cities: random acts of violence and bad art

my cousin was killed two days back; stabbed five times, by a bunch of men on a street in bangalore after he and his friends got into a brawl with them. my cousin and his friends had run out of gas on the street and were asking for help when these men started harassing the girls in the group. this is the story we have.

one of the last places on earth i expected to be the scene of a brutal random killing was bangalore. i don’t know why, but i always think of that city as this tree lines safe though boring little town. people insist the place has changed but our last visit merely gave me the impresionof more of the same middle class domesticity that lived in its own islands while somewhere on the other side the older part still managed to survive aggrieved to some extent about being left behind in the surge forward fo the great tech-city. perhaps the only things that were not aggravating the possible violence (a clockwork orange’ scenario perhaps was the opium haze that the pride of belonging to the high tech city of the country created.

yesterday aparna, siddharth, ruapli, kausik and me took a trip to the project 88 gallery where they were showing some work made by film makers, architects and artists to represent bombay at the venice biennale. it was another shallow and completely meaningless mining of the current trend of interest in this city in all of the world. and these were tackily made, completely laughable projections and installations whose observations were not even as profound as those from students of the 9^th standard- and made with the kind of gloss that substitutes for finish.

the space is superb though.

maanasi bhats mattress factory photographs at the mirchandani gallery were far more interesting. especially since it was just yesterday morning that sonal and me were discussing women musicians and were talking about the subject matter that they seem to engage with.