Why Every City Needs a Willy Wonka
There was a time before the pandemic when rush hour traffic was a thing, a thing you dreaded every morning, the mere thought of which prompted an existential crisis: “Do I really have to do this life thing every day?” On one such soul-crushing morning, I let the midday Chennai sun flow through me as the lava flows through the terminator at the end of T-2, except the lava is flowing through me head-first and I have to endure it with the same level of robotic indifference as the T-800. Having lost my staring contest with the red signal I noticed a giant advertisement banner selling me a washing machine. The minuscule love for humanity that I still had stashed away somewhere in my heart had always fuelled my hatred for advertisements. I hated how they fight with a raging passion with each other to steal away as much of your attention as possible.
I thought If I had money to burn I would probably just buy up that space and put up a joke or a comic strip or at least a “have a good day because if you don’t someone else will” Then I thought of what other goofy things I could do for no particular reason.
Why not build a giant bouncing castle for public use? Why not replace stairs with slides on as many schools as possible. Why not go to libraries around the city and leave money inside random books? How about a treasure hunt with clues hidden in graffiti all over the city?
This led me to think about people who do have money to burn, especially in my city, and why they aren’t doing things like these? Is it because they’re not fun or creative enough? Maybe it’s because nobody feels they earned the right to do big, fun things just for the sake of it, or maybe it is frowned upon to use money that way, or maybe we aren’t encouraged to communicate, on a slightly grander scale, with the community we live in. I think that’s it, nobody told us we can talk to our city without trying to sell them a washing machine.
As much as a city needs artists, singers, and dreamers of all kinds, it also needs a Willy Wonka (and no, I am not going to talk about the potentially unpaid Oompa Loompa workforce or the child safety standard of the chocolate factory) these are the kind of people who do things just for the fun of it. The man had a chocolate fountain inside a factory that nobody was ever allowed to visit before the competition, so don’t tell me the golden ticket competition was a marketing gimmick. Although he wasn’t exactly the kind who wanted to communicate with the outside world, he did try to reach out to the world in the end, to select his successor. He selected a handful to share his craziness with and sometimes that is enough. You don’t have to be a prankster, you don’t have to sell anything, you don’t have to be a social media star to initiate a handshake with the world in creative ways but if you own a chocolate factory don’t forget to slip a couple of golden tickets into your chocolate bars sometimes.
