Eclipse

Eclipse

A moment of sucked breath.

Leaves fold over, filigree

in pinhole crescents

like scattered nail clippings

on mastic, yellow on black.

Happy biodegradation

in mid-afternoon evening.

The moon, a frying pan

cocks a snook at star one.

Betrayed by the light

my camera remains,

unclicked.

15.01.2010

Two holes made by punching a ballpoint pen through a piece of card paper.

The dial of a watch (above) casts an image on the wall (below)

Which historical wrong gives you the right?

One bone of contention that bedevils any talks on climate, such as those currently on at Copenhagen is that the ‘developed countries’ must bear the brunt of responsibility for climate change. This is through fundamental restructuring of production and enterprise, everyday living and general progress in these nations, the ones who are well off. The developed countries of the world, Old Europe and New America have reaped the benefits of industrialization for the past two hundred years, most of it through the over-generous use of the finite resources of the planet. In doing so they have polluted the atmosphere, not only locally but globally, raising temperatures, and have brought the natural resources of our planet to the edge of depletion. All this is substantially true, but to make a whipping boy of industrialized countries by positioning themselves as victims, the ‘developing countries’ make poor, untenable arguments. These countries and indeed those of the ‘underdeveloped world’ want to have it both ways- make the big boys pay for the sins of the past and continue their own present substantially polluting ways because they ‘need to develop’ to come on par with the rest/best.

I think it is this misguided sense of victimhood, this subaltern posing that will bring useful action on climate change to an inevitable halt. The sense of historical wrong that the Other World is ballyhooing has a whiff of hypocrisy about it. For which are the historical wrongs that give those present a right to redress? That the sins of the fathers committed in the name of development are the sins of the sons and need immediately to be countered, whereas the sins of the fathers committed in the name of racism, religious intolerance and ethnic fundamentalism should be let go in the name of reconciliation and the need to ‘move beyond’? Can one assert that one wrong is tenable while the other is not? Take your pick. Every historical wrong, from the Jews being dispossessed by the Romans to the depredations caused by every former coloniser on every former colony, from the temple breakers of the early 1100s India to those crusaders who sacked Constantinople rather than continue their own religious jihad on Jerusalem can be called upon once again and through their descendants be made to pay for the wrongs of the past. Why then should the descendants of those who created, nurtured and ultimately prospered because of the Industrial Revolution now have to pick up the tab? Even more so, it is a wilful under-appreciation of the fact that industrial progress has, whether those crying wolf like it or not, raised the standard of living of peoples everywhere, which in turn has allowed even the erstwhile dispossessed to reclaim their rights and dignity, right up to the point where they can make these one-sided claims.

It is time primarily to put one’s own house in order. In terms of the environment, the price to pay will be high. The changes to shift to a more sustainable way of being are paradigmatic in most cases and painful for those accustomed to the comforts of a lifestyle fuelled by using natural resources and pollution as most of the developing countries, China, India, Brazil and those of the Middle and Far East already are. They strip-mine, dump sewage into fresh-water, mass produce vehicles of mass pollution and pat themselves for their progressive ways. Such countries have no business posing as victims so that they can continue their exploitative ways ‘for some more time’ so that they can come up on economic par with the First World. In the case of a ticking bomb scenario, as climate change very much is, each country should put their nose to the grindstone and find their own ways and means to convert to more sustainable ways of living. Laying down conditions, buying time, and creating ‘first you, then us’ arguments will only make things worse, and things such are they are, bring in no cheer at all.

To that extent the Government of India should be lauded for making targets for emission cuts by themselves, without waiting for agreements on climate such as those being attempted at Copenhagen. This is by no means enough, but should show the rest of the world that unilateral attempts to alleviate the ill effects of climate change should be the precursor to coming together at the negotiating table. All strategists are aware of the management game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. When this game is played iteratively, the best way forward is ‘Do Good First’. The phenomenon of conditional reciprocity that all the developing and undeveloped countries are waiting for shows them up in a poor light. No matter how under-resourced you are, you can change and you should. Remember if you have nothing, or not much at all, you are not contributing overmuch to the problem. That does not give you the right to become an exploiter,  just because your neighbours or former rulers have been.

Strategy begins at home.

What happened to the lions?

Starlings are tough
but the lions are made of stone
I'm thinking about the lions
What happened to the lions, in the night?
"Lions" (1978), Dire Straits

After the delight of walking through the Court of Myrtles in the Alhambra at Granada, and entering the fabled Court of the Lions, we were in for a shock. For the lions, all twelve of them, had gone walkie, leaving behind a forlorn basin in a new wooden box. Why build a cage after the lions had bolted? The marble lions, the centre piece of the court had been removed to a safe haven to be restored. Over the centuries, lime and grime had coated their noble visages to a point where their features were in danger of being obscured. Conservators would toil over the course of the next two years (2009-2010) to bring back the beasts to their pristine state.

