It was a brilliant piece on the American online portal, Substack, written by Maisa on the stunning recent heist at the famed Louvre Museum of Paris that first set me thinking. She had called the theft “a performance piece about how nothing sacred is as safe as it pretends to be.” The phrase lingered like incense. What if the Louvre were replaced by Sabarimala? What if the stolen French crown jewels were the Lord’s own gold? Suddenly, the parallels shimmered — both places thronged by pilgrims, both obsessed with divinity and display, and both robbed not just of treasure but of illusion.

The daytime heist at the iconic Louvre -the most visited and the single largest museum on earth- occurred on October 19, shocked the world. Four men, dressed as workmen, broke in through an upper floor window using a ladder on a moving truck. They cut into glass cases with an electric saw and made off with over $100 million worth of royal jewels, gifted by the 19th Century Emperor Napoleon III to his two wives. The entire operation conducted at the 232-year-old and 6,52,000 square feet-large museum which had more than 8 million visitors last year, lasted barely seven minutes.

The Substack article said; “The Louvre is not a jewellery shop. It’s a cathedral of curated ownership, a palace turned archive where value is as much about story as it is about carats. Everything inside is a public artifact and also an assertion of power: crowns gifted, ornaments accumulated, empires represented in polished metal. To breach that temple and walk out with its ornaments is to stage a tiny, chaotic critique. Someone took a centuries-old performance of status, interrupted the choreography, and in doing so revealed something obvious, the things we call........

© Mathrubhumi English