rahul and the gay movement

rahul gandhi, it would seem, according to cnn-ibn is the new gay icon. and the story goes that section 377 has more of a chance of being defeated now that his aura is gaining ground. just how is that assumption made is not clear in the news story as he has not been heard making any statements in support, or for that matter, against the gay community. what is, though, is the reason why he is popular among the lgbt community according to the channel. it dutifully begins the story with a stereotyped (read effeminate, whiny voiced) gay man lusting after rahul’s sexiness and cuteness and how his dimples are adorable. naturally this is the reason why the case against 377 has new hope. and then you wonder why people don’t take the issue seriously.

self pity / all the things that occupy my mind

i guess the end of semester is always like this. mandess. i am trying to come to temrs with the fact that you are going to be the bad guy for so many students who might fail, meeting parents who are desperately trying to pay the next years fees for their kids, or kids whose year has been colossal down in the ups and downs of growing up- and now it seems too late to catch up, or those who fell ill and lost months of work, or so many more. meanwhile there is the studio faculty who claim some universal ‘standrd’ by which students are to be judged, laying down the law and making someone else actually do the dirty work. in this case – yours truly. so there we are juggling these emotional balls and trying to keep sane when there si the rets of the world- the exchange programmes, the design cell projects, the council inspections (next week- by the way) and the guest lectures (today’s was cancelled and that’s why i am home early) and somewhere in the middle there we teach too.
last week ended the bidders presentations for the dharavi project. we are part of the experts committee to oversee the proposals by developers. and this time the rhetoric has changed- everyone talks about community, livelihood, light and ventilation. the densities are still mind boggling and the solutions desperately try and make sense of them to make reasonable built form. unfortunately only few good intentions manage to make it to the end.
to chill on saturday after a grueling drive to pune and back where i discovered the naked men and commie sign on the ceiling fo the cdsa building we went for a party to bandra that was seedy and musty with the smell fo the cologne of lonely people looking for love- or at least some sex. walked out feeling ill.
on monday sonal, mom and me went to worli for an indian classical music concert. the sitar was efficient but boring and rajan sajan mishra were way off form as the main singer had lost his voice.
also the jigsaw puzzle was completed in the past two days and lies at my feet waiting to be framed and the stepney of the car needs to be fixed. ustaads is the new joint in ic colony where we eat- cheap, durable and good kababs.
confounded by the collisions of thousands of different forces upon every single munite of the day, i feel like a mess. is someone here volunteering a massage?

an explanation, a complaint, a warning and four films

if you have been wondering where i have been and why i have stopped writing i think i owe you guys an explanation. it seems that what i put down on this blog is too often taken too seriously and often in a way that don’t intend it to be. this is causing many close friends and relatives to be rather wary of me. naturally. i must have been an idiot to think that they would not read this. and trying to explain things to them is a pointless exercise. i do try and tell them these are just temporary rants felt on that particular day- but it is there, isn’t it- on the internet for anyone to find at anytime. so that has led to a censorship of my thoughts on the blog. i cant clearly say what i mean here and have therefore preferred to keep quiet. it bores me to pretend here. this is not my stage for that kind of performance- it demands a different form of me that i am prepared to be. yet.

so the movie reviews can continue but not my unbridled anger at some other delicate issues that i shall continue only to make veiled references towards. more than a fear of reprisal it is just simply easier that way.

so to make up for lost time a few pet peeves. why do we exoticise the ‘strange so much? the ‘interesting’. it must be because we see everyday life as so boring that the odd is fascinating. unfortunately that also makes us make normal people exotic. character becomes caricature. the urge to be interesting obviates any empathy between us and the object them. in the cinema city project that is something that i think we have to try to avoid. though admittedly it seems extremely different when everything we encounter is so darn ‘interesting’.

