first year study trip

leaving today for a week to tarkarli on the konkan belt for the first year study trip. no posts until then, unless there is a cyber cafe close by. see you guys later.

punch drunk love

yet another one of those american slightly off center films where the protagonist is slightly askew in the claustrophobic normality of american suburbia. adam sandler finds true love to save him from his loneliness, fits of rage and sadness and phone sex encounters in a slightly odd emily watson.

i have seen enough of these to know the general arc of the narrative and the treatment was self consciously alternative with sudden swerves into magic realism and special effects. decidedly ordinary a film; for intelligent commentary on the unbearable monotony of ‘normal’ living in america look somewhere else- a little less clever.

dharavi meeting - rajiv indira

the sparc office

at the sparc office today, in a meeting with sheila and jockin about the public presentation on saturday, we sat in the room on the ground floor of a building just off the t-junction. the building was one of the first built by sparc under the sra with 14 foot ceilings and lofts for the personalization of space. it wrapped around a sort of courtyard where kids were playing. a nice enough typology. the office itself is a room with a vinyl floor of zigzagging black and white stripes and plastic chairs upon which we sat amid the many other slum dwellers waiting for their turn for audience with jockin. hovering above us on the walls was the huge aerial photograph of dharavi with little red notations on it- marks of ownership and recognition of territoriality. this is a new way of seeing themselves for many of the communities- a brown speck amid a sea of clustering and overlapping forms.


the building and the courtyard

two versions of the units with the modifications made by the residents.

new empire

a film which strikes one note in its first few seconds and keeps it held throughout like the drone of white noise in the background. except that in this case it is the foreground.

a film of pointless or rather single minded maudlin nostalgia for the glory days of youth of thirty something sentimentalists that is spread over a good forty minutes of reminiscing voice-overs about relationships with waiters and shaky romantic shots of the monuments of south mumbai.

unerringly throughout does canteenwala strike the melancholy note, old fashioned already at grand old age of 34, he romantically yearns for the lost beauty of his past through unbearably wistful eyes. it seems as if he can’t confront the fact that he is not young anymore. the world has moved on and his time is over.

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.

babel

if the narrative was not such a gimmick; and if there was not this need to sort it all out in a perfect circle all at the end; this film might have actually worked for me. each of the four episodes in isolation worked without the ham-handed depiction of world-wide connectedness or the sometimes silly anti-american preaching.

so many of the sequences are gorgeous and often very moving- beautiful to look at, in spite of the one lapse into the moralistic reprimanding of the american tourists in morocco. my favorites must be the wedding sequence in mexico and the club scene in tokyo. the undertone of sexuality in the teenagers was also a welcome addition of reality into what otherwise could have suffered from the cute kids syndrome of a hollywood film. the acting is superb all around. it salvages the film from its rather contrived structure and shows us sometimes emotions that felt real and true.

the end wraps things up too neatly. the only child who dies is the child who did not pull the trigger in morocco, while the blond kids bereft in the california desert do finally get home to their parents. the spanish maid who has raised the children gets deported and in japan the father and daughter embrace over the lights of tokyo.

what is ironical that for a film that wants to talk about the distances that separate us through language and culture, and unite us through what would be called our ‘common humanity’ it ends up tying things up too easily; as if to leave some strand loose, or to leave some aspect unexplained would throw us completely off balance- and that’s not allowed. the tower of babel is actually completed thus destroying the power of the myth.

happy new year

the party was at avon- a repeat of last years venue. this time more people and strange juxtapositions therefore. there were the parents- mukuls and mine, then there was mukuls cousin rajul and his wife, mukul, me, sonal, saurabh, ranjit, chitra, george, surabhi and sanaa; ajay and sharda; madhu, paro; shekhar and his friend skyler ( who unsuccessfully kept trying to change the bollywood fixation of the music) ; ateya, ninad, kaushik and mohua; aparna (hopefully who did not feel too out of place), john, mary and joanna (it was great to have them there); shilpa gupta (looking lovely); sunita maushi and her three friends (who came in post new years and left in an hour); girish and jabeen, dipti (who came in for a few minuted before heading out for her own party) and chaitanya (whom no one had seen for years and looked completely shell shocked). the songs of the night were ‘aaj ki raat’ and its cool disco groove- very smooth and ‘beedi’ with its blistering bawdiness. as usual we over-ordered the food and there is loads of alcohol left over. mukuls dad made reportedly exquisite mutton (it was over before i began to take dinner)

we woke in between piles of glasses and leftover remains on abandoned plates everywhere and sat talking until lunch time in the window over the city before deciding to clean it all up.

