as any fule kno

FirstPost Mumbai: Garbage-in, Garbage-out: The state of bricks in Mumbai

2012-01-31T16:57:00.011+05:30

Image: eartharchitecture.org

Here is an excerpt from my new column on FirstPost.Com:
Garbage-in, garbage-out: The state of bricks in Mumbai
for full article , click on link above

excerpt:

Many kilns in operation just outside Mumbai work with rough and ready techniques for firing bricks that obey no norms of production. Although guidelines for building and operating brick kilns have been framed by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), it is unlikely that these kiln owners have even heard of the organisation. Their work habits result in near-toxic levels of air pollution in the vicinity of the kilns which are fired for days on end, emitting the acrid smoke that every worker cannot avoid inhaling. Notwithstanding this, bricks are churned out by the millions.

The quality of bricks produced and available in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai are, even to be most charitable, rubbish. In architecture school, we learnt that a good brick should be ‘of standard size, have sharp and truly right angled corners, have a bright colour, be of dense and uniform texture, should emit a ringing sound when struck, and, when dropped from a height of three feet or so should not break into pieces.’ None of this applies to the average Mumbai brick. Given the fact that most of your houses have an external face that is only half-a-brick thick, is it little wonder that your houses leak? If the supply end is poor to start with, how could the constructed edifice be otherwise?

A Bookshop dies: a paean to Manney’s

2012-01-17T22:39:00.003+05:30

I growed up, like Topsy, in libraries and bookshops.

Besides the British Council Library (Motto: ‘Truth Always Triumphs’) where my father was the librarian, it is the bookshops of Poona that were the long suffering witnesses to the sputters and spurts of my pubescence. One of the most visited was Manney’s Booksellers next to Westend Cinema (English movies, soda fountain) at Camp. And now, it is shutting down.

Bookshops, like Irani Cafes, seem to have a way of doing this, blindsiding your comfortable memories and leaving them frayed and crotchety. Manney’s (the anglicised ‘Mani’s’, after its owners) is (for a short while now) a cavernous bookstore of current bestsellers and oddities and rarities that one can safely get lost in for an afternoon. In its bowels, I graduated from the vast collection of comics (GoldKey and Indrajal) and children’s books (especially the Three Investigators Mystery Series, ghost authored, but hosted by Alfred Hitchcock) to Alistair MacLean's oeuvre of war novels and contemporary thrillers (where I read my first swear words, and was thrilled to learn their spellings) to a completely eclectic set of reading habits, foraging rather than finding new stuff to read.

Manney’s was the first port of call, though not the only one. Around the corner from Manney’s were the Modern Book Stall and the Express Book Stall, both on East Street; while the Utkarsha and Popular were both at the Deccan. Each was different from the other, so visiting them all one after the other, browsing, not necessarily buying, was as ritualistic as temple darshan. Manney’s offered the largest collection, its employees tolerated, yet frowned upon my frequently darkening its doorstep (Free Reading Not Allowed). Manney’s has bookshelves upon bookshelves- travel, the English language, the Classics, novels, books on spirituality, philosophy, cinema, music and uniquely, a section on the military. Presumably it caters to the extended presence of Armed Forces folk in that part of Poona, the Southern Command being nearby, but also the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla and the Armed Forces Medical College. Then the shelves peter out, un-categorized yet fun to delve into. I have always found that the best bookshops are the ones without direction. But then maybe Manney’s had imprinted on me in my impressionable years.

These are the institutions that landmark your life, that you take for granted will always be there. And yet, after nearly forty years of browsing, I did feel that bookshops like these remained behind the times as the world moved on. It is not that monster bookshops (a huge Landmark store is just across the road) now dominate the book buying scene, nor that online reading and online buying are killing them. It is simply that these single proprietor bookshops never developed a warm relationship with their customers, never created the ambience for an extended stay and never made offers that bibliophiles could never refuse. This standoffish, take-it-or-leave-it attitude lingered on even after the challenges to their former monopolies loomed large.

I have my own Manney’s story: I have mentioned browsing and not buying; one could not afford most books in the shop. Once, in the late eighties, while still in college, voraciously skimming books on rock ‘n roll, I found a freshly minted paperback of ‘20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been’ edited by Jann S. Wenner. Its pristine cover and chewed-off corner delighted and enticed, and equally quickly disappointed as it was way too dear for my collegeboy allowance. I left, feeling all the worse because I had riffled through its pages and it offered everything a rock-philiac would have liked to get jiggy with.

Twenty years later, the book was still there, on the same set of shelves, now yellowed, considerably worse for the wear, thumbed by strangers, never owned. Between the two decades, each time I visited Manney’s, I gave the book a darshan and a wistful caress. God knows, the book is probably still there. I wondered each time: just what kind of turn-over policy did the proprietors have for their old stock?