i have to remind myself of that photograph of myself performing for sonals camera in my room when i was a teen- pretending to be a rock star on the wall to remember that we all perform constantly perpetually – either for ourselves or for what we imagine as the others gaze. in which case we are all strange- and interesting. but the more on the cinema city project later. i shall upload the brief. the presentation meanwhile a few days back at majlis was fascinating with kaushik, us, the tambu cinema kids and hansa presenting the twin vastly different timelines of renu and kamal swarup.

shall i now get on with the films that i saw over the past few weeks. ‘the drummer’ is up first. supposedly a favorite at sundance and it did nothing at all for us. a mixture of genre films told a plodding story of a son of a gangster on the run who finds himself and salvation through the mysticism of zen drummers in taiwan. so you can pretty much imagine the rest. some neon lit hongkong to landscape shots of taiwan to music film clichés to some martial arts for chineseness.

‘jagte raho’ became part of the cinema city presentation when the space of the endless apartment building where raj kapoor tries to find water and escape his pursuers reminded me of tati and archizooms take on the endless grid of modernism or the perpetual loss of identity in the city. i could have done without the moral of the story that condemns women to the seva of the pati and salvation through the problematic image that combines woman/nature/tradition. highly conservative- i thought- in spite of the beautiful ‘jago mohan pyare’

‘milk’ is the only hollywood film of the bunch and i think the best film of the set. in spite of the trapping of the fairly conventional biopic that makes the protagonist into a superhero sean penn the story real and palpable through the love stories, the friendships and the sorrow. all the performances were fantastic. so much better slumdog which we seem to have claimed somehow as an indian film.

‘no smoking’ has been so highly recommended and condemned by people that to react to it purley as a film became very difficult. as the film progressed is spent more time thinking about what he was trying to do and how clever he thought he was rather than being involved in anything the film had to do at any other level. it seemed like it was merely trying to appear smart. the ‘cool’ tale about the soul of man cleansed with his addiction as he becomes shallow was a little adolescent. the rest of the film tried to make this observation profound through too-clever references most of which i will admit that i did not get or care to get. as a bad of tricks i guess it was fun but i hoped for more ‘soul’ for the lack of a better word at my fingertips right now. and as a cinema city aside what is one to make of the space in the city where baba bengali runs his labyrinth of atrocities. somewhere in a slum way below the ground in perpetual darkness. is this the way in which the new avant garde film maker imagines the slum- a chamber of horrors? or am i being anal and need to chill?

bombay/delhi again

the bombay delhi debate again and this time within the studio. not really a debate, more of a discussion, as the spa faculty and students are here for a week long exchange with our 3 semester masters students. arunav showed us the results of the concentration of power in the hands of a few in delhi. as national capital a national pride is summoned up as justification for the most gruesome evictions. first the asiad games, then the commonwealth and somewhere it is whispered the olympics are next. these events are used as reasons to clean up the city of everything that is seen as unwanted- or unaesthetic. today a slum along the river tomorrow a riverfront promenade. the master plan is the apparatus of planning the city. but it stays far above the everyday realities of the needs of the citizens. these have to find ‘illegal’ methods of finding space within the city. as long as it does not mar the unspoilt wide roads that separate more than connect the various fragments no one seems to bother. it is this distancing that i found so incredible. arunav said that as delhi wants to recreate itself as a global city it has to find ways to attract investment. but being so top heavy a system the only way it can do it is by top-down brutality. being so used to the insidious cunning of the developer lobby in mumbai i was pretty struck by that shameless brute force. Considering the difference between the two cities I cant help but believe that The spa course can afford its classical urban design bias while we in Mumbai absolutely cannot. but this is the kind of development that the middle classes seem to favour. this urge for a fascist dictator who will make everyone fall in line and create that simpler sweeter utopia where their children can run free and safe in green fields with butterflies. it is no wonder then that the hero of the middle classes is narendra modi. then there is the supreme court that seems to have decided it is the executive power in deciding the directions of development across the country- and for mumbai. first it was the mill land verdict, then the overturning of the 33/9 cess building case in favour of the builder, then it says that it is unrealistic to imagine sez’s (in spite of farmers complaining) only on non-fertile lands. according to today’s headlines it looks like it is heading to overturning the rights of slum dwellers in favour of the original property owners. the avenues of new delhi only seem far away from the slums of mumbai.

