daisies. ajab prem ki gazab kahani. of time and the city. neelkanth nirala. sharira

terrific in its irreverent frivolity, ‘daisies’ was a blast. two girls decide to go ‘bad’ and dump hopeful elderly men as lovers, gaily destroy a well laid out feast and generally run around doing naughty things to the ‘establishment’. when it was made, it was a critique of the soviet iron hand over czechslovakia. today it rails against ‘the man’ using surrealist imagery and mad cap pop humour.

‘ajab prem ki gazab kahani’ is only redeemed by the prettiness of ranbir kapoor and the easy going nonchalance of katrina kaif. they salvage the nonsense around them that makes character speak loud and shrill when they have to be funny and a plot that no one bothers to make sense of.

liverpool is the stage of a coming of age documentary drama in ‘of time and the city’. using mostly found footage and gorgeous soundtrack and a reminiscing voiceover terence davies tells its story and his. he longs for the past like all of us watching cities transform into beings we no longer know. t is unashamedly sentimental and lovely to watch- but nowhere as brilliant a journey as guy maddin’s similar bittersweet paean to his hometown ‘ my winnipeg’.

after a week since seeing ‘neelkanth nirala’ on stage i am still ambivalent about it. at one level the same anxiety of loss – this time of language- as a classical form- i understand. after all don’t i also dramatically rue the complete illiteracy of coming generations. i could not wholeheartedly participate in this grieving for the loss of what has after all become the national language; nor could i get incensed by its reactionary tone (the devoted wife/ daughter)- given my own anger at similar posturing by the mns- but this time for marathi. the trope of suffering artist turning away from worldly fame and fortune has been seen before too many times and this play did not add much beyond. perhaps the theater as a space flattened the characters even more- but then there was the language itself. the cadences and rhythms, the over reaching metaphors whose ambitions and registers we are to embarrassed to speak in. the language was beautiful.

so stylized and precise it left me cold- ‘sharira’ where dancers from kalakshetra danced to live music by the gundecha brothers at the ncpa. fantastically mounted, the bodies of the dancers stood still and moved slowly through incredible postures in excruciating slow motion. the eroticism only exploded once in a while when their humanity- impatience, irreverence, anger- were allowed to break through the stone like perfection of the movements. the music filling the room was beautiful.

pune highway . slum meeting . dear liar . october . spade

pune seems like a city that is intent on getting its act together- or at least making sure it makes all the necessary moves so that it appears like it is getting its act together. as the city is exploding on the fringes into luxury apartments and special townships slum housing seems to be becoming the concern of the academies. that’s a good thing. but the solutions being imagined are severely limited by the possibilities within the jnnurm and the sra models.


on the way to pune at joshi wadwale adyllic rural maharashtra

paul, sheila and me drove to a college of architecture in pune yesterday to try and develop a method of inventing new ways of interviewing and naturally imaginging housing in slums. as in before having and answer to know what is the question-exactly. so there we were in a conference room with representatives from architecture colleges, community groups and their ngo representatives. it was decided to hold a workshop in the month of june where all of us would participate in examining communities and developing solutions particular to their needs. 4^th year design students, 10 of them, will be part of this. hopefully it will pan out. seemed like an interesting development. after the workshop the project might even gain academic legitimacy if the pune university decides to loosen its grip on what constitutes legit architecture at the fourth year level.

i almost missed 'dear liar' at prithvi because of the meeting though- and it would have been quite a tragedy. nasserudin shah and ratna pathak playing bernard shaw and his love interest, the actress mrs patrick campbell., read their love letters to one another. both were terrific, naseer was better. but the leters were the stars. brilliant and witty.

what is with the organic twists and urns on the walls and ceiling at alfredos?

at home today, i finally decided to watch eisenstein’s ‘october’ which has been sitting on my computer for too long now. i wish all agit prop films were this exhilarating. there is no way not to be completely taken in when lenin enters, or when the palace is stormed, or not to be amused with the cheap potshots at the monarchy and the provisional government that took its place. And in the middle of all that historical narrative there are still the faces of people who you remember and become emblematic of the characters in the drama.

samira's publiching debut 'spade' is out with articles by quaid, chhaya, mustansir, aniket, rupali and me.. among others. 'architecture and politics' is what it claims to be about.