No consolation to us though, we, who had paid good money to see them. However temporarily, the centre piece of the visit to this Nasirid Court, built by Muhammad V between 1362 and 1391, was obscured. The tableau of our imaginations collapsed like a card-castle, and replaced by an entity as alien as the monolith among the Neanderthals in Kubrick’s 2001. What appreciation could be possible for the surrounding court and chambers, with their exquisite ornament of geometric and calligraphic finesse, when the vellum itself was botched with spilt ink?

What were the conservationists thinking?

This brings me to the issue of interventions. Any infill in an existing environment will be viewed critically in inverse proportion to the time that environment has remained pristine. Any change that is not incrementally invisible will hurt both memory and ‘good taste’. Part of our mooring in life is to be able to take some things for granted, and the environment in which we physically move, that of the home, the street and the city work best when they are backgrounded to our own lives. So change, any change, would in effect be undesirable. We would be fooling ourselves, however, if we thought that we could live in the vacuum of our own imaginations forever.

So what kind of intervention is the more acceptable- the harmonious or the unpredictable? In recent times architects have been called upon to make these choices in an increasingly built environment. There are few tabula rasas, especially in our ageing cities, spaces are constantly being remodeled for a variety of reasons. Insertions are inevitable, and they will be new. What attitude of conservation, or conservatism should the architect adopt?

Look at the insert in the Court of Lions. The central fountain of marble was two tiered- with a large lower basin and a carved upper fount. Twelve lions flanked this basin radially facing outwards. Positioned more or less in the center of the Charbag that the crossing water channels formed, the fountain formed the focus of  both axes that led in from the entrance to the court and that led out from the surrounding chambers. Both lions and upper fount are now significant by their absence. The lower (large) basin was in need of conservation, too. The rim of the basin boasts of an eulogy for Muhammad V carved in calligraphed marble by Ibn Zamrak describing the building of the court and of the lions. You can read this poem below.

The basin is large, simply too large to remove from its central location. So it has been enclosed, not by a tarpaulin or some such, but in a ‘camera’- a room of its own. This room is made of slatted timber on a metal frame, with glazed front and back along the shorter side of the court. Visitors can view the basin as it goes through various stages of restoration from the glazed ends, while the slatted end gives a new foreground to the axis leading on to the Hall of the Two Sisters and the Hall of the Abencerrages.

Under the roof of this box is a canvas canopy that can be moved as desired. The outer box of wood can (seemingly) be slid out along its axis to allow for a larger inner volume, and the canvas roof on the metal frame can be then be a shelter against the harsh south Mediterranean sunshine. The wooden slats allow for cross ventilation and the glass has perforations too. The entire system sits lightly on the pebbled base of the court. With this intervention, the conservators and their precious object are protected from the elements- from both solar radiation and the droppings of the thousands of swallows who inhabit the Alhambra, providing a constant chirruping in the background and casting abstract patterns on plastered white walls in the various courtyards. All very functional, of course, but does the intervention work?

It does take getting used to. First, the disappointment of the missing lions needs to be overcome, and then a reconciliation with the wood, glass and canvas replacement. The ‘camera’ is a small room, proportioned not to overwhelm the arcade of the court, allowing space and light enough to appreciate the existing architecture. It forms a new element, an installation, in this space, that creates its own presence, becoming part of the stepped visual axes as it rises from fountain to arcade to roof to dome. The glazed ends form a portal framing the basin with the arches behind, and you realize that nothing is really lost.
The Court of the Lions in the Alhambra now offers an alternative view, for a limited period only, as long as the conservation process lasts. During this time the arcades themselves have come into their own, not having to remain secondary to the impressively iconic lion fountain that dominated the composition of the court. The ‘camera’ can be appreciated, in of itself, as a well crafted modern device, or seen as at an interim scale between the basin and the arcade in a larger unfolding of spatiality. The absent lions constantly intrude on our imaginations. The conservators have made the right choice by not replacing them for the time being with plaster or GRF casts.

For too long in the last two hundred years has the Alhambra been exoticized and orientalized, mostly by visitors from the West (Washington Irving, Richard Ford, et al) who came to wallow in its ‘perceived’ decadence and relegated it to a ruin by treating it as such, occupying it with unseemly callousness, vandalizing it with graffiti. After centuries of suffering in such pitiless ‘timelessness’ the Alhambra, or one part of it at least, has become a dynamic space once again, with its new intervention. Artists like Christo and Anish Kapoor today, thorough their installations in well regarded public spaces make us renew our relationship with those environments by shaking our own perceptions of those spaces, and asking us to seek new meaning in those places that we took for granted. Maybe this was not what the conservators at the Alhambra really had in mind, but the enclosure around the basin forces us to look at the former Moorish palace anew, and that is something.