can ad campaigns get any more offensive?

shouldn’t we be angry? this is the new times of india campaign. ‘teach india’ they call it and these are the images.. it’s a series where obviously privileged young men and women take time off their busy schedules and ‘help’ the unfortunate by educating them. this is in today’s newspaper. a wide toothed fair young man takes time off his busy exercise schedule (note the orange track pants and the hurdles in the background) to teach a darker thinner and thus marked as such - underprivileged man to count - the hurdles perhaps. there is an ipod headphone dangling from his left year and a towel in his hand that wipes his sweat with. but the real difference is in the body language and the eyes. the difference between the two looks to the camera is amazing. while the yuppy teacher reeks of smug satisfaction, the reluctant student seems shy and even resentful beneath the apologetic slump as he raises his eyes to meet ours. the ‘u’ ties the two men together across sparkling white t shirts. while one man fills his up the others hangs limp around his skeletal body. the image is carefully assembled with signs that make sure that 'times of india' readers don't even begin to identify with the wrong man. we all know which one of the two it is addressing. disgusting. incredibly offensive.

post no 1001 - university jury rant

back at last from my third and final day of evaluating third year design projects in various colleges around the city. because it is the third year there is supposed to be one ‘rural’ project and one ‘urban’ project. what either of those terms means is pretty pointless because none of the projects that were set even ventured to look beyond organizational efficiency and.. and pretty much nothing else. the icing on the cake were the models, made in paper, painted in fluorescent watercolor, green foam made lawns and brown mud. trees of twisted wire wore tufts of dust as foliage. rural hospitals seemed to be the rage. over programmed with labyrinths of unventilated corridors and ugly windows to boot. pitched roofs give it a rural ‘effect’ i was told. and then the random curtain walling that is unashamedly called elevation ‘treatment’ on all the ‘urban’ projects. elevation treatment used to be a bad word in my days of bad architectural education where ‘authenticity’, ‘honesty to materials’ and other such romantic notions from early modernism seemed to hold sway. but at least there was that much. i hate to sound like a regressive stick in the mud, but for gods sake what in the world is going on in architectural education today? and its not even as if the organizational ability or drawing quality or that other annoying word ‘resolution’ was any better than projects being accused of just ‘talk’. structure, circulation and services that holy triad of a university jury were all i was, much to my own chagrin, reduced to looking for, and found even them to be flawed. grrr..

a case for boring architecture

what is it about the permanence of architecture that frightens us so much? is it its inherent stability that is difficult to shift- the making of boundaries that is its inherent nature? the urge to transgress them leads to construct complicated formal operations.

we are too afraid of immobility. with a culture of 5 second attention spans fostered by television we get anxious when we are confronted with stillness. we are afraid of being boring- not entertaining enough to command attention. complicated maneuvers are performed. folds, blurs, twists and turns- because one can. i do realize the overtly proselytizing tone of this post but these acrobatics seem like distractions created to hide the shallowness of our concerns. experience and habitation seem to be relegated to a lower status than the projection of seductive form. ‘the soft pornography of the rosebud’, i have said this somewhere else.

the problem is the urge to be ‘interesting’: as in unusual, odd, eye catching in magazines and drawings. the represented space is far more important than the lived. and that is the bind of architecture- because it is about represented space- only. architecture naturally then, to survive and flourish, must consign to a lower rung the non-pretty- the domestic, the body, the deformed, the ordinary, the mundane and elevate what is ‘interesting’.