'sweeney todd' . harish lunch . 'kheli meli'. marathi manoos and the family

it’s a blast watching helena bonham carter and johnny depp relish the slashing of throats and gleefully sing and dance to blood splattered songs in ‘sweeney todd’. namrata and me squirmed, giggled, laughed as the barber wreaks his vengeance upon the vermin infested city of london where the blood flows like vermillion water down the cobblestreets. that was two operas in a row.

and at lunch, the vagaries of college provided us with fodder for more nasty in-jokes and self deprecating humor regarding college, student affairs and the state of architecture in the city. nothing new about that particular bitching session.

but surprisingly the marathi play in the evening ‘kheli meli’ also turned out to be pretty twisted as a group of men dying from an incurable disease joke about love, sex and death. a black humour not often seen on marathi stage which otherwise goes for the silly slapstick. i enjoyed it in spite of the tackily made but interestingly imagined set, the over extended and unnecessarily sappy end and the obligatory (in an mns world) marathi manoos joke.

speaking of marathi manoos, i was embarrassed to find my late poet uncle suresh bhats words being appropriated by the mns to justify the anti north indian tirade of the mns. words from his poem for the sanyukta maharashtra movement are displayed in huge saffron posters at strategic junctions in the city. i don’t know why it should baffle me- this completely regressive posturing by the illustrious lode star of our family. its not as if the rest of the clan is very different.

the reasons i have odd dreams at the end of the month: madame butterfly . invisible cities . city shots (interior and exterior) people

how can i be expected to sleep well after being assaulted by the sawdust in the air from mustaq’s enthusiastic carpentry on the terrace (it gives me a severe allergy); and phone calls in the middle of the night to trace the whereabouts of our very own artist=engineer. in between bouts of trying all the way from 2 o’clock to 5.30 i had to have two ridiculously cinematic dreams- one that definitely bar-coded me as film snob and the other as a hollywood action fan. to enter a gallery for a derek jarman art exhibition and be confronted with huge painting –projections of paul klee like drawings of golden haired boys. these are annotated with the poems of tarkovsky’s father. and then running like hell from a strange shadow who is abut to kill me up a steep hill of dust and then sliding down on the other side into a village. running like hell. and as i run the word gets around ‘supandi is coming’ and panic films the air. as i run looking for shelter from the shadow behind me doors start shutting on the street. ‘the supandi is coming!’. a clearing at the end of the street where i hide in the bushes and watch supandi come in – who turn out to be dark me in grass skirts doing a hindi film version of a tribal dance.

as incongruous a phenomenon must be watching a russian woman and an italian man play a japanese woman and an american man, singing in italian with english subtitles with an orchestra that’s called the ‘symphony orchestra of india’ and is made up largely of musicians from kazakhistan. but the music was beautiful. the tragic heroine and her maid had voices that could make you cry (in spite of the danger of creating an embarrassing ‘pretty woman’ scene); and for all its feminized asia being ravaged by the ugly american- was pretty interesting as a study in orientalism.

or maybe all this oddness has to do with the beautiful cities built as riffs on calvino texts by the first year. cities where meanings disappear as soon as you let go, or signifiers tease you into imagining patterns, or memories are found and made, or lie like unattainable utopias.

palak

kruti

anuj

pratyusha

jeenal

reema

sonal

or maybe its the streets of this city.

highway

i-flex goregaon

kharghar

juhu

borivili

kandivili

powai
--

or its rooms.

avon

mandapeshwar caves

red box

santacruz community hall


dharavi workshop

dharavi house
---

or people?

dad

aaji, usha maushi, mom

ranjit sonal

muk

prachi

deepali benita rohit paul

rupali

chetan - reluctant architect back from australia for his first novel.

paro surabhi

me

long overdue photopost no 2 - pina bausch . manish's kelwan