kaushik said that today the bombay based film industry is shaping the way in which other places in the city are represented. if that is so, then the delhi of dilli 6 is a village for us. instead of the madness of a city we are presented with a ghetto of happiness and camaraderie. the only way out of that ghetto is presented as mumbai (as the marine drive backdrop in the photographers studio where sonam longs to become an indian idol; or america from where smug half hindu half muslim abcd arrives to show the underexposed ghetto inhabitants that the kala bandar that haunts them is inside their hearts, and if they look really close into the mirror then they will be rid of it. its all terribly patronizing. no city film this- instead delhi is transformed into idyllic pre-modern village with all the problems that we liberal city dwellers imagine there- dowry, illiteracy, caste discrimination- it is like a checklist that goes on and on. and the proposed solution is so trite it makes you cringe. somewhere along the way in a song the village is spliced with shots of manhattan making, if nothing else, at least some odd images. waheeda rehman and rishi kapoor should have been the stars and then maybe it would have been all right.
later benita and me headed into town for a talk on cairo at the udri. the lecturer spoke of the patterns of exclusion and inclusion that have shaped the city today. the desert as the space in between that makes maps impossible was beautifully drawn and the story of the city had echoes of mumbai- large scale private investments, gentrification, etc. i must admit to somehow being a little uncomfortable now though of the spectacle of strangeness that we exult in as much as we decry especially when we confront some of these new landscapes. there is an exotica that taints the way we see- ‘the interesting’ that somehow makes the everyday alien- or at least removed somehow- allowing us to gaze at these as if they do not affect us. i also find that we sometimes aid and abet this strangeness tourism for that breed of urban researchers than mine the ‘global souht’- indian or from the west. the discourse si then somehow shaped by this gaze- as these are the languages promoted by the lecture series or the conference circuit. other voices cannot be raised if one is to belong to this network. sad.
jasraj was in form at the science center yesterday. the alaap of the first raga had me in tears at the sheer beauty of some of those patterns. his voice like heavy deep silk. the later thumris and bhajans were good too but no match for the gorgeousness of the first half.
2 comments:
there is this one word, i suspect, you use quite differently - 'the interesting'. have read it in a lot of your earlier posts. Would you like to elaborate the debate in your mind with the idea of 'interesting'?
my problem with the word interesting…now that is an interesting question that makes me try and formulate and answer as clearly as possible. i find that the word is often used by people who are not willing to spend time with a place to discover something deeper but are seduced by the appearance of a disturbance within the ordinary. this disturbance is seen as an exciting phenomenon and is valorized. this valorization tends to make a commodity of the everyday phenomenon until it becomes an anecdote to be bartered on the growing market for oddness from the global south. i.e.- the admittedly odd or rather illegible new landscape is rendered exotic. the alucobond and glass malls and the pseudo historical apartment buildings take the place of snake charmers and elephants as exotica from the east to be peddled on the global lecture series circuit. the west to looks to us to supply them with such mutations and we oblige willingly. what is our everyday is made into strange through their eyes. or ‘interesting’. doesn’t this distance us from our context as well? the interesting is fascinating for a disinterested observer who cares only for the anecdotal value of and experience. like a photograph s/he will carry home to tell all the friends and family to say ‘i saw this too’- aren’t you envious? the urge to be interesting might end up making our everyday into a catalogue of oddities. i am party to this creation and have to know how to resist it.
and i mean that even in terms of architectural language. is the urge to be ‘different’ regardless of the context an urge to be seen as separate form the rest of the ilk.. sometimes regardless of the context in which one builds. to stand out from the crowd- to be unique and marketable as such.
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