ewf

i drove down the largely uncharted eastern waterfronts of the city yesterday after dropping my mother off at padmatais house. the design cell had documented the area extensively and everytime foreigners comes we take them to display (as chaitanya had once said) the “underbelly” of the city.

padmatai lives in one of the fancy high rises that are being built in the area amid the taxi cab populated antop hill- slum redevelopment and salt pan encroachment. all the way south from there a landscape of distinct precincts- most surreal and desolate. to think less than 10 minutes from them the mad development in the MIll LAnds or the markets of the "native" town.

first wadala with its public housing projects, then petroleum containers and warehouses for cotton with the old train lines that used to carry goods from the docks to the rest of the country- and the railway stations alongside. further to the south slums all along the edge of the road in between the crevices and clinging to the edge of buildings and compound walls of buildings empty of all that used to once be the activity centers of the city and are today merely shells.

the big 'hit' place in the belt among the foreigners is always the slums at the lakdi and hay bunder areas and the ship breaking yard at darukhana with its metal scrap selling shops. very photogenic. but this time no photos of that. instead some from the main road through this landscape waiting to become real estate.

dosti acres - antop hill


wadala housing and water tanks

trucks and tanks

warehouses

tracks on the road

railway station

the dockland road

the 'elphinstone' estates. empty shells with slums on all sides.

inox . ice age 2 . south bombay exotica . train

since i had two hours to kill in town yesterday having hitched a ride with mukul and his parents into town i decided to watch ‘ice age 2’ at inox in cr2- the swanky new mall at nariman point. very glitzy. marble all over the place with stainless steel trimmings. ruby tuesday where i had lunch was atrociously expensive and the faux american memorabilia made me more than a little ill. even stranger was that the entire restaurant had only foreigners as patrons.

the theater has hugely expensive tickets and as for the film- i don’t think i can take it anymore when animated characters in prehistoric times make contemporary american pop cultural references constantly for the sake of humour. here mammoths have ideneity crises and vultures break out into broadway musical numbers. not as racist or angering as some other films of the genre i have seen – a case in point being ‘shark tale’- but still trying too hard to be likeable.

the udri offices are in a perfect location for an organization that is involved in urban research. a terrace on the fourth floor overlooks the blue synagogue against a skyline of kalaghoda with the mumbai university in the distance. it was a picture postcard evening with a pink sky, a low moon, oval maidan with cricket being played and the grotesque beauty of the buildings. very exotic.

rajabhai tower and the stock exchange

from the udri offices

western railway hq
after a long time i was taking a train back in rush hour from churchgate to borivili. i used to do it every day for a while. yesterday the complicated systems of movement that seem to have emerged as an unwritten code impressed me again. without saying a word to each other a polite system of understanding exists regarding which side does one stand to get off at various stations, how do new travelers enter the compartment. someone needs to make a drawing of these movements. tushar is working on something for his exhibition in rome. dad is involved.

wednesday morning- baby names from 'di'

so i have meetings late. college at 12 to correct some papers for the entrance examinations and then 4 at the udri. mom and dad are both lazing around at home after waking up with laziness and a headache respectively.

morning conversation on a weekday at home after along time, talking about rahul and sushamas son and name options – has to start with a “di”.

dilip, deepak, dheeraj (kumar) all sound like film actors; dimitri and dino too european; dinkar (?) dipankar – bengali film actor ?

not that we are being consulted but we can still freely suggest.

the rear courtyard. ‘36 china town’

samiras office is in an 5 to 6 storeyed building almost at the corner where lamington road meets opera house. like most of the buildings on that road it has a few shops on the lower floors facing the street, an awfully decrepit wooden staircase leading to offices and a few houses on the upper floors. naturally, it also has its bunch of eccentrics- samira notwithstanding- ‘the old lady of the lift’ – as she calls herself who leaves ironic topical messages every morning on the door of the lift shaft at the ground floor.

the building wraps around a rear courtyard that serves as a light shaft for the inner rooms and a dumping yard. a wrought iron staircase connects the verandahs that serve as corridors. it’s a good place for cigarette breaks- not that i smoke. but what a difference a tree would make in the middle of the court.

on the main road, many more of these buildings are falling apart and being replaced by enormous towers- courtesy regulation 33/7. traffic can only get worse.

36 china town is unbearable. i wanted to watch some bollywood fluff for a long time and i was prepared for illogical storylines, pointless song and dance, bad acting by good looking people; but i could not bear the excruciatingly long first half of the film where a murder is introduced through a long winded so called comedy sequence with paresh rawal and johnny lever playing annoying addicted gamblers, upen patel playing a jawline, and shahid and kareena looking like the bewildered idiots i suspect they are. i had such an intense urge to spank them both it scared me. the resolution of the killing takes all of the second half and akshay khanna solves it by smirking sardonically and raising one eyebrow. for the good of mankind- do not watch this film. making it flop will save countless lives.

city snaps

yesterday in town..


the art deco towers that no one notices on the jj flyover road

churchgate station

secondary skins at new marine lines

bmc building in the dusk

jury day no 3

this time the jj building when smita and me sat through more than 27 students third year design projects. first of all, i don’t know whether you know about the even batch and odd batch thing in jj. every year has two divisions made of odd numbers and even numbers. they have completely independent projects from one another. how do they keep up with this complication is beyond me. anyways we saw rural centers for community development where there was no community to be seen, an agricultural information institute somewhere near hospet that might as well have been in new bombay (except that the site was made into a pentagon because the students were bored of orthogonals), an artisans village which was on the pune highway- enormous and atrocious (seen before) and a museum at bijapur . none of the projects was even marginally interesting and for some reason the students thought that a logical adjacency diagram was architecture. so when we tried to ask them what their design idea was it was like talking to them in a strange east european language. “huh?”

still some kids were just naturally talented. some of the drawing skills were fabulous. watercoloured sheets and perfect inking. trees and skies- and human figures with scio. i got all nostalgic. sometimes this urge for finishing was ludicrous. even though most of the drawing was incomplete the skies just had to be there. liked one girls cheese wall project and another kids libeskind wannabe. even the bamboo obsessed boy seemed like he had potential.

met vandana there too. she was seeing fourth year work and was still toiling away when i left to meet eli at wellington mews – the fancy serviced apartment building at cooperage. anna, angela and her in pretty tackily detailed but generously endowed room on the first floor. she looks the same and pretty happy. it was good to see her.

angela

eli

anna

silly hollywood summer blockbusters - 'the core' . 'catwoman'

saw another hollywood summer blockbuster hopeful from last year yesterday. ‘the core’. to kick start the earths core a group of americans drive a phallic cylinder down to the center and set off a series of nuclear explosions. the earth gets an orgasm and life on the planet is saved.

and then there was ‘catwoman’

whoever thought that halle berry could be catwoman needs a brain transplant. michelle pfeiffer had sizzled her way into all my childhood fantasies in black leather since i saw her in tim burtons ‘batman returns’. that was the real catwoman movie as the character stole the show away from michael keatons bland batman and danny devitos annoying penguin. she had all the best lines – and easily the best costume. the story lines and some of the shots in both the films are so similar you inevitably compare the two movies. the revenge drama, the making of the costume, the resurrection scene in which mysterious cats breathe new life into the dead woman; and even the miaow she purrs after her first outing as catwoman are seen in such similar contexts.

as a storyline - somewhere a pseudotext about the exploitation of women by the beauty industry is attempted. rather pathetically. sharon stone plays the evil empress of a cosmetic company selling addictive permanent youth cream that will destroy the faces it’s trying to save. what makes it worse and even more ironic that berry is the spokesperson for l’oreal in another life. in the original comics, as well as film catwoman had no real special powers. she was just a kick ass kung-fu fighter with a mean whip. the decision to give catwoman some superpowers have merely made her into another computer generated special effect. berrys bland face does not help relieve that.

halle berry, if you’ll forgive me, has no sex appeal whatsoever. extremely beautiful she may be, but really, besides looking pretty enough in the very hot new catwoman outfit she over does the femme fatale bit so that she looks like a pre-teen girl desperately trying to ooze sex appeal. embarrassing.

i love superhero films and thought that this gave the entire genre a bad name. looking forwards to x-men 3 now, and superman returns, and pirates of the caribbean 2- and mission impossible 3. all due for release soon. silly hollywood summer blockbuster festival does not seem like its going to end soon.

pfeiffer

berry

colourful indian truck pictures

where in truckistan are those red breast like mountains between which gushing rivers spurt more than a little suggestively?

they seem to be on every truck in the city.

who imagined this particular image? the man should have a job in a multinational advertising company.

i love her eyes - see below.

juries still . 'animatrix' . 'national treasure'

called away on jury day in college to be present at another bandra college today rizvi. on the seventh and the sixth floor where me and smita sat through reasonable drawings rendered with skies and trees just how i used to do them in the prehistoric years at lsr. the projects were a cultural center in pune – three humongous auditoriums with a courtyard in the middle; and an “interpretation” center at patan where all the kids had a ‘step well’ as a concept. repetitive and banal- but not incompetent.

at home in krvia the fourth and third year juries went off all right. we were told to program the vasai project and make the kids do case studies for auditoriums, which we duly noted- but with some trepidation.

at home i have been watching hbo and star movies evening shows. ‘animatrix’ yesterday with animated characters that speak more with more emotion than keanu reaves did in any of the three movies. ‘national treasure’ silly caper film with nicholas cage stealing the declaration of independence to give back to the world a historic treasure. was there something subtle being proposed about the secrets within american values that need to be rediscovered to save the world from ignorance? who cares? after dinner time pass when you cant sleep early.

nandita and meha

at dimple theater yesterday after the screening

the koli hot chick

it seems like popular culture has decided that the hottest type of indian woman is the marathi or the koli woman in the navvari saris. i dont think any other group has received the kind of high glamour representations that these women have with their sexiness all raw and unpolished. sandra from bandra is another type- but not with this particular brand of hotness quotient

this new billboard wants to sell us a new tv magazine, but nothing compares to madhuri dixits gyrating navel in sailaabs 'humko aaj kal hain intezaar..'

jury duty

had a call for jury duty at an architecture school in bandra today. only two students and four jurors. more than a little ludicrous. over and above that the work ranged from the mediocre to the awful. that is – one mediocre and the other awful. don’t really know whether it was the students fault.

the projects included a ‘cultural center’ that was meant to be a prototype for any site in any situation. international style at its most inane, i would have thought- but even that would mean that some thought had been put in setting the problem. the other i.e. rural project was a ‘vocational training’ center at kamshet. every alternate contour of the site was removed for no apparent reason but to let the students make rcc frame structures that want to look like huts. the worst possible architecture in the world. in spite of this, we had to pass one student and fail the other. why should the kids suffer for the blunders of their teachers?

one of the poor girls was the only girl in the third year. she had no class because that year the college was allowed no intake. she had an attendance register and a classroom all to herself for the entire year. poor thing- such a surreal situation- if she bunked- it was a mass bunk.

printed rainbow

in ‘printed rainbow’ gita raos 15 minute animated film an old woman through her matchbox collection dreams her way out of a dreary grey cityscape into palaces from mandu, truck rides across the country, forests and a house in a serene countryside . at a preview screening at dimple theater in bandra, yesterday so many film makers got their kids along. i used to be terrified of animated characters and the strangeness of the surroundings when i was a child. i wonder how yesterdays film affected them.

lamps

samiras oversized lamps at brio

city under reconstruction

this city is always under re-construction. from the cranes that rise above slums making vertical what is now horizontal to canvas wrappers around old rcc buildings as they resurface them. if this was somewhere else, those wrappers would be theorized as secondary skins- sensual surfaces that play hide and seek between the inside and the outside. thanks god, no one speaks like that here yet. or do they? i have heard more than one architect rave about the “textures” of dharavi. and some of them claim to have critical practices.

cranes at mhada - kandivili

under reconstruction - andheri

iraniwadi

the new link road connection between malad and kandivili is under construction and like after the first slice through a body organ it is bleeding fluid. barber shops, cricket matches, porn video parlours.

hidden . gangster – a love story

the pvr cinema lobby in juhu- where we saw gangster

cache or hidden is a strange enigmatic thriller. a middle class couple in paris start receiving anonymous video tapes of themselves on the doorstep one day. slowly and steadily more is revealed about a dirty secret being pushed under the carpet by the man of the house regarding an algerian boy who his mother had wanted to adopt and the lies he had told to get rid of him. there is a undercurrent in the film that indicates that there is more to it than the surface storyline. it seemed like it was about racism in france and the denial of its history. the open ended finale was puzzling but the further i get from the film, the more appropriate i think it was.

gangster – a love story is relentlessly dark. following a gangster on the run and his relationship with his ex-bar dancer girlfriend. a police officer in the guise of a lounge singer infiltrates and traps them. emraan hashmi i have begun to forgive for being alive, shiney ahuja is quite happening and the girl (whoever she was) was awful. as soon as she started talking i felt like laughing. it was not a bad film. something kept happening and the twists in the story were convoluted but not badly constructed.



the love triangle

saturday snaps

morning at the directors lounge: saurabh aditya prasad making changes to the dadar station project proposal.


afternoon in the middle of the rapidly transforming landscape of jogeshwari where cattle tabelas and industrial sheds and godowns jostle with new residential complexes and multiplexes. all of the city's history in a one kilometer radius.

here in a high empty shed near an old well that was completely filled up we found a veneer and plywood godown where we chose a gorgeous ebony and a dramatic black wenge for sureshs apartment.

art room. schumania

the room

after a long time spent a boys night out with ranjit and saurabh.

first in ranjits room with his paintings strewn all over. huge canvases to small sketches of abstract science fiction landscapes and distorted figures.

and then after picking saurabh up, a bantering conversation over dinner at schumania at ic colony. beer and tandoori chicken legs in the midst of many young and middle aged men drinking away their sunday nights- like we were.

ranjit