I do not vouch for this, but I never heard of Manney’s ever having a sale. Now, as the shop-owners have announced, when Manney’s will finally shut shop by the end of March, they will organise a ‘Grand Sale’ with discounts of twenty percent. Twenty percent. Bookshops like the Strand in Bombay offer a discount of twenty percent on All new books, and considerably more on older ones. Life goes on in these bookshops; books keep changing, the shelves are constantly refreshed. The sale events of bookshops like Strand are looked forward to with anticipation; when you can buy books in buckets. Little wonder then a shop like Manney’s, much loved, can also leave you in a state of perplexity.

Its old world charm and old school obduracy notwithstanding, I am sorry to see Manney’s go. The vast space it occupies and the advantage of its location in Poona Camp makes it real-estate to be sought after. I wonder what will replace it though. Cafe Coffee Day? Barista? KFC?

Another bookshop? Naah, unlikely.

FirstPost Mumbai: When Dharavi grows up, it wants to be Khotachiwadi.

2012-01-13T17:35:00.003+05:30

Here is an excerpt from my new column on FirstPost.Com:
When Dharavi grows up, it does not want to be Shanghai

for full article , click on link above

Dharavi Koliwada

excerpt:

"The first impression one gets while walking through these localities is the humane scale of building, the coziness of homes, shops and production units nestling close to each other. You know the fortune of each dweller is dependent on their neighbour. This social network is a vast support system, fuelled by proximity and circumstance. One is reminded of the Barrio das Fontainhas in Goa, with its similar architecture of narrow, sheltered alleys, quaint, colorful facades and outdoor living. Or of Khotachiwadi, an urban village in Mumbai, a well-knit community, so popular with tourists who love just to walk through its narrow streets and pocket plazas.

Despite this, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) chooses to name these localities as ‘difficult’ areas, and damn them to the eternal hell of rehabilitation."

Dharavi Koliwada

Street in Fontainhas, Goa

Photo by MalenaN; posted in virtualtourist.com

Khotachiwadi

Urban Bawl 4: Dead Spot

2012-01-07T12:16:00.004+05:30

Here is the third in the series of my Urban Bawl columns in Time Out Mumbai for their 'Back of the Book' page.Some of my nostalgic ruminations on the 'forceclosed' Rang Bhavan and a clarion call for its return to active duty.

The Rang Bhavan at Dhobhi Talao, with an entrance from Badruddin Tyabji Marg next to St. Xaviers.

Image from Google Earth, accessed on 7.01.12

Dead Spot

(click on link above)

excerpt:
"I have my own trove of memories of this lovely place in the heart of the city. Being of congruent vintage and having studied in a college just a few steps down the road from Rang Bhavan (not St Xavier’s), I have marked my presence at several landmark events there. The hairs on my forearms still rise as I recall being pushed against bamboo barricades, within touching distance of Osibisa in the mid-’80s; in awe of the resonating drums of Daku Potato, who wielded a club rather than sticks to rock the joint. Now rarely remembered, Osibisa’s AfroCarib songs were more viral than “Kolaveri”."

Latika!!

2012-01-02T23:19:00.000+05:30

For our Uncertain Times, a Villanelle

2012-01-01T22:56:00.000+05:30

Judgements in Carpets

We should have noticed. We should have come clean.

Our basic instincts were never so wrong.

We smiled. Let a hundred cover-ups bloom.

Like judgements in carpets, we flexed our looms.

Even dust-mites saw through us, all along.

We should have noticed. We should have come clean.

Blindly complacent, shielded by the sheen

of our glories; those we tried to prolong.

We smiled. Let a hundred cover-ups bloom.

Placid, we added padlocks to our tombs.

We were exhumed. We were deaf to the gong.

We should have noticed. We should have come clean.

Got poured down the sink, as before. We saw

the curtain call end our lieutenant’s song,

We smiled. Let a hundred cover-ups bloom.

Conciliation was defeat. We assumed

in the end, then, we would all come along.

We should have noticed. We should have come clean.

We smiled. Let a hundred cover-ups bloom.

'Kutte' and 'Siyaasi Leader ke Naam' by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

2011-12-20T00:17:00.016+05:30

Two more translations (and transliterations) of poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
These are from his collection 'Naqsh-e-Faryaadi' (1943)'.

Kutte
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Yeh galiyon ke aawaaraa bekaar kutte
Ke bakshaa gayaa jinko zauq-e-gadaai,
Zamaane ki phatkaar sarmaayaa unkaa
Jahaan bhar ki dhatkaar unki kamaai.

