Why we must rage against the tyranny of monumentality, reclaim the small

We have all been trained — some of us since early in our lives — to marvel at everything monumental. We are awed, ensnared and enraptured by the big: the tallest skyscrapers, the most-followed social media accounts, and the biggest economies (the Indian government would have us believe that we’d become the third-largest economy in the world with a GDP of $5 trillion in the next three years), you name it. In our quixotic craze for the expansive, we forget the understated beauty that comes from things tiny and seemingly insignificant.

It is a curious symptom of the times we live in: a time when there is a great deal of emphasis on hyper-achievement, a time when the extravagant displays of success, beauty, wealth, power and pelf are way too ubiquitous. The ‘achievers’ are lauded, remembered, followed, and those who fall behind in the race of life are doomed to irrelevance and despair and, oftentimes, driven to the brink of death. Success is always measured in grand and grander terms, often to the detriment of those who fail to meet the towering benchmarks set by society.

If you think about it, hyper-achievement has entrenched itself as the defining ethos of modern life. From the moment a child enters school, he/she is taught to aim higher, reach further, and leave everyone else behind (as a parent of a seventh grader, I know this too well). It’s the same with corporate employees. The result is a culture that equates social status with measurable accomplishments: grades, promotions, awards, net worth. Failure, by contrast, becomes a taboo, a source of shame to be hidden rather than an inevitable part of growth.

The obsession with monumentality is neither new nor unique to our times, but its acceleration in the age of social media and neoliberal capitalism has pushed it to new heights — or lows. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen has spoken about how modern development narratives focus excessively on GDP and other “big” indicators while neglecting the less glamorous metrics of human well-being. Similarly, in her powerful comparative study of two Indian icons, BR Ambedkar and MK Gandhi, The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste (Penguin, 2019), Arundhati Roy juxtaposes the towering image of Gandhi with the deliberate erasure of Ambedkar’s radical politics. This selective focus on what is mainstream (and, therefore, colossal) has implications far beyond mere aesthetics; it shapes our collective priorities, often marginalising the quiet and the dissenting voices.

Roy, in her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things (Penguin, 1997), places the vulnerable — children, subaltern characters, small desires — against the crushing machinery of history and society. Her celebration of the “small things” gestures toward an immense truth: our lives are determined more by the little moments than by monumental events. The smallest acts of care, empathy, and rebellion often carry more moral weight than grandstanding spectacles. In Roy’s Kerala, the ordinary details reframe the terms of what truly constitutes power.

Arundhati Roy's celebration of the “small things” in her book 'The God of Small Things' gestures toward an immense truth: our lives are determined more by the little moments than by monumental events.

It’s easy to see why the monumental holds such sway. The “big” is inherently spectacular. When the Burj Khalifa pierces the Dubai skyline, it is impossible to ignore its gleaming dominance. Social media influencers compound this idea. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are calibrated to privilege the loudest, brightest displays, creating a perpetual arms race for visibility. This cultural conditioning extends to every aspect of life: the richest billionaires, the highest-grossing films, the largest corporations, the biggest political rallies — all celebrated as symbols of achievement.

When the Burj Khalifa pierces the Dubai skyline, it is impossible to ignore its gleaming dominance. 

It should not surprise us then that this veneration of the monumental comes at a cost. As we fixate on the top 1% who control more than 40% of global wealth, as per Oxfam’s Survival of the Richest report (2023), the billions struggling to make ends meet are rendered invisible. The grandeur of the few eclipses the humanity of the many. Similarly, in Indian politics, the extraordinary electoral victories of the BJP — we saw that in the case of Maharashtra Assembly elections recently — are endlessly analysed, while the erosion of grassroots democratic institutions barely registers in public discourse.

In India, this obsession manifests in the cutthroat competition for entrance into elite institutions like the IITs and IIMs, where success is turned into a national event, printed on front pages of newspapers, while those who fall through the cracks are forgotten. The tragic spate of student suicides in Kota, Rajasthan — a city synonymous with coaching centres for engineering and medical aspirants — reveal the human cost of this relentless pressure to achieve. The system turns children into cogs in a machine, churning out future “leaders” while discarding those deemed unfit for the race.