John Dobbin, Lions in the Alhambra
Water color, From a sketch made in 1859, V&A Museum, London


Poem on the basin of the Lions
Ibn Zamrak (1333-1393)
"May The One who granted the Imam Mohammed
with the beautiful ideas to decorate his mansions be blessed.
For, are there not in this garden wonders
that God has made incomparable in their beauty,
and a sculpture of pearls with a transparently light,
the borders of which are trimmed with seed pearl?
Melted silver flows through the pearls,
to which it resembles in its pure dawn beauty.
Apparently, water and marble seem to be one,
without letting us know which of them is flowing.
Don't you see how the water spills on the basin,
but its spouts hide it immediately?
It is a lover whose eyelids are brimming over
with tears, tears that it hides from fear of a betrayer.
Isn't it, in fact, like a white cloud that pours
its water channels on the lions and seems the hand of the caliph,
who, in the morning, grants the war lions with his favours?
Those who gaze at the lions in a threatening attitude,
(knows that) only respect (to the Emir) holds his anger.
Oh descendant of the Ansares, and not through an indirect line,
heritage of nobility, who despises the fatuous:
May the peace of God be with you and may your life be long
and unscathed multiplying your feasts
and tormenting your enemies! "


PS.
The fountain was two-tiered- lower large marble basin, upper carved nozzle with a smaller basin. This is evident in the water colour by John Dobbin from the 1860's. The two tiers are also visible in a silent documentary on Granada and surroundings made in the 1920's.
However all contemporary photographs before the restoration show only the lower large basin with the lions. At what point was the upper portion removed? Was it, in fact, a later addition- after Ferdinand and Isabella took over the premises in 1492? I have not been able to find any references to corroborate.
For the time being, the missing part of the fountain remains a curiosity.

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Sartorial Alternatives for a Pestilent City

Given the severe shortage of N-95 face masks in the city of Mumbai, which the city clearly cannot do without, here are a series of alternatives that doctors recommend for you to use in order to prevent your infecting others with the H1N1 madness. Choose the one that most closely fits your sartorial comfort zone:

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"Agar paas aane ki koshish kee, to main golee khaa loongi! Saala soovar ka bachcha!"
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Who would you feel comfortable sitting next to on the Vasai Fast, eh? Left or right?
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Nah! Won't work. Not really.
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Not this, neither.

. .... that's another fine mesh you've got me into!
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For those specialised in this sort of thing.
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The machete can come in handy dealing with those pesky critters even before they invade the hockey mask.
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Technically sound device, with triple brush filter.
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For complete all round protection, keeps you feeling fresh all day.
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Available at most leading malls and multiplexes in the city and suburbs.

No shortage of stocks. Competitive pricing for bulk orders.

Join the H1N1 mania and be counted among the happening crowd!

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1969, July

As the world watches, he steps into the void
aware of the fragility of the cord that holds.

Squealing, childlike, he transfers his load
Onto the clothesline, that breaks on cue.

He spins uncontrollably towards a concrete moon;
Now, within reach, he makes his final leap-

leaving hieroglyphs in the angel dust
that flies like applause as he hits.

1.3.2000

Tranquility Base, Bombay

20th July 2009
When we were kids, ‘Apollo’ meant the Gateway of India. The harbor around the Gateway (from where we still board boats to Elephanta and Alibag was known to all as Palwa Bunder, of which the word Apollo was an angrezi corruption.

Palwa, as any fule kno, is Hindi for Mystus Vittatus, a fish found in the waters off Bombay. Ergo, Apollo Bunder. Not much later, I knew Apollo to be the Greek God of the Sun, son of Zeus, whose (pater et fils) shenanigans I read about and observed in my copy of Homer’s Illiad- the comic book version by Classics Illustrated.

All that changed after Apollo 11. Forty years ago today, 20th July 2009, when I was five, the Apollo Mission put man on the moon. If ever there has been a BC and AD event in the history of the human race, this has been it. Nothing before or since, even today, has equaled this achievement, and I am happy to say I was part of it.

Some memories help you root yourself in the past. Some are unreliable, but compelling. For me the most compelling of all memories I have of early, very early childhood, is one where I hear people (probably at home) insisting that man can/will never step on the moon. In the fog of this memory, the 20th of July 1969 takes centre stage.

