image post: mill land / the world wipes his ass

nanny mcfee

a new mary poppins of sorts but emma thompson is stranger and weirder than julie andrews and nowhere as sweet. as far as childrens fairy tales go this one is nastier than most, and maybe even darker. even the evil stepmother or the wicked aunt are far more twisted. nothing compared to the perpetual darkness and beauty of ‘pans labyrinth’ but nice enough. at the end though with every lesson the kids learn emma loses her warts and ends up looking like a model for skin products.

Ponytails - Ringtones - Punches. Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd

again chance coincidences between themes in the films i saw back to back two days ago. in this case same sex love and societal repression. perhaps that was not meant to be the main theme in pankajs film on women boxing or even in the sweet romantic comedy ‘honeymoon travels pvt ltd’ but they did end up being major threads in both. but it cant be just my own reading. in the boxing film the sport did take a back seat to the girl child/ boy child drama of one girl and the tension filled lesbian romantic relationship in small town india of the other one. and constantly, perhaps too often the annoying sounds of ring tones form the background noise. in ‘honeymoon travels’ the case for happiness through loving the one you want rather than the one whom you are with was a theme that ran throughout especially when an nri gay man marries sandhya mridul for cover. meanwhile in another relationship ameesha patels macho husband is traumatised because he is madly attracted to another man. but besides all these convoluted dramas there was shabana azmi and an adorable bomab irani as an elderly couple in love stealing the show.

image post - streets

mumbai masala - link road

chincholi bunder road, link road

hiranandani, powai

jogeshwari vikhroli link road - 'indian' flavoured street lights'

prabhadevi

lalbaghcha raja, parel

image post - powai under construction

s v road

andheri

andheri

jogeshwari

jogeshwari

jogeshwari

kandivili

kandivili

borivili

one day last month bored of my usual ways back home i decided to go via sv road. here are some images of the cascading signboards of andheri, the odd new glass shopping centers, the residential towers and even some fragments of some of the summer homes that once lined the street.

irony and the traffic jam

it could only be irony that could keep my spirits alive having spent the entire week with a terrible body ache, and spending a good 6 and a half hours driving through traffic jams in parle, dharavi, sion, lalbaug and a flat tire to the yacht club for a meeting that lasted all of 15 minutes. i did not even have time to touch the fish fingers before beginning to drive back this time past more traffic jams on the docklands road, dharavi, santacruz, dinidoshi, malad and thakur complex. all this while the only consolation was that with me was an ex-chief of the mmrda with his stories of bureaucracy and corruption, inefficiency and the everyday idiosyncrasies of large organizations and even larger egos. and all in that particularly acerbic air that only a marathi man can have. i know it well from my mothers side of the family. luckily for me and thanks god for that part of my genes my sense of humour was still marginally alive even when I got home.

ganpati weekend

'the color purple' . 'all about my mother' . 'a home at the end of the world'

oddly, parallel themes run through the last two books i read and pedro almodovars ‘all about my mother’ which i saw again with ranjit and sonal last week. in all unusual constructs of family are born to confront loneliness and death. in ‘the color purple’ nettie finds love with her husbands ex-lover in the american south. somehow in the safe space of the unspoken sisterhood between women sexual love is allowed to exist without being expressly forbidden. it must also be living under the shadow of poverty and brutal oppression that forces traditional notions of family to be broken and new forms appear. in ‘all about my mother’ a mother grieving for her son finds solace in her own past and in the friendship of other women each coming to terms with their own suffering. the family of friends chosen ends up being stronger than the family born into. the scepter of aids hangs over the film as it does over the unconventional family of bobby, jonathan and carla, a shy bumbling man, a flamboyant confused gay man and an aging heiress in ‘a home at the end of the world’ by michael cunningham. the book follows the voices of the main protagonists as they fumble along constructing a loving space of their own outside what society imagines to be the norm.

a few images from the past few days

we met chandrashekhar yesterday for the continuation of the cess project. taking the proposals to the community in null bazaar. after lunch at an amazing fish place (trust paul to always find one in any part of the city) we drove to a meeting with some people about building jetties at versova.

site 1

site 2

namrata, lubaina and me hung around at infiniti and landmark for a while until i went for a massage to juhu beach while they changed for the freshers party at the j w marriott. i couldn’t recognize any of the kids whose dreary day looks were nowhere to be seen and were replaced by the sheen of satin, shimmer and sheer. everyone looked lovely.

the previous day lubi, namtu and me had been to powai with pooja from the third year. the site was being stripped and the final touches were being put. the surfaces of brass glittered against the bison.

the wardrobe handles

the light fixture

kaushik and mayuri in the break after design class

and then the next second year project site is the bmc ward office in andheri east. we hope to rearticulate the interface in between the street and the building.

radom street photo no 1 - near the airport

random street photo no 2 - what does the man mean?

second year - the exquisite corpse

playing around with a surrealist game showed us new ways of looking at the city and intervening in it. the kids produced great work- some fantastic projects- and wild processes.


kushals brilliantly conceived, beautifully made rest space at kamathipura. outside a glimpse of a tremendously voluptuous interior. a model that took the breath away of the whole school.

maitris system of barriers and spaces entering hanging gardens

pradnyas parasite on the thane jail wall

virals constantly evolving space at a corner at social nagar in dharavi

nikhars folded market space making plane below mohammedali road flyover

devikas wire mesh tetrapods for listening to the rhythms of the waves on marine drive

masooms study of disappearing and appearing bodies at darukhana

apurvas process models to construct frivolity at bandra lands end.

vishals container project - living and working

vyoma's banganga retaining wall insertion


shivani in the mill lands

nupoor in the same mill building

pathik inverting amitabh's bungalow into a public space

sharans hybrid model and his hybrid at worli fort

hetal making a landform and light link between the slum across the road and mandapeshwar caves

elizabeth working with playful movements of sight screens at august kranti maidan