It’s not too hard to see how hyper-focus on the big leads to distorted priorities. Consider the Indian government’s push for mega-infrastructure projects like the Central Vista redevelopment in New Delhi. While billions are poured into creating symbols of national glory, marginalised communities are evicted, their homes and livelihoods sacrificed at the altar of progress. These stories seldom make headlines; they are deemed too inconsequential to disrupt the narrative of tremendous achievement.

Literature offers a potent counterpoint to this tyranny. Take Ruskin Bond’s deceptively simple stories about life in the hills, where the smallest moments — a child’s first glimpse of snowfall, the blossoming of a tree — hold overwhelming beauty. Bond’s work centres on the ordinary, the everyday, and shows that they have their own quiet strength that cannot be captured in metrics or accolades. In the same way, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, a slender fable that fits easily in one hand, expands our hearts immeasurably.

Ruskin Bond’s work centres on the ordinary, the everyday, and shows that they have their own quiet strength that cannot be captured in metrics or accolades.

The planet-hopping Prince’s wisdom is encapsulated in his smallness. His delicate frame and minute home asteroid challenge the norms of significance, defying the idea that size determines importance. Instead, he speaks to the hidden worlds we so often neglect: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Smallness, the book suggests, is not to be pitied but celebrated, for it leads us back to love, sincerity, and the unnoticed magic of the universe.

The writer Annie Dillard captures the importance of the small in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), her explorations near her home, and various contemplations on nature and life; she writes about the act of paying attention to life’s tiniest details. For Dillard, the way light falls on a single leaf is as worthy of awe as the most majestic mountain. Her prose is an antidote to a culture that equates worth with size, reminding us that the world’s beauty often lies in its subtlety. This mindfulness finds expression in the works of Mahasweta Devi, whose stories amplify the lives of the dispossessed. Her characters are not the heroes of grand narratives but the silent sufferers of systemic oppression: tribal women, bonded labourers, untouchables. Devi’s work delves into the beauty and tragedy of lives that are routinely ignored.

Some of the best books that have been published and won several awards in the UK recently happen to be by small-indie presses like Fitzcarraldo Editions, Sort Of Books (publisher of Booker Prize winner Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida), Galley Beggar Press and Tilted Axis Press (the publisher of Tomb of Sand, the International Booker Prize-winning novel by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell). Similarly, in modern cinema, directors like Chaitanya Tamhane (Court, The Disciple) and Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) have eschewed bombastic storytelling in favour of intimate, human-scale narratives. Their films capture truths that no blockbuster could ever convey.

One of the ways we can resist the tyranny of the monumental in our personal lives is by finding joy in the everyday. It is in the slow rituals of cooking a meal, the laughter of a child, the unspoken bond of friendship. These moments may not win awards or go viral, but they are the threads that hold the fabric of life together. As the poet Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” To pay attention to the small is an act of love, a way of saying that every life, every moment, matters. It is a form of rebellion against a culture that demands we constantly strive for more, bigger, better. So, how do we reclaim the small in a world dominated by the big? The answer lies in cultivating a culture of mindful recognition. It means valuing the unremarkable as much as the extraordinary: the fortitude of a single mother, the unnoticed kindness of a stranger, the simple pleasure of a cup of chai shared with a friend.

The political implications of this shift in perspective are profound. To value the small is to challenge the hegemony of the powerful. It means asking why the government courts the billionaires while farmers languish in debt, why development is measured in highways built rather than lives improved. The 2020–2021 Indian farmers’ protests exemplify the power of the small. What began as a series of localised demonstrations grew into one of the largest movements in modern Indian history. The farmers did not have the resources of a multinational corporation or the clout of a political party. What they had was the determination of common people united by a common cause. Their victory in repealing the controversial farm laws speaks volumes about what collective actions could achieve against gigantic odds.

The monumental will always have its place in our imaginations, but it must not come at the expense of the small. By recognising and memorialising the overlooked and the understated, we create a more inclusive, compassionate world where success is evaluated in terms of the richness of human experience. This does not mean that we abandon ambition but broaden our understanding of what truly matters. In the end, it is the small, unremarkable moments — a hand held, a song sung, a story shared — that define us. In reclaiming the small, we reclaim our humanity. It is to remember, as the poet William Blake did, that you can “see a world in a grain of sand/and a heaven in a wild flower.” After all, as the popular adage goes, the finest treasures often come in the smallest packages.