space inventory – springfield restaurant / horniman circle / kalina university / dharavi / mm hospital

spring field restaurant bovili east. dinner on sunday evening. dizzying internal space wit recreation of flowers and trees in painted plywood tables and china mosaic work on the walls. the frosted glass doors had celebratory icons of glasses and fruit floating in abstract geometries. above us a dark green sun sent out yellow rays and above that a misty blue sky false ceiling with amoebic cloud simulating cut outs. the waiter had green jackets on. a pure vegetarian bar.

monday began with a drive into the town office of the aiilsg where we spoke of slum free cities all over india. the office is on the third floor of one of the botawala buildings that circle horniman circle right near the town hall. the internal well of the building has this run down ornate elevator with cobwebs on all its corners, a mirror with a comb on a string for people to set their hair as they climb and a liftman who keeps reading his marathi newspaper oblivious of who is in the elevator.

from there we went to kalina university where in corridors hep dressed boys and girls waited among piles and piles of dot matrix printed pre punched sheets to meet some one of the many rude swaggering clerks who control their destinies. the building is a rotting modern atrocity built like a maze – perhaps an appropriate way to house a bureaucracy that’s lost all touch with its purpose. state education can only be housed in these rotting carcasses. unfortunately. from the empty land of the university there is a great view of the bandra kurla complex glass buildings waiting to encroach on this land.

in dharavi we had a meeting about the design cell and fourth year design project. the students are going to be introduced to the area on thursday. we needed to know how. at sparc’s office on the ground floor of a slum rehab building on the main road we sat in the shadow of the large aerial photograph of the slum slicing it into manageable areas to survey. follow roads, don’t follow community patterns. maybe they are related- maybe not. then we took a long walk to muslim nagar where houses pile on top of houses and no edge is discernable from one to the other. the densities are unimaginable. hw do we begin to count? if “counting is a political act”.

today morning, mom had to be admitted to the hospital for her long delayed operation. mm hospital in i c colony where the general ward was still under construction and the smell of paint was all around. we waited in the waiting area on the first floor with the cheap chinese tiles on the floor and ceiling. white with streaks of pink and blue repeating in an endless pattern across the surface. a band of wood patterned vinyl formed the edge between the municipal off white of the walls and the monotony of the tile work.

mom is there in the hospital still recovering from the anesthesia. she will be back home in an hour or so. i did not go to college today and am typing away waiting for dad to call so that i can go pick her up.