assumed in this situation is that everyday life cannot be exhilarating. experience, unless it is mediated through formal operations cannot bring joy. within these operations, if experience has a part to play then it is the active body performing antics that is considered (like in an amusement park or playground). otherwise form must play with itself. turn, twist, swirl. when the body is still it is form that must dance.

boredom and the blog

i am bored with the blog. it used to be a place whose presence gave me a reason to re-look at the world around me, find words to describe it. the ordinary took on ‘significance’ to be thought about, get confused about, pontificate about. now, as these pontifcations become more pompous and tedious, i find myself struggling to keep interested. i am not so much worried about the blog becoming boring (i don’t read it)- i am afraid it might have lost its ability to excite me about every little thing in every day. i might be settling for a more inert way of living and watching the days go by- not noticing things and therefore not talking about them.

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.

tv show jury

considering the controversy over my temper tantrum over certain students bunking two days of school when they had design juries to go shoot for zee antakshari perhaps i did overreact a bit. but i insist – only a bit.

after all there is the indubitable fact is the very fact that a talent show on television which has been known to have episodes where the participants and contestants are dunked in water is considered to be more important than an important evaluation in the most important subject in architectural education. it’s a question of putting straight the priorities of the school and the students. isn’t that also what education is about? or are we to stay valueless, watching people come in and watching people leave- only learning how to resolve toilets along the way. perhaps the method was too harsh. but if the argument to go for the show is that we have no ‘cultural activities’ in the school and this was a place to display talent, then i am afraid we must look at what constitutes the ‘culture’ we choose above the activities of the school. to me the show is a competition between people whose only talent is knowing film song lyrics and the letters they begin from. enjoyable i am sure- singing along with the perennially smiling hosts and buzzing the buzzer before your competitors. fun – but talking about it like it is about ‘talent’ is a problem. and as someone who loves pop as much as i do i technically should not have a problem with the very existence of the show or its enjoyment. but to say that it has more value than a design jury in school or the film club or the encounter or the electives- which are some of the ways in which the school engages with ‘culture’ – like it lies somewhere outside is patently ridiculous. and i got angry about this.

but perhaps there is a larger question at stake here. what is the role of a teacher? if it is not laying down a standard of value systems that the students are asked to react to – positively or negatively, however challenging or ridiculous they might seem to be, the entire system of education is reduced to a farce. we keep each other happy by making sure that we don’t threaten each others secure sense of comfort. we say only sweet things to each other in sweet ways to not ruffle any feathers.

there was a time when this was not so. arguments were tough things and students were put through the shredder as preset ideologies were challenged and twisted. they grew hard as we were hard. nothing was allowed to go slack. the students probably hated us then but the work was better. as much as slackness was punished good was work appreciated. in an effort towards universal happiness we did not let quality diminish. i have a feeling we have let that happen over the past few years.

i am sitting at mukuls house right now as ateya and chitra prepare for the farewell party that they are throwing along with ninad, saurabh and aditya. all of them have been students of mine and are people i have become close to and very fond of. each of them brilliant, passionate, intelligent and each very much their own person. fantastic people. over the next few months they will all disappear to america and to london. i am going to miss them so much. its been a long time since rupali and me violently tore into them when they were in the second year. i keep hoping that there will be others who will be able to do as well as they have done for themselves- got into some of the best universities in amazing programmes. i compare them with what i was at their age and am embarrassed by my silliness. something worked when they were in college that does not seem to be the same anymore. for the better or for the worse i am not sure. i am certain though that those were far more difficult times to be a teacher and to be a student. the fights, arguments, rants were vicious. many tears were spilt and many sheets torn, models broken / upturned. today things are more peaceful, happier. we are now softer and more attentive to the feelings of students. i like that. they might be happier than they were 6 years ago. but i hope we have also not let go of the urge for excellence in an effort to live in peaceful blandness. safe from harm. sterile.

back to antaskhari. i lost my temper because i expected better from the students. i wanted to make sure to them as well as those with them that the choices you make are important decisions. now the ball is in their court.