Na aaraam shab ko na raahat sawere;
Ghilaazat mein ghar, naaliyon mein basere.
Jo bigde to ek doosare se ladaa-do;
Zaraa ek roti kaa tukdaa dikhaa-do.

Yeh har ek ki thokarein khaanewaale,
Yeh faaqon se uktaake mar jaanewaale,
Yeh mazloom makhlookh gar sar uthaa-e
To insaan sab sarkashi bhool jaaye.

Yeh chahein to duniyaa ko apnaa banaalein,
Yeh aaqaaon ki haddiyaan tak chabaadein.
Koi inko ehsaas-e-zillat dilaa-de,
Koi inki soyee hui dum hilaa-de.

Dogs
translated by
Mustansir Dalvi

On every street, these vagabond, good-for-nothing dogs,
on whom is bequeathed the appetite for beggary,
amass the slurs of their age as wealth
and each rebuff from their world as wage.

No rest at sundown, nor relief at the dawn,
they make dwellings of dregs, domiciles of drains.
Should they dissent, domestic strife may be bred-
just flourish before them a stale scrap of bread.

They, who endure the boot-lash of each person,
condemned to perish, piteous with starvation;
should they, the oppressed, ever raise their heads
humankind would rue every condescension.

Should they desire to rule the world, they could;
and chew upon the very bones of their masters,
if only they were alerted to their deprivations.
O! For someone to shake their insentient tails!

Siyaasi Leader ke naam
by
Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Saal ha saal, yeh beaasraa, jakde hue haath
Raat ke sakht-o-siyaa seene mein paiwast rahe,
Jis taraah tinka samunder se ho sargarm-e-satez,
Jis taraah titli kushaar pe yalgaar kare.

Aur ab raat ke sangin-o-siyaa seene mein
Itne ghao hain, ke jis simt nazar jaati hain
Jaa-ba-jaa noor ne ek jaal-sa bun rakhkha hain.
Door se subh ki dhadkan ki sadaa aati hain.

Tera sarmaaya, teri aas yehi haath to hai
Aur kuch hai bhi tere paas? Yehi haath to hai
Tujhko manzoor nahin ghalba-e-zulmat, lekin
Tujhko manzoor hai yeh haath qalam ho jaayein

Aur mashriq ki kameen-gah mein dhadaktaa hua din
Raat ki aahani maiyyat ke tale dab jaaye!

To a Political Leader
Translated by
Mustansir Dalvi

Year after year, these pathetic, repressed hands
remain embedded in the inky heart of night,
like the growing ardor of a straw, facing off the sea,
like a butterfly screaming defiance at a mountain.

And now, so many wounds in night's black marble breast
lie inflicted that everywhere the gaze wanders
it is ensnared by a gleam that has woven a kind of web.
From afar, the booming premonition of dawn’s heart beat.

Your worldly goods, your desires are these very hands
What else do you have? Only these hands.
You will not accept the dark dive into nightfall
yet acquiesce as these hands are hacked off;

while waylaid by the east, the pounding dawn lies
entombed beneath the iron carcass of night!

FirstPost Mumbai.The Blue Tarpaulin

2011-12-12T22:00:00.014+05:30

Here is an excerpt from my new column on FirstPost.Com.
The blue tarpaulin: what it bares about Mumbai’s high-rises

Antilla, in Blue Tarp

Image posted by DomainK
on the website http://www.indiancricketfans.com
on 06-06-2011, at 03:13 PM

"...In my opinion, La Familia Ambani did not not shift into their two billion dollar abode because of a Vaastu dysfunction. I think the problem was much more mundane. Antilla leaks. This is why Mumbai was subjected to the rather unedifying sight last monsoon of large parts of the world’s costliest urban home covered with blue tarpaulin.

Antilla apart, the blue tarpaulin is a sight that has become ubiquitous all over the city. Normally associated with slums in mid-growth or buildings under construction, Antilla caught our eye mainly because it was a skyscraper, a state of the art uberhaus, and one designed by a vaunted, outsourced architectural firm.

Let us begin with the moral of the story first: Mumbai’s climate will bite you on the bum if you do not respect it in the first place. The tarpaulin is indexical of the essential disjunction between our aspirations and the sensitivity we have to fulfill them."

Mario de Miranda (1926-2011)

2011-12-11T13:31:00.007+05:30

Mario Miranda passed away today.

We never met. We did not need to.

Mario de Miranda was the subliminal presence in our growing up years. He provided the visual counterpoint to our learning, our schooling, our appreciation of English, of literature, of illustration, of art, of Bombay, of India and beyond. His illustrations in our schoolbooks, his cartoons in our newspapers, his murals on the walls of our restaurants and his art in our galleries remain forever in the back of mind and can be recalled in an augenblick.

When I started writing this blog, one of the first pieces I wrote was on Mario. It remains to this day the single most visited page on my blog, outstripping very other blogpost by several hundred visits. Here is a poem I wrote, inspired by one of his illustrations, way back in the 80s, when I was in college, based on his 'Bar Lady in Germany' . This was the first of many wonderful travel illustrations that he produced, displaying finesse and rigor in his cross-hatching but sublime in his observation of life.

India should remember Mario as our own Norman Rockwell.

We are fortunate that architect Gerard da Cunha has designed a gallery in Goa specifically for Mario's work and has published a comprehensive book of his oeuvre. It is now a time of remembrance and appreciation.

Tchau, Mario!

Last Day in a Lived-in House

2011-12-10T13:48:00.002+05:30

Christo

2011-12-01T21:24:00.007+05:30

Christo,

New York City, 1981

photography by Annie Leibovitz

First published in the Rolling Stone 1981

Urban Bawl 3

2011-11-25T23:01:00.001+05:30

Here is the third in the series of Urban Bawl columns in Time Out Mumbai for their 'Back of the Book' page.

Two small stories involving articles of clothing, centrifugally and centripetally engaged.

A New Column on Urbanism

2011-11-21T22:17:00.003+05:30

This is the first of a new column on urbanism I will be writing for Network 18's Mumbai section of firstpost.com , which I should be doing every three weeks or so. To read the full piece, please click on the title below:

Urbanism: What makes Shivaji Park more accessible than Oval Maidan

Walls, railings and boundaries make Mumbai's public spaces less accessible than they could be.

(excerpt)

Every unauthorised shop-owner needs a peg on which to hang his wares. So does every squatter. Give someone a backrest and they will fashion a home out of it. Every physical subdivision, every border or fence in Mumbai’s public realm provides a multitude of pegs, made available for appropriation by the private anxieties of its legal occupants. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, more than half a century ago, spoke of how borders, while being dismissed as passive objects, or matter-of-factly as edges, actually exert an active influence. Every new wall physically and existentially divides its denizens. You are who you are depending on which side of it you belong. Take care of your own then; forget what goes on outside.

The emerging city of Mumbailopolis arrays its spanking new buildings, all barricaded against Mumbai, Open City. Lower Parel’s Peninsula is a fairly generic corporate park, laid out classically in gridlike blocks. Situated at the junction of Ganpatrao Kadam and Senapati Bapat Marg, Peninsula is surrounded by walls that visually deny views on both sides. There is nothing the city gives to the park and in turn it gives nothing back. On the inside is a befountained evocation of urban order, quite suited to totalitarian big brotherly Singapore. Manufactured havens such as these have strongly filtered accesses; but outside, le deluge.

High Modernism in IIT-Delhi

2011-11-19T19:39:00.003+05:30

Celebrating the High Modernism of IIT Delhi's Main Building in the 50th year of its existence. The central administrative building was designed by architect Jugal Kishore Choudhari in 1961. Its razor finished RCC fins and unconventional cross axes still enthrall. This vista leads to the pilotis popularly refrred to by its 'inmates' as the 'wind tunnel'. Much loved haunt in the Delhi summers.

Photo taken on 12th November 2011.

Two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

2011-11-17T21:38:00.023+05:30

In celebration of the centenary of Faiz Ahmad Faiz' birth (February 13, 1911), I translated two of his best-known poems into English. I did these in February, the month of his birth and was very happy to get a chance to read them in public during this year's Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai (on the lawns of the Prince of Wales Museum). The events in Africa and the Arab world since the beginning of the year made made them so prescient, it was uncanny.

The illustration was made using Harmony's Mr.Doob software.

Aa Jaao Afrika (1955)
by
Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Aa jaao,
maine sun li tere dhol ke tarang
Aa jaao,
mast ho gayi mere lahu ki taal
Aa jaao, Afrika!

Aa jaao,
maine dhool se maatha uthaa liyaa
Aa jaao,
maine chheel di aankhon se gham ki chhaal
Aa jaao,
maine dard se baazoo chhudaa liyaa
Aa jaao,
maine noch diyaa bekasi kaa jaal
Aa jaao, Afrika!

Panje mein hathkadi ki kadi ban gayi hai gurz
Gardan ka tauq todke dhaali hai maine dhaal
Aa jaao, Afrika!

Jaltein hai har kachhaar mein bhaalon ke mrig-nain
Dushman lahoo se raat ki kaalak hui hai laal
Aa jaao Afrika!

Dharti dhadak rahi hai mere saath, Afrika
Daryaa thirak rahaa hai,
to ban de rahaa hai taal

Main Afrika hoon,
dhaar liyaa maine teraa roop

Main tu hoon,
meri chaal hai tere babbar ki chaal

Aa jaao, Afrika!
Aao babbar ki chaal
Aa jaao, Afrika!

Africa, Come Forth!
Translated by
Mustansir Dalvi

Come on,
I have heard the throbbing of your drums.
Come on,
my blood surges in drunken rhythms.
Come on, Africa!

Come on,
I have lifted my forehead from the dust.
Come on,
I have scraped crusts of despair from my eyes.
Come on,
I have shrugged off the pain of ages.
Come on,
I have clawed off webs of despair.
Come on, Africa!

The manacles on my fists are now bludgeons,
the choker round my neck forged as a shield,
Come forth, Africa!

Doe-eyed spears glow in every river marsh,
the inky night, ruddy with enemy blood,
Come forth, Africa!

The earth beats with me as one, Africa!
The river swells and dances
to the backbeat of the jungle.

I am Africa,
I have fashioned myself in your shape.
I am you,
my gait, your leonine stride.

Come forth, Africa!
Come, stride out like a lion.
Africa, Come forth!

5.02.2011

Hum Dekhenge (1979)
by
Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Laazim hai ki hum bhi dekhenge
Woh din jiskaa ke waada hai,
Jo lau-e-azl mein likha hai

Jab zulm-o-sitam ke koh-e-garaan
Rooi ki tarah udd jaayenge,

Hum mehkoomon ke paaon tale
jab dharti dhad dhad dhadkegi,

Aur ahl-e-hukam ke sar oopar
Jab bijli kad kad kadkegi,

Jab arz-e-khudaa ke kaabe se
Sab but uthwaaey jaayenge,

Hum ahl-e-safaa mardood-e-haram
Masnad pe bithaaey jaayenge.

Sab taaj uchaaley jaayenge.
Sab takht giraaey jayyenge.

Bas naam rahega Allah kaa,
Jo ghaayab bhi hai, haazir bhi,
Jo manzar bhi hai, naazir bhi.

Utthegaa ‘An-al-haq’ kaa naara
Jo main bhi hoon, aur tum bhi ho,

Aur raaj karegi Khalq-e-Khuda
Jo mai bhi hoon, aur tum bhi ho.

We Shall See
translated by
Mustansir Dalvi

Inevitably, we shall also see the day
that was promised to us, decreed
on the tablet of eternity.

When dark peaks of torment and tyranny
will be blown away like cotton fluff;

When the earth’s beating, beating heart
will pulsate beneath our broken feet;

When crackling, crashing lightning
will smite the heads of our tormentors;

When, from the seat of the Almighty
every pedestal will lie displaced;

Then, the dispossessed we; we,
who kept the faith will be installed
to our inalienable legacy.
Every crown will be flung.
Each throne brought down.

Only His name will remain; He,
who is both unseen, and ubiquitous; He,
who is both the vision and the beholder.

When the clarion call of ‘I am Truth’
(the truth that is me and the truth that is you)
will ring out, all God’s creatures will rule,
those like me and those like you.

5.02.2011

Urban Bawl 2

2011-10-15T13:26:00.000+05:30

Here is the second in the series of Urban Bawl columns in Time Out Mumbai for their 'Back of the Book' page. This piece is on city, memory and a set of installations by Jitish Kallat.

Bringing it all back home

2011-10-06T00:15:00.009+05:30

Artist Jitish Kallat has been invited by the Bhau Daji Lad Museum’s Director Tasneem Zakaria Mehta to create a series of installations in the museum that engage with the exhibits. This invitation is one of a series of mandates that the museum has made to invite contemporary artists who are alumni of the Sir JJ School of Art to make works of art in the museum. Through historical incidence, the museum is habited with artefacts and exhibits made by the former students of the Sir JJ School of Art in the late nineteenth century. Kallat is the second contemporary artist to put up his work thus, the first was Sudarshan Shetty.

The Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla, Mumbai is an ornate pile nestling cheek by jowl with the city zoo. This museum (formerly known as the Victoria and Albert Museum) and its extended grounds (formerly known as the Victoria Gardens) house several artefacts of nineteenth century colonialism, including the equestrian statue of Edward VIII (latterly remembered elsewhere, but in absentia, as Kala Ghoda) and the elephant that gave Elephanta Island (formerly and latterly known as Gharapuri) its name. It is inside the museum that the singular legacy of the Sir JJ School manifests itself.

Unlike the Ajaayab Ghar/ Wunderkammer paradigm of museums that were the repositories of curiosities and exotica, essentially rooms filled with collections, sorted or otherwise, with an intention both to preserve as well as to enthral, the Victoria and Albert was an entity created to reflect the city of Bombay. In a well orchestrated attempt to portray the colonial city as inhabited by a diverse cosmopolitanism under a benign ruler, the Sir JJ School of Art and its students were commissioned to create relief maps, figurines and dioramas depicting life in the city as it was then.

The museum was therefore lined with showcase after showcase filled with glimpses of life in Bombay and surroundings, teeming with the vitality of the various denizens who populated it, but neatly sorted according to sartorial taxonomies of caste, creed and religious persuasion. Ergo, dioramas of Bombay at work and at play exhibited full bodied depictions of Parsees in their flowing white robes and tall hats, varieties of Muslims with varieties of beards, Kutchhis, Marwaris, Kolis, Marathas, Agaris, and assortments of sadhus amongst much else. All these populated the museum in a representative albeit stereotypical microcosm of the city outside. Other creations by the School of Art also fill its shelves, notably pottery and ceramics. Of course there is a sizable collection of other collections as well that are on display in the vast interiors on either side of a dominating, larger than life, marble statue of Uncle Albert himself.

I have memories of several visits to the museum as a child. I soon realised how different it was from the other great museum of the city, the Prince of Wales. A visit here formed a bonus feature to the de rigueur walkabout in the Raani Baag to admire caged animals. I was not particularly impressed by the exhibits that I thought bordered on the monotonous, showcase after showcase of clay toys, especially in comparison to the Prince of Wales, a place I loved, which was a veritable Ajaayab Ghar. With every visit, it seemed to me, the museum was getting darker and dingier, there were not too many visitors about, and a sense of desolation and abandonment was apparent. All this changed, very happily after 2008, when the museum was exquisitely restored by Vikas Dilawari, many of the artefacts re-housed under a contemporary curatorial gaze. The latest enterprise, as is seen with Jitish Kallat, of commencing a conversation between the contemporary city and the erstwhile artefacts has revitalised the space, both literally and intellectually.

It was only appropriate for director/curator Tasneem Zakaria Mehta to bring an alumnus of the Sir JJ School of Art in as an Artist in Residence. There a great resonance between the two institutions, near contemporaries of each other. The School of Art was set up initially to preserve and resurrect the dying crafts of India, whose value Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy saw in the artefacts that filled up the vast Indian section of the Crystal Palace Exposition of London in 1851. Through his munificence was the school of art set up, with an aim to train local students to carry forward these traditions. Things did not exactly work out this way, for within a year or so of the school’s inception, Sir JJ was dead and the teachers and masters imported from England set up a curriculum to train students in the grand tradition of the Beaux Arts, with specialised departments of painting, sculpture and architectural ornament. Students became more and more adept at these skills rather than Indian crafts and as the city experienced its boom in the wake of the cotton trade and textile industrialization. The School was able to contribute to the city in several ways. In the last decade of the 1800s, ceramics and pottery made by the school went ‘viral’ for a short while in the mother country.

Like the Bhau Daji Museum, the Sir JJ School of Art stayed the course it had set upon. Art was produced for the Salon, within the Western tradition of the Beaux Arts and the modernism that had made its impact fully felt in Europe did not really impact Bombay’s shores until the penultimate decades before independence. It would require an almost subaltern resistance to the craft/skill based productions. This would emerge from within its students in the early fifties in the form of the Progressive Artists Movement that rattled its doors and rebooted both the forms and substance of what was produced in the school. Change, such as it was, was brought about by the alumni of the. Dissatisfaction bred innovation.

To return to Jitish Kallat. His installations, currently up at the Bhau Daji Lad are collectively called ‘ Field-notes: Tomorrow was here yesterday’. Kallat, through a series of rather subtle interventions, introduces a voice that begins with a whisper that slowly rises not to a din but to a level that cannot be hushed away. His work talks of the contemporary city, of Mumbai, as a series of intrusions and impositions that occur where least expected, and are made up of objects that allude to change and transition, the propensity of the contemporary city to usurp the old, to erase the inconvenient and to easily slip into an amnesia fuelled by unreasonable aspiration. Kallat bring the city to the museum, disturbing years of cobwebby and mildewed mindsets, raking nails across the persisting image of the idyllic cosmopolis that the former artefacts sought to recreate. His installations evoke issues not given enough air in the city: the conflicts that have beset it in the contemporary past, the ghettoization of the mind into increasingly homogeneous selves, the othering of everyone else, and the swift slide into violence outside that is only a step behind the violence within.

With 'Chlorophyll Park (Mutatis Mutandis)', using digitally composite photographs, Kallat addresses the aspirations of a ‘dirty’ city with a ludic use of lawns that over-run former tarred roads with a uniform green lushness, or as his press note says ‘evoking a time when urban expansion is halted, and nature exacts her claim on the concrete jungle.’ O that our city could be like this! And yet, the oversaturated green sets up a counter allusion- that of Astroturf, the faux grass carpet made of plastic, uniform but lifeless. The fulfilment of aspiration flips back to mere application of superficial lamina, not unlike the ubiquitous blue tarps that we see covering large parts of the built city, especially in the monsoons.

Kallat’s panoramic photograph ‘Artist making a phone call’ where the same subjects make impossibly multiple appearances in the same image is successfully juxtaposed (using similar framing and symmetrical locations) with panoramic images of Bombay taken nearly a hundred years ago. This exhibition is filled with such created presences.

A visitor passes under an unexpected series of scaffoldings within the interiors of the museum- at the entrance, all round the statue of Albert and straddling the grand stairway like a Dusshera toran. These bamboo scaffoldings, held together by coir rope, are ubiquitous in the city outside. Every inhabitant of Mumbai walks around or under them, side-steps to avoid them or rues their presence on buildings, flyovers and skywalks and pavements. They represent the city in flux, never complete, never at rest. Kallat turns the museums space inside out bringing in an element of exterior presence inside the museum, belying expectations of what should be in and what should not. One is reminded of the Laurentian Library in Florence by Michelangelo where the interior walls are articulated as an external facade. A closer look at the scaffolding is revelatory: these are not bamboo at all, but meticulously crafted poles of fibreglass. The knots that cause one to mistake them for bamboo are in fact animals in relief, familiar to most South Bombaywallahs.

They encounter them every day, embedded in the neo-Gothic ornament that can be seen on most of the buildings in the stretch from Bombay VT to the Regal. Birds and rabbits, dogs and mice have played peekaboo with pedestrians on the streets of Bombay since the late 1800s, leaping out from behind the acanthus fronds that make up the Corinthian capitals on so many buildings in the colonial city. Another flip: the past has infiltrated the present, the contemporary contaminated with a persistence of the erstwhile.

I first encountered ‘Annexation’ from the museum’s upper floor gallery looking down into the atrium. I had just finished contemplating ‘Anger at the speed of fright’, Kallat’s own contribution to the dioramas of the museum, which he makes by usurping two showcases that would have otherwise have housed objects from the museum’s permanent collection (models of boats and ships, as it happens). The showcases are filled with foot high figurines, all male, dressed sartorially to evoke Rajnikanth/Salman Khan/Govinda, indulging in various cameos of rioting, assaulting each other with weapons of various found objects, scattering a detritus of abandoned possessions in their wake. Frozen in the middle of a bloodletting fury, these little people occupy the space they are housed in a variety of vignettes of choreographed violence. Preserved here, in all their inglourious presence, is a diorama riveting to look at, but with a sinking heart.

As I moved beyond this installation in the upper gallery, I looked down at the ground floor to see a burnt-out kerosene stove with equally burnt-out tweezers for lighting the wick. Do you remember the primus from the days before the gas stove became the primary choola to cook on? A remnant of violence, a destruction of domesticity, the aftermath of a riot, this black, soot-stained, partially melted stove reminded me of our immediate past, of things we did witness in the mad days our city went through not so long ago. We don’t talk about how easily the city can revert to this, as it did for extended periods in 1992-93 (and of course various times before that, and occasionally since). The stove was aligned with other displays and even had chrome barriers that called attention to it as ‘a work of art’ or an exalted ‘do not touch’ exhibit in a museum. It had dark, bad beauty that warranted a closer look.

‘Annexation’ is a work of great aesthetic pleasure when seen up close. Made of lead and metal, it is formally arranged as a monument, with plinth, column and canopy overridden with the self-same animal figures, just like those on the bamboo scaffolding, taken down from the neo-Gothic buildings of the city, and lumped together. The animals of various species had resorted to devouring each other. The stove transforms to an under-scaled gazebo or an over-scaled fountain, classically correct in its mouldings and ornament. Once again Kallat conflated the past to make us realise the present.

Now consider this. In the ‘Battle of the Styles’ that was an ongoing debate in the mid nineteenth century, both in England and in India, the neo-Classical vied with the neo-Gothic for being anointed as the most appropriate style of architecture in a universe dominated by Kaiser-i-Hind Ranee Victoria. From the 1860’s onwards, the neo-Gothic style achieved fashion dominance in the colonies. Bombay’s first line of public buildings, the set that gave the name of ‘Urbs Prima India’ to the city were all built in the neo-Gothic style. These buildings displayed ornament and architectural articulation taken from French Gothic and Venetian Gothic sources, proselytised mainly by writers like John Ruskin with his ‘Stones of Venice’, a very influential voice amongst architects and artists of the time.

In Bombay, the School of Art commenced classes in 1857, under three masters- one each a master of painting, of sculpture and of architectural ornament. Lockwood Kipling was the Master of architectural ornament. His work and his teachings for the ten years or so that he spent in Bombay was greatly influential, as was his attempt to integrate Indian forms with western architectural elements. He initiated the creation of architectural ornament, of forms and elements of buildings carved in stone in the School of Art which would then be installed on the various buildings that were coming up in the city. His students became adept at creating elements like column capitals, bases, plinths, friezes, roundels, crockets and gargoyles that would become the crowning features of the neo-Gothic buildings all over the city.

All the architects creating these new edifices, from F. W. Stevens, to George Wittet, to John Begg and William Emerson ‘outsourced’ the aesthetic details in stone to the students of the Sir JJ School of Art. Lockwood Kipling’s own work can be seen even today in the two beautiful reliefs of local Indian life created in the tympanums of the entrances arches to Crawford Market. In the School of Art Building (designed by Molecey) built in the neo-Gothic idiom, sculptural vignettes of artists and craftsmen are ‘embedded’ in the Corinthian Capitals. The most notable building that Kipling and his students would contribute to was the Victoria Terminus Station, across the street from the school. The Venetian Gothic pointed arches on the facade are interspaced with a variety of architectural sculptures that range from the symbolic to the representative (busts of city fathers) to the playfully ornamental, where architecture freely morphs into sculptural depictions of peacocks, monkeys, rabbits and rats. These animals are on full display at eye level on the porch of the railway station that leads to the ticketing chamber. It is from this very porch that Jitish Kallat has sourced most of the animals on his scaffolding and his stove.

These two installations bring all the various strands together: the outer city and the inner museum, the older artefacts with the current impositions, the Bhau Daji Lad with the Sir JJ School of Art, the rapidly changing with the resistant past, and the 21st century city with a 19th century form. An alumnus of the school of art, Kallat has returned to the very museum that the school’s early artists filled. But Kallat’s prodigal installations return with the same elements that made the school a notable contributor to the city in the first place, the home of the architectural ornament. In his inimitable manner, Jitish Kallat has succeeded in bringing it all back home.

9|11 Dreams of Falling

2011-09-11T21:02:00.007+05:30

Dreams of Falling

I claw at cracked floor tiles to get a grip,

walls shear sidewise into wounds of steel.

Dislocating planes, this floundering ship

is pulled inside out, its organs revealed.

Inhaling dust of exploding plaster,

the girl seeks a haven under a jamb.

Gunshot splinters, steel barely outlasts her,

a wide-eyed puppet; an abandoned hand.

Horizons shudder in a sinusoid,

skipping beats are surprised to turn flatline,

I accept the long fall into the void,

while out of my sight, the city’s dying.

My body deflates, a resigned hiss. Are

dreams of falling premonitions of this?

Mustansir Dalvi

4.3.2000

This famous image, now known as 'Falling Man', seen here in a cropped detail, is a photograph by Richard Drew, which he took at at 9:41:15 a.m., on September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center New York City.

Urban bawl

2011-09-04T14:15:00.001+05:30

I have been invited by Time Out Mumbai to write a column for their 'Back of the Book' page with a frequency of six weeks or so. Being given a general carte blanche (other than the word count), I was delighted to accept. What is nice is that the column will be circulated every fortnight into Time Out Delhi and Time Out Bengaluru, hence the six week interval.

The first piece is published in the latest issue of Time Out, under the by-line 'Urban bawl'. This one, called 'English Class', is a reflection on our use of language in the city.

Please forgive the photograph.
I do know it makes me look like an 'Urban bawlat'.

A clean, well-lighted place

2011-09-01T23:34:00.008+05:30

An extended (much longer) version of this piece has just been published in Vol. 1, Issue.2 of Domus (India) called a 'A New Crown Jewel'; with much greater coverage on the construction process, the drawings and many more photographs; including a short writeup by Rahul Mehrotra. Do get hold of the issue if you can.

Like a family that hasn’t really had a child-that-lived for quite some time now, certainly not a healthy babe, architecture in Bombay has seen the begetting of runts with such aclarity that we, mere citizens, seem to have forgotten that an alpha animal can come into existence too. So it is an occasion for a muted huzzah to see a new addition to our dry shores in the form of an insertion in the middle of our art district. The new Visitor’s Centre to (the Museum formerly known as the Prince of Wales) is a small but sensitively designed building that both replaces an earlier one that was well regarded, and does so with a program that considerably expands the scope of its predecessor.

Bombay has/is becoming bereft at a pace that will overwhelm us before we know it. In the rapidly changing urbanscape today, memories of places are the grunts that are the first to face the cannons of change; slated to die quickly, to be forgotten so the development machine can roll on inexorably. You only have to see the changing skylines around Nana Chowk and the Mills Lands