the delhi jury . last song of dusk . the autograph man

delhi is cold nowadays. the overcast skies turn midday into a grey dawn smothered in smog. the project was to be an exercise in knitting the civil lines to the old city. disturbed by the unusual (for delhi) fragmentation of that precinct, all the students wanted to ‘connect’ and 'intergate' but the only tools at their disposal were the woefully inadequate tools of form- actually not even form but volume on a sketchup drawing. if ever there was a case where the technology becomes the imagination it is here. the generation of what is assumed to be content is so easy that it takes on the aura of seriousness. for me the problem was more fundamental than merely that of representation or design skills- it was the way in which we define a ‘city’. or rather what is the ‘urban’ in urban design? when the morphological is easily removed from the historical, or the idea of an ‘activity’ is disembodied into a bar chart- i wonder whether we have cornered ourselves by trying to attain some slippery notion of being rational – i.e. arithmetical – and forgotten that the city is after all experienced and dreamt.

i lived at the spa guest house, the old directors bungalow with lawns and terraces and dined at fancy restaurants- on the first night with kt and arunav at the iic and the second with rinki and arunav at gk2. delhi’s acronyms and the images they evoke.

at cp (another one) ‘the bookworm’ is closed. sad. another good bookshop gone. instead of buying a theory book therefore i bought instead siddharth sanghavi’s ‘the last song of dusk’ that turned out to be a complete potboiler with doe eyed heroines and evil step mothers a la beta. madhuri is not dancing anywhere yet but she might. and the language is all prim and camp, over written, englishy and self consciously poetic- very often annoying and unintentionally comic. and i had just finished zadie smith’s ‘the autograph man’ which, though not a patch on ‘white teeth’ or ‘on beauty’ still is great fun to read- just as language. especially when she nails exactly the way people speak, even though in the book all of the over-clever self referential postmodern kaballah stuff is unnecessary.