a happy new year to everyone! hope you guys had a great time.

bhagam bhag

the last film of 2006 was also probably its worst. the only redeeming thing about this royal mess was govindas ‘kaiffe’ and the catchy ‘signaaal, pyar ka signaaal’. nothing else. and yes, lara dutta was beautiful. random comedy can only be done by david dhavan.

right now, i am mukuls place cleaning things for tonights party.

happy new year everyone. have a great party!

conference notes

day 1 session 3
the first two are my originals
and the second two..
while i drew the tree; mukul drew the airplane; then i drew the wtc..
etc etc..
important work.

conference day 3

day 2 and the hunt for appropriate metaphors for modeling the transforming city continued. how do we imagine the periphery of the city? paul, yogita, prajna and rohit presented the vasai virar region, while sudhir patwardhan spoke of recording beauty. then prasad presented the strange forms of new work that seem to be emerging in the interstices of the economy along with anand and vijayawada stock exchanges and tamals stories from the fringes of film city. third session shekhar and the archiving and mapping of the city, and the in the last session the “culture industry”, the ‘traffic talk’, the everyday and the ‘erotic’, multiplexes and the ‘uncanny’ and kaushiks fantastic work.

there was an odd but interesting schism in the seminar, where the intensely technocratic and ‘field work’ heavy presentations sat juxtaposed with the aesthetic, presided over by theoreticians. as much as an odd mixture this was, it was great fun to watch as each seemed to find its own trajectory to follow all trying to find common ground. a need for a holistic model, as if there can be one, seemed to underpin it all. or on the other hand there is this urge to dismantle all defined forms as simplistic and reconstruct new images constantly to comprehend. through it all it was understood that we needed to diagram.

as enigmatic and seductive forms shimmered in the air the exact mode in which they operate always seemed just out of reach. as conceptual tectonic plates shifted and capillaries rose, the act of doing always froze them into a form whose much vaunted dynamism seemed inert. somehow we feel like we can work in the folding of these plates and constantly navigate in between. i dont know how.

but the dinners after were good. the first day at asiad with kaushik, mohua, ranjit, ninad.. opposite was the new prime mall all dressed up for the holiday season. blue lights made tree trunks into fairy tale jujubes and the floor was lit with little blue jewels.

yesterday at ‘blue water’ – which gyanprakash said is a space that all through the past two days we were criticizing. were we? below the huge scaffolding of a hoarding that seemed 4 stories tall, just opposite the new mall being constructed on link road near the proposed metro station, in the messiness of the sheds and galas of the small shops along the street, a sudden open courtyard through a cane canopy. inside water fountains and low blue rexene seats on white brick platforms and the usual constellations of stars around which groups revolved. the leftovers found the periphery and got suitably happy.

conference day 2

in which we spoke of morphologies- new forms in the city- physical and institutional, conspiracy theories abounded of corporate agendas within the civil society organizations that seem to be all over the planning processes in the city and spoke of how occupancy is so much more complex that we imagine it to be. binaries were constantly being dismissed and new forms of understanding were being postulated. capillaries perhaps, or maybe folds of strata collapsing into one another. complex forms, ‘messy’ perhaps where they embed within one another complicated and tenuous relationships. what worried me was that the taking up of a moral position, anyways difficult to develop in a terrain so ridden with mines, was being constantly being warned against. as if it would invariably be too polar. and then there was this discussion on political mobilization. where is the political? is it possible without a ‘cause’? how does one develop one in a ‘morphing’ city?

day 1 field visit

powai

jeebesh and anant

cotton exchange

sewri pavement dwellers

nilesh at udui shri krishna

darukhana


darukhana

phoenix mills

star night bar at guzder bunder in khar- love the mirrored facade

taking people around the city reveals it anew to me. today in a qualis anant, jeebesh, jeenal, aparna, nilesh, rupali and me drove from juhu to malls at inorbit, to sites and services housing at charkop to thakur complex and aarey milk colony to powai and then mankhurd and touched down in navi mumbai. after lunch at the ‘established in 1942’ udupi shri krishna near matunga station with the banaleaves and authentic sambar and rice (along with the very vociferous proclamations of originality and uniquenaess) we got to the eastern waterfronts where it seemed as if the ship breaking yard was gradually shrinking. after a terrible ride hunting for kerosene wharf we got to phoenix and then back to juhu. and everywhere, absolutely everywhere we could feel the heat of the pressures of development. change is good. perpetually.