and i forgot- let the complaints and protests begin.

ridiculous incident on the street

it was most appropriate that it was as i was watching a monty python film on tv at 9 in evening or so that the absurdity of bureaucracy reared its ugly head right in the middle of the ‘ministry of silly walks’. a police man stood at the doorway asking me why i ran over a man and did not take him to a doctor on the 16^th of this month. naturally i was aghast at such an accusation. now for the flashback.

i was taking a right turn onto s v road form the highway when a man accelerated to go straight from the right lane (the lane from where one is supposed to go right) the big bulky tight t shirt clad marathi man with his wife in tow also had huge diamond earrings on and was driving a badly beat up fancy honda civic. as a result of his uncalled for acceleration the front of his car nicked the back of mine. a gentle nick- happens in bombay all the time. as it was definitely not my fault and because i was in no mood to make a scene i decided to go back home.

but the man decided that in the alternative universe that he inhabited i was to blame. the smell of alcohol that emanated form him confirmed his delusional state. he followed me to the entrance of my lane.

an altercation ensued during which he stole my cell phone from the car, people gathered around, told him to take it easy, got back my phone and cajoled him to chill as he was drunk. the man insisted on taking this forward.

at the local police chowky he came late and i had already spoken to the local policeman. he told us to go to the main police station to settle the issue. when i arrived there it was undergoing reconstruction. i waited for a while until the man arrived and then bored i waved my hand and said bye.

seething, when i got home, i had a feeling that this was not the end of the story. and true enough it was not.

what is amazing to me is the fact that his complaint was actually taken seriously. i went to the police station to give a statement and it appeared that the policeman in charge had pre-decided that i was the guilty one. the interrogation was a joke as there was absolutely no reason for me to speak. i was told that i was in the wrong lane when the fact that i was most definitely not and that the other guy was, besides being drunk was frustrating. the whole situation was totally suspect. i had to pay a fine at the end. an official one.

the absurdities of bureaucracy mean that it only takes someone to complain and then you are guilty no matter what the “facts” are. sonal said it feels like a kafka novel.

gujarat - art, intolerance and censorship

so, the stories of art censorship and right wing fanaticism about what can be seen and nto seen by the public seem to never end. the latest being the vandalisation of a students work at the m s university in baroda by vhp activists. it seems as if the art students were holding an exhibition of their final work when some self-proclaimed carriers of the moral codes of the country stormed in, took objection to one particular students work and destroyed it. in the process the also beat up the student. when the police were called in, they ended up arresting the student, and let the miscreants go free. the university refuses to file an fir on the students behalf, and instead wants an apology to be delivered for the art work by the student. meanwhile the student is still in jail.

the ridiculously inverted nature of this can perhaps only occur in gujarat- the hotbed for the experiment of right wing reactionary rule. as all intellectual endeavors are repressed, while jingoistic hindutva makes demands on the public realm, when the institutions of democracy and education are prey to the whims and fancies of violent and intolerant forces, there is no place in india where the frightening fascism of reactionary politics is more apparent. in the rarified and gradually isolated spaces we inscribe for the production of resistances and alternative imaginations, the increasingly privatized spaces, we are asked to produce discourse that does not threaten or question the status quo. is the only alternative becoming militant and rigid, mirrors to the forces we are trying to resist?

yesterday there was a meeting held at chemould gallery in town where amid representations of goats and peacocks rising out of construction materials, a group of artists, curators and concerned citizens held a press conference on the event. a petition was drafted, and signed.

please sign too.

