played cricket on evenings and Sunday afternoons, cows and pigs and chickens grazed. It was a smidge of green in the dusty landscape. Now it has been blasted for a huge underground car park, towers have emerged from the ashes and all light from the sun to the ground has been blocked.
Construction workers in Telangana must know more about dynamiting than any others across the globe. High blue fencing jealously sways guard over each square foot and day and nightwatchman keep an eye on security. Poorly painted signs on the chain link fences say “This land belongs to Ms Shruti and others”. Who is she? Who are the others? I want to know. And the adverts? - they are a delight. The new blocks will be "unarguably playful", "absurdly limited", and you will enjoy "lakeside living". Names for the colonies include "Accurate Windchimes", "Phoenix Halcyon" and "The Meadows". One boasts that its residents are '"cherishing buying a home near the kids school". One prime colony bills itself as "an unusual narrative of urban luxury in a natural setting of green and blue... ushering you into a healthy lifestyle....the extraordinary is calling...." My personal favourite this trip was "The Pinnacle - the joy of disappearing every time you get home".
Presumably market research told them that disappearing is what folk want to do after a hard day at the office. High on the Deccan Plateau, Hyderabad is a hot, dusty, boulder-strewn city - the Musi river and all other bodies of water are putrid, rancid, garbage choked cesspools and the sky is grey with pollution and construction dust. I wonder where these bucolic places with dream homes are...
But I guess the saddest thing about all this progress is the loss of communal Indian living. When housing, poor or posh, is relatively low rise, everyone knows their neighbours and there is a sense of community. In these towering behemoths that contact with others is pretty much lost and instead privacy is valued and guarded.
Jesus describes the coming kingdom of God as one where children will play in the streets and we will truly love our neighbour. Not sure how that can happen if you live on the 45th floor. The compounds that were built in Moinabad back in the 1980s were designed round a central garden/play/event space where everyone could congregate. Children could run around and adults could sit together under shady trees to chat. A sense of openness and community and belonging is what the brothers and sisters who helped with the construction all these years ago were aiming for. They saw the project as a small patch of the kingdom for the here and now. WCF supports selected housing and house repair projects keeping families safe and sheltered. Buildings in Hyderabad that house Christadelphian activities and projects are all built on rock foundations - literally and spiritually. Matthew 7:24 tells us that those who follow Jesus’ teachings build their homes on the rock that is Christ alone. No sensational advertising needed. It’s all true.