the river. suspect . thesis juries. birthdays of the week. thane belapur road

the only film i need to add to the relentless film list is tsai ming liang’s ‘the river’. here again as in ‘the hole’ water permeates into the hollow lives of a family each of whose members are living in a vacuum reaching out for warmth to strangers- the keeper of a porn video store or the shadows of a sauna where bodies find each other in complete darkness. all communication is broken down until the water invades the body of the young man and creates a debilitating neck injury or it pours down thorugh a leak in the roof until at the end in the heat of the sauna the boy and his father find each other.

last night mukul and me went to see shumona’s show in town called ‘suspect’. i loved the residual spaces that the exhibition found itself in. this one was behind a coffee shop in kala ghoda. the work was a series of photographs and films found at street corners around the world.
there can be nothing as depressing as a thesis jury. this time it was in new bombay and when i got there were no students at all. slowly they trickled in one by one until we got tired of waiting. those who came had no interest at all in their work, some of them had blatantly copied stuff and had no understanding of what they had done. the dance academies and cultural centers on plots in bandra kurla complex or kharghar. even when the issues were reduced down to services and loading unloading platforms we were left disappointed. as against that i can only be extremely happy about at least three of the thesis shown at krvia. pooja’s skillfully executed mediation between the institutions associated with a church and the city, mayur’s intense and beautifully detailed boys hostel and neelima’s clever redensification of a bandra village.



earlier in the week. aparna celebrated her birthday at sea view and on the same evening we surprised madhu on the eve of her birthday at her place.



here are some photographs taken on the way back from new bombay. thane belapur road with its new railway stations and the old industrial lands being transformed into glass towers courtesy reliance.