rant regarding the state of the youth

this year more than any of the ones before i am struck by the ridiculously indulgent parenting methods of the fathers and mothers of the kids in the school. unable to face the fact that the child might himself be deficient in some way, they threaten legal suits, haggle over marks, argue about random details and finally threaten media exposure. its as if they can bully their way out of a failure. if it was my father of mother doing this, i would have just died of embarrassment. instead these spineless kids of today stand in the shadow of their vociferous dads and simpering mothers hoping to trick their way out. and the friends of the so-called victims jump on the sympathy bandwagon for the underdog, tsk-tsk ing away at the unfairness of it all. all of these hold the institute to ransom threatening any standards of excellence that it may try and set. maybe that’s what all of them want- one big happy family where we treat everyone with kid gloves and facilitate a way for mediocrity to pretend to be success. is that the kind of place where they want to say they came from?

dharavi tours

a sign in colaba for all the white skin who came to india seeking the glamour of being knee deep in third world filth, to make their holidays in india into a true adventure in the wild, here is an easy to use and access way to be truly daring. and as in the taj, ms sophie and her swiss boyfriend change into their tight summer t-shirts and shorts, picking the oldest and most crumpled pair of khaki trousers- in dharavi the insides of the houses on the tourist walk are rearranged into the right state of disorder.

power plays and male bonding

it has been two days of being enmeshed in the petty politics of all dimensions. inevitably, because of recent developments certain facts, which were always known, were brought to light- and once out there in the open we have been forced to act upon them. there is the danger that plagues young men looking for security, especially young men who are not so secure in themselves. they crave a space where they are accepted. sometimes this can be good, sometimes it can make them fall. and to vie for their attention are a myriad different ways of seeing, many different power centers, each resenting the other, dissing it as invalid or corrupt. given this situation, and the trauma of an architectural education, is it really that surprising when gods are made of mere mortals, when cliques are formed over cigarettes and beer; when devotees and acolytes throng around anyone who offers them clarity- a rule book from where to begin living their lives. when something here goes wrong, it can destroy the very foundations upon which this community is built. built on a trust, it is a brittle thing to break if a crack develops. and when it does, it becomes fetid with rumours and backbiting; of gossip and bitching. from the point of view of an outsider, it must seem rather insidious; but i do not know if it is easy to extract oneself from its grasp when the community is as small as it often is. power is addictive, as we know. and most of the time it is its own reward.

the edge is the drug

is there any way to speak to the rebellious urge in the young without patronizing it? how in the world do we begin to talk to them when although we see what is going on, any word that we say will be seen as an attack on what they think is so dear to them? how do we get them to trust in the fact that we only mean well for them, when they instinctively feel us as the enemy? this of course is fuelled by forces on the outside waiting to capitalize from this rebellion. this is a difficult question made even more so by the fact that our positions of power come with their own rigid rules of right and wrong, and one cannot break them easily, while those bent on destroying all that an institution represents have no such qualms. and what makes things worse is the sympathy that the so-called wronged wrench out from their acolytes for being the misunderstood rebel. it becomes the way in which they assume power. by being the smooth rebel outside the system they present an easier, smoother ride through the pitfalls of an architectural education. how does one fight this suicidal tendency of the young- to plummet into a whirlpool of destruction where the exhilaration of being on the edge of death is the drug? any suggestions?

woman marrying banana trees- all is right with the country.

so now amitabh bachchan has been proposed as one of the next options to be the president of india. just when i was getting completely irritated with the way the entire charade over his sons engagement or wedding to aishwayra rai. i cannot believe that any sane literate individual would make his future daughter in law get married to a banana tree, a banyan tree and a stone idol to rid herself of the curse of the manglik. as if we did not have enough of these nonsensical superstitions anyway that now we have the ‘first family’ of indian cinema actively practicing such regressive reactionary rituals.

what is even more annoying is that this probably means that more of these rather archaic practices that have been known to completely destroy individual lives will be reinforced having gained validity through their adoption by influential people.

i wonder how someone like abhishek bachchan is able to reconcile his urbane hipness with this stifling conservatism; or is the liberal pose merely that- a pose; and is he really only a silly papa’s boy, too spineless to step out of his fathers shadow. and now this grossness as president!? no thank you, mr bachchan, we don’t need any more women domesticated.