the presentation for the ‘eu’ conference is tomorrow and muki and me finally put together some photographs.

govandi toilet search

a toilet on the edge of the dump yard

kids on the road skirting the dump

the road to the toilet

today prasad and me drove to govandi to see a toilet. prasad, on the tour for the ‘spaces of entrepreneurship’ tour wanted to show the group this toilet run in the slums near the dump yard run by a certain sattar bhai. after a detour that took us through smoking piles of garbage with children playing cricket in between and on top. the slum on the edge of the dump was probably the home to the lowest rung of the poor in the city – rag pickers who would not find space anywhere else. the slum rehabilitation schemes that are to transform these areas will never get here as no builder will be able to sell anything in the area what with the stench in the air.

the toilet we were looking for was a two storied affair with sattar bhais office above. a small school wrapped around the toilet and the kids were playing in the slime and dust that rose around. the toilet was being painted and prasad and me sat on the terrace sipping sweet tea and eating biscuits as sattar bhai regaled us with stories about the advantages of privatization of water and the politics of sanitation in the city.

as with any experience in the city riddled with startling contradictions we lunched with chitra immediately after at yokos sizzlers at the hiranandani galleria in powai below faux arcades.

from the terrace of the toilet to the dump yard
the toilet with the school in the foreground
sattar bhai

christmas

the christmas tree

the shrine

celebrated with two stiff scotches at johns house. ranjit, shyam, shriya and me joined mary, john, joanna and the rest of their family. merry christmas everybody.


john shyam shriya joanna

shriya joanna

strange dream #190

in a darkened room with everyone watching there are projections all around me of a blue decapitated head. the image is an almost perfect overlap of andy warhols and debbie harrys faces. it is staring impassively at the audience. somehow it seems though that i am alone in this room. the image turns out to be a music video for a punk version of 'smells like teen spirit’ put through a grinder. its about ‘the myth of beauty’ someone says.

the face flickers in the light across different surfaces constantly on a black and white screen until at the very end on the floor another image appears with the body of the strange face. a post mortem is being performed on this body by slicing the screen/image/body by knives that pierce it from above and below. brutally cutting up the skin and the screen / floor. i cant figure out whether the knives are real knives or only flat surfaces of the image. out of the dark eyelid like gashes that the knives have created come crawling out worms - thousands of them. black in colour, squirming out of the surface. sometimes real and sometimes merely image. at the end they form a dark squiggly mass in the blue pool of the projector light in the middle of the dark room. and i am still watching impassively, curiously as if looking upon a painting by van gogh. i woke up.

mrs brown

in which judy dench swallows up the screen as the mourning queen victoria who develops a close friendship with her servant after her husband dies of typhoid. the usual period drama fare. repressed emotions of the upper classe are brought to the fore when confronted with the brutal honesty of the poor. meanwhile all political wheeler dealers sneer in sophisticated sarcasms. in spite of the predictable tropes - harmless on a sunday morning over breakfast.

dharavi presentation - koliwada

the students in the meeting

at dharavi yesterday, we held the first of our scheduled three public meetings in the area. the meeting was held at the koli jamaat hall in koliwada and organized by the koli leaders. the hall is on the first floor within the dense fabric just off the main road and entered through vinyl floral cutouts with photographs of muscular men. besides the students i counted at least 80 people from the community. though most were from koliwada itself there were also people from the other stakeholders participating in the project. ninad made a shuddh marathi presentation about fsi / mukesh mehta / possibly larger houses. the first few responses were very antagonistic – especially about who we were and what was our interest in the area. especially since the name of the school was ‘raheja’. paul and ninad did a reasonable job of pacifying the crowd and were helped a lot by the people who ahd given us support on the field. the meeting then continued with dazzling performances by different people who took the opportunity to orate vociferously on the probable benefits of the projects to the people of dharavi. it was exciting and dramatic. i doubt i have seen a more exciting process for an architectural design studio. interventioning as academics.

the 'holi maidan' where the last meeting is scheduled

the street to the koi jamaat hall

the entrance from the main road to the koli jamaat hall

the community members

kini from the koli community

annual day photos

painting workshop

building workshop - escape routes

pauls speech



projection workshop

kalpits models

annual exhibition

the second year movie for the annuals

the non-choreographed dancing