Of course, at my age, at the time, I had never heard of the American or Soviet space program. Sometime after, and I was still as little at the time, I remember sitting in the garden outside my uncle Dawood’s farm house in Shirol, near Kasara, gazing up to a completely lightless sky, except for the incredibleness of the Milky Way, and watching a star make its arrow-straight course overhead. A moving star! My uncle had a name for it: ‘Spootnik’. What was that? A satellite, he said. That didn’t make things any clearer, but still I loved the show.

Of course, after July, the news was all around. Men had landed on the moon. We even knew their names, vivid and evocative- Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin. Images of spacesuit shod, glass visor (reflecting the blackness of space) wearing astronauts were all around us. In newspapers- The Times of India, the Sunday Standard, the Poona Herald, in the Illustrated Weekly of India, and on walls of restaurants, on Volga ice cream and on the covers of firecracker boxes during Diwali. Apollo 11, astronaut, Armstrong, Aldrin, America all became Indian words.

My role in the success of the moon landings came soon after. On the 24th of October, 1969. On that day, five years and ten months old, I found myself in Bombay, stationed at the turning outside Crawford Market, under Lockwood Kipling’s marble murals, where the D N Road swings to Carnac Bunder. I was one among a huge crowd, lining both sides of the road. My uncle Musta-ali, whose finger I had held on to for the short walk from Bhandari Street to our current location, hoisted me up on the railing at the first roar from the mob.

The cavalcade arrived soon after, dark cars, as I remember, and in one of them two red faces in suits, their arms out of the windows, waving. Armstrong, Aldrin. As they swept past us, I looked at them, and waved and waved and waved.

That night the both of us went to the Azaad Maidaan. It was a festive place. All of Bombay had turned up. A replica of the Eagle had been made, perhaps in plaster, perhaps by makes of Ganesh idols, I don’t know. From the Landed Eagle, an Astronaut was descending on to the Azaad Maidaan’s turf- just one small step away.

On one side of their tableau, exactly like during the Ganapati season, a film was being screened on a stretched white cloth. It was a documentary on the Moon Landing. I watched amazed as the astronauts somersaulted in the weightlessness of their capsule, where down was up, where they attempted to suck blobs of water out of the air. I can’t vouch for these last memories, I may have seen these in the film of the event called ‘Footprints on the Moon’ that was shown in cinema theatres not long after. I do remember the documentary being shown, though.

The vividness of that day has stayed with me. It is one of my earliest, sharpest and most enduring memories that I cherish to this day. We in our forties are getting on in years now. We predate television, we predate computers, we bloody predate man landing on the moon!

Today, as I use the internet to follow a minute-by-minute recreation of the Moon Landing on

wechoosethemoon.org , I am filled with nostalgia. Watching Buzz Aldrin in an interview relayed live on the BBC, I think: ‘I saw you, man, you waved to me.’ I Google for the precise date, when, in their whirlwind tour, the astronauts came to Bombay for their tryst with me.

I was five. I was there.


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A Diachronous Delving into Dhan Te Nan

What delighted me even more than hearing Vishal Bhardwaj’s ‘Dhan Te Nan’ for the first time is the realization that the music director has to be of the same vintage as I am. Why? Because I instantly recognized the sound-meme from my youth that he so cleverly channeled into his song for the forthcoming ‘Kaminey’.

‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’

If you are my age and grew up soaked in Hindi films, you know this sound. The first cousin to the more ubiquitous- ‘Dhishum!’ , which, as any fule kno, is the only technically correct foley for a punch, a box, a kick, a swipe, or (as we say in pure Gujarati) a fight. On the other hand, 'Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!', as any fule kno, is the loud background music exclamation! when the hero dramatically breaks into the villain’s den to save the heretobefore kidnapped heroini from a fate worse than… chiz chiz chiz.

‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’

In big, bold letters. In flashing lights, in neon. The audio equivalent to Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’ (1963). As kids we must have made this sound in a variety of settings, telling the picchur ka shtory the morning after, or even catching a friend during chor-poliss- ‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’ Gotcha!

Was it Bhardwaj, or Gulzar that did not get the sound just right? Dan Te Nan is a bit pale when written down, although its quite fine when sung, just like the sound we kids used to make. This dilution is not surprising- we’ve heard it done before. Rajesh Khanna used this as a dramatic counterpoint in Bawarchi (1972), but in an almost lisped ‘Dhat-ta-raa!’ which even we, as frigging seven year olds, for God’s sake, knew wasn’t the right way to say it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN9-EneTL80&feature=related
Wimp!

This is a sound that needed to emerge full blown from within, deep within, rising up from the rectum, through the digestive tract, up the esophagus until its escaped with a roar: ‘Dhann-ta-dhaaaan!!!’ (dha-na-dha-nan)

Well, what to do? We are the people our parents warned us about.

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