noida

pardon me for being pissed, but after an hour of watching footage of the upper class jerk who raped and killed 35 children, chopped them up and buried them in his backyard with help of his servant- then probably sold their insides to international organ traders; and then watching politicians pass the buck around shamelessly - the bjp blames samajwadi blames bjp blames congress; and then suffering through the sensationalistic sentimentality on all the television news channels; and the panels of experts - sociologists/psychologistss / criminologists each hogging their 15 minutes of fame to peddle their wares.. i have lost all faith in the humanity of the privileged.

dharavi

siddharth making the presentation

it seems mumbai is on the international developmental radar as never before. with high real estate prices, lots of possibilities for markets and loans, everyone and their mother seems to have a stake in the city. and nowhere are the stakes more apparent than in the developmental and architectural world. as white skins of all variety seem to walk the streets (or rather hop through the five star hotels) of the city each group seems to have a fabulous solution for the ills of the city- each one more grand than the other.

meanwhile the state seems to be paying a great deal of attention to these proposals and paying none at all to the ground conditions that these grand schemes aim to replace – whole heartedly. enamored by the images of the spanking new the existing is made to have no presence at all in these new cities. this has been plaguing us in the school for a long time now and is becoming more and more apparent in the fights that we have been having over the design cell projects. the schools cess proposal, the big debate over transit oriented development proposals and fsi- all seem to be our ways of beginning to resist these mad inhuman proposals. and then there are those professionals who, eager to lick white ass and completely surrender to these forces, offer no critique at all – and on the other hand fully participate in facilitating them. they are perhaps the most dangerous of all. we hope that we don’t make too many of them.

today in the school we had the big dharavi presentation. this is a design cell project where are working with local community groups to develop a master plan for the redevelopment of dharavi that emerges from an understanding of the local. i don’t know how many you know about the infamous 'mukesh mehta plan' that has been as of now accepted by the state government. the proposal in essence treats dharavi as a blank slate and using an fsi of 4 clears large tracts of land for bandra kurla complex style commercial development. there is absolutely no cognizance of local work and living patterns or historical fabrics. communities are sliced into to create land for fancy glass clad buildings that can be sold at enormous rates. the people of dharavi have rebelled violently against this plan.

the fourth year has been working hard on this project finding real data and doing intense mapping on the site. this was presented to the local community groups and their leaders today. we were very worried of possible animosity and about the chemistry between the groups but it turned out quite well. the students had done a great job of the presentation and it helped convince even the skeptical of our intentions.

now that the project has begun and since we want to base it on a hands on real possibility lets see what kind of plan will emerge.

the meeting

vinita at the base of the huge aerial view of the slum

as an aside i thought i will include some of the other proposals recently made by architecture schools in the us and in britain for mumbai- both atrocious and incredibly disturbing. in the sci-arc proposal the city is submerged displacing everybody, and in the aa proposal for dharavi atrocious towers are built hovering over the slum cutting off light and ventilation for the entire population. i don’t know whether this is speculation, a joke, a crime or just plain stupidity and arrogance, but if one is not to get angry by this nonsense then what is one supposed to feel? both proposals do not want to deal with the real lives of the people affected and therefore choose to be superficial and pretend 'creativity'. and these schools are where many of our students and faculty have masters from. the orientalisation of the oriental. i am still reeling.

this is sci-arc.. flooding the city and making "testicular architecture" for the rehabilitation. science fiction and disaster movie- is it a wonder that the school is near hollywood.

and this is aa, london. towers over dharavi - the slums below it would seem need no light, no air- no life.

images courtesy – sahil via ninad.

riot

the question is this.. unless buses burnt in bhandup did we bother to know about a dalit woman being raped and murdered in nagpur? or were we too busy reading about abhishek bachchan and aishwarya rai going to benaras because they were both manglik.