happy birthday john

around 30 years of a friendship is a long time. i have a photograph of you on my bicycle in exactly the same pose when you were around 12. this is like a hindi film time lapse scene as you morphed from my childhood hero - a sporty, confident, energetic, loving, funny, crazy guy into the handsome, warm, loving, brilliant, sentimental, funny, crazy guy on the pulsar that we first saw together in a showroom in andheri east. one of the best memories i have of it, is me and you driving hard and fast back from new bombay where we had gone to meet your cousin. the wind in my hair and conversations that whipped past us as we sped.

happy birthday ninad (one day late)

from here in mumbai to all the way there in america. this is him at jj giving his fourth year examinations.

juno

skeptical though i often am of the american alternative film, especially one that begins with a sweet animation sequence, i loved ‘juno’. ellen page plays 16 year old pregnant girl who decides to deliver the baby and give it away to a well to do perfect yuppie couple. with only a bunch of great one liners this might have felt like an extended episode of ‘friends’ but somehow the film was able to do much more. the smart alecky stuff was actually funny and the fuzzy feel-good stuff was fairly moving. this, in spite of the fact that the fuzzy stuff has lines like, ‘love the one who loves you for who you are…” but the boy who loves such sets a new standard for sex appeal on screen and his lover juno is terrific too.

strange dream no 45

there is a place in the hills somewhere where the corridors are white and i meet dushyant. the boy, i hear, is ill. i meet him and give him a hug. on the way back to the nearest city there are no rickshaws available on the street. they all seem to be headed the wrong way. parulekar and me take a motorcycle. i am tied to the back of it like a kite as he rides wild and fast over the hills and valleys. as he races i soar into the sky, fall into puddles on top of mountains, bounce off trees until i get stuck in a lush green valley. sonal and kalpit meet me there and she tells me about the beach on top of kanheri caves which suddenly looks to me like a puddle with soft sand underneath. kalpit puts his hand in it and squeezes the sand that stays exactly in the same form that he has shaped it into. “ this is nothing- you should hear about the ghost stories i heard of in ahmedabad., says k. “i hate ghost stories.” i shout and try and scramble out of the bushes. as i am climbing, suddenly there is one place that i cant get out of. k and s try and help me out but they also seem to be slipping. and then suddenly in the bushes that i try and hold on to i see the shoes of a petrified dead body. i scream and try to look for another way out but the whole series of bushes in front of me turn out to be corpses standing upright in a forest of trees.

(photopost) random images from last week

twins - siddharth / taksheel

namrata

sanah

fog in the morning

mustaq and jalal working their way through the woodwork for the new furniture at home

tapan

mukul on the new megachair


the terrace without the roof (before the retractable shed)

opportunities – “ don’t put this on the blog”

with the mounting frustrations of trying to work within a system that is often considered repressive, all the teachers of architectural schools of the city might be taking a few steps towards a new system- less restrictive and hopefully that allows for more freedom. that is, if we are able to resolve and go beyond personal ego hassles and larger political battles. today’s meeting at rizvi though ended with some hope. we don’t mind being part of the process of developing a new curriculum. somebody’s got to get their hands dirty. at stake are many issues though – what is the role of the architect? should the education system cater to the market? is design the synthesizer of all the various aspects of the course? what is technology, really? why are some courses so redundant and yet so firmly entrenched as necessities? tempers flared and nerves were rattled. an emotional end to the day. i was told by a senior member of the group not to put details of the days proceedings on the blog – but compulsive that i am, i can't not. i hope this post though is ambiguous enough.

taxonomy . 'i love you to death'

as further evolution of the idea to explore form more systemically i was considering classification systems. the world as a giant tree of distinct differences. a taxonomy of animal, plant and mineral life. aren’t all these classifications based on formal relationships? relationships as perceived by the eye? the idea is to explore these formal differentiations – the architecture of the internal relationships between parts. or even the methods through which they differentiate themselves from each other. the compulsive indexer that i am (no snide ones about by over organized music) is very excited to imagine the universe as neatly divided into categories cross referenced and annotated.

‘i love you to death’ on sony pix last night was silly fun- as a dark a comedy as hollywood could imagine making in the 80s. when kevin kline gets punished for infidelity by his wife (supported by her mother, her friend and his friends) by getting shot in the head, he turns over a new leaf. very cute and keanu reeves and william hurt ham like hell as the hired killers and have a lot of fun while at it.

jodhaa akbar

sonal and me performed an experiment on jodhaa akbar yesterday. by placing our palms firmly in the middle of the screen we could block out hritik roshan from the whole film. the conclusion of this experiment was that the origin of the cleft on his chin was attributed to the force of the air against it as he neatly bisects every frame. this is the mark of a mughal emperor. symmetry. his wife meanwhile must stand slightly off center as her veil adds the ‘element of the diagonal’ to the frame. she must also show her fiery rajput blood by cooking food for her husband. some comic swordplay wearing a white veil will also do.

i have not seen a sillier film in a long time. the entire purpose of making it seems to be determined by the ambition to make an ‘epic’. with that tag comes the obligatory notion of ‘grandeur’. that must be the reason for choosing to tell this story too. after all it does allow you the opportunity to linger long on the forts and palaces of rajasthan and agra. not to forget the fact that you get to gawk at jewelry provided by the sponsor. not that there is anything really wrong with any of that. the problem is that the whole film is constructed entirely out of formulaic ‘epic’ shots with a narrative that has nowhere to go. some nonsense family feud is cooked up for dramatic purposes, plot developments are resolved in a jiffy and battle sequences follow. you wonder why four hours were necessary for such fluff. i guess length of film is another way in which one gives the impression of grandeur. it batters any possibl resistance from you. you are expected to believe you are watching an important film when all it really is, is a k serial running in a back to back special.

aishwarya and hritik provide all the necessary airhead glam for the film. she simpers delicately, he purses his lips and gives dignified smiles. he is quick to take his shirt off and thrust his sword around and she stand in the window fantasizing. his sherwani swirls gracefully around as he twirls dervish like after being hit by a holy light from the sky. he is saved from near death when a similar light rises behind bhagwan krishna after her tapasya. three men sing in rehmans voice, tribals dance in jhingalala fashion for akbar, and so much more nonsense that sonal and me were in hysterics throughout. we have been practicing bisecting space like akbar ever since.

nature denatured / recaptured

{notes for a possible design project next year}

the assumption of this exploration is that the separation between culture and nature only exists as an act of imagination. nature is all encompassing embracing our selves as an integral part. to separate man from nature or the ‘man-made’ from the ‘natural’ can only be an act of creating a rift. this rift is the place that is being explored here.

the separation between man and nature is constructed everyday through our acts, gestures, metaphors and institutional systems. nature is thus made- taking on different forms and different meanings. this is an exploration of some of these constructs and the modes through which nature is thus constructed / imagined.

---
three categories below

the tame / the wild / the resource

a the tame

pastoral peace – the hearth

architecture is what forms through man in a love/war dance with nature

the primitive hut / the noble savage

farmhouses without farming

nature framed

alienation of use / productivity

the anxiety of age / deterioration

the fetishisation of the flower- colour

perpetual youth – the lawn / the flower

the soft pornography of the rosebud

floral motifs on clothes’ paisley prints / orchids

roots, tubers.

The biological portrayed as fetish

the picturesque

‘strategic beautification’

lawns – desire romanticisation

pretty nature

mangroves

the claude glass- the making of the real into a picture

beauty vs the real

sentimentalising nature

plastic flowers

topiary

guerrilla gardening

the reclamation of public space by agriculture

totalitarian schemes – ‘utopia’

cloning

b the wild

modes of survival – to please the gods/ to banish the untameable

taming the animal

shit / sex

bestiality of man

civilizing cities – “urban jungle” – free running

the dangers (possibilities) of darkness

violent docility

nature as woman

landscape as barbed wire

surveillance

the alienation of the reclining body

playfields and laughter clubs

yoga

kaifi azmi park / the morning walk

cosmology

potent nature

folk narratives? religious / mythical?

the festival – holi.

nature as metaphor

the “natural order” racism / evolutionism

‘unnatural’ behaviour – deviance – ‘against nature’

national park as view

the wilderness / panther attacks

representations

the weekend trek

the zoo, aquariums

national geographic

fossils/ traces

the ruin, dust

the sublime

helpless in the face of such majesty

c the resource

science

food

zoology

botany

naturopathy / nature as healer – mother

ayurveda

agriculture as a return to the uncorrupted relationship to land

the ‘green’ building

fishing villages / crabs

environmentalists

kitchen gardens

railway tracks

the nallah

(photopost) - mahashivratri at mandapeshwar

see below for the resurgence of a forgotten historical artifact through festivites, encroachments, bigoted rhetoric and community pride

(photopost) last week in town - vidura at bodhi, five spice

mahashivratri and the caves . 'colossal youth'

there is a new collision course being laid out over a historical artifact in our own little corner of the world. after years of being neglected by all concerned, the archaeological survey of india, the municipal corporation and the local community, be they hindu, muslim of catholic, there has been manufactured a sudden resurgence of interest in the mandapeshwar caves near by. with the elections just around the corner the annual mahashivratri festival- generally a relaxed low key event of lighting diyas all across the courtyard in front of the caves has been turned into a tackily produced mega event. electric lights shimmer on the lone tree in the courtyard, halogens burn in the interior, a huge statue of ahilyabai holkar is installed holding a shivling to underscore her dutiful devotion. under the patronage of right wing hindutva groups the long forgotten caves has received a new lease of life as an object that symbolizes the atrocities commited by marauding invaders upon ‘our’ culture. vinyl posters depict the replacement of a sculpture by a cross hand carrying a pick axe,; and the building of the church right above the caves. the church is itself a protected monument under the asi. on a hastily assembled stage with plastic chairs laid out in front local kirtan singers interrupt shrill remixed versions of bhajans on the speakers. local boys from the shivaji nagar slum opposite help in organizing the event- collecting shoes and making sure that no devotee stays too long rapt in front of the ceramic tiles installed within the cave that serve as the backdrop for the idol. the difficult thing for me to get around to understanding is this- shouldn’t we be glad about the interest in the upkeep of the caves? granted that it is being done rather tackily right now. but does that mean that with the right kind of stone cleaning and paving this appropriation for reactionary purposes is something we should stand by? i’d rather sometimes let the caves die.

the spaces in ‘colossal youth’ shrink horizontally until they crowd the characters in the frame in shallow rooms- dark interstices within the city. there is rarely a horizon to be seen. even the windows looking out over the city burn out into a scaleless white. the film was shot in a slum of lisbon with real characters playing versions of themselves as the neighborhood undergoes reconstruction. the decrepit tight rooms are being systematically replaced by sterile white spaces where older relationships might not survive. our central character is ventura- an aging immigrant labourer from cape verde who wanders through the living spaces of many individuals who might be his children. he stands like a mythical narrator in whose presence the stories of each of the actors become mirrors into the lives of the migrant and the dispossessed. through the entire film i was reminded of john bergers ‘seventh man’ and his poems on the love, identity and longing of the migrant. there is a love letter recited like a chant many times in the film to a lover back home whose silence at the other end gets more and more deafening.

end of semester architecture blues . china india

an end of semester recap regarding design and its development leads to a rethink regarding the processes deployed last year. successes and failures or rather new areas to explore emerge and fade into the chaos of voices in the corridors of the college. persistent themes might rise to the surface. i might be beginning to discern some of them. looking back at the year littered with experiments old and new comes a realisation that interdisciplinary dialogue can only emerge if we are able to articulate where does each discipline come from. the problem that we have, of course, is that we don’t know who we are. We scrounge around in half baked terms stolen from theories of social sciences or literature, misunderstand them and superimpose them upon architecture without finely analysing them for relevance. a crisis in architectural theory is dislocated elsewhere.

i hope this does not sound like i am advocating a return to insular formalism or even worse pragmatism (which means the market). on the other hand, i hope that it means we look closer at the architectural object(ive) analytically. my current thinking is trying to locate the question at somewhere between and i guess encompassing two categories.

the first is the architecture as ‘made’. as in architecture that is created as an act in space through the body. a prosthetic device worn to protect and/or to perform. a mask/ a veil/ a shroud / a fake fingernail. architecture that we attach to our sensory organs so that they perform better. to see better, to hear better, to feel better (or worse).

the second is architecture as systemic. a set of relationships between objects that form patterns particular and universal. patterns of folding, floating, slicing, dancing, capturing and letting go. these patterns exist everywhere around us. slice open the body or turn to the city; or look into your self- inside where it hurts. do you see them?

these are some of the ideas we hope to play with next year: finding architecture where three identities intersect – the archetype, the self and the other. a game of tarot and masks; opening up formalism by the analysis of the cultural object; and perhaps looking at nature as it is constructed through our acts in space.

will try to keep this space updated regarding the journey.

meanwhile yesterday vidura’s china photographs were projected large scale at the top floor of the bodhi. documenting the everyday lives of a forgotten community in panoramas of interior spaces. the homes became the sets within a photo studio, the subjects assumed docile expressions. surprisingly absent was laughter, pathos or anger. or was it there and i was unable to see it because of the surprisingly distancing panoramic frame. composed and still with little movement in space or time. perhaps in a few more years they will gain from the aura of nostalgia or the shock of knowing that the chinese man when indian plays cricket.

blissfully yours

to remind us to feel again the skin needs to be sore. as it reddens and flakes every single movement on it becomes vivid. a piece of cloth can scorch it and a cool balm soothe it. through these feelings, even for one afternoon, of sunlight tangled up in the trees or the freshly cut fingernails of a lover in your palms, there is a form of salvation possible. three lost people leave the city to find salvation in the arms of a lover in the wilderness. bliss is felt in the particular of the moment through the senses. its amazing how some films can be so tactile, how every single moment can be infused with so much eroticism, every gesture filled with so much sexual frission.

love is a sweet poison (don't touch me)

rickshaw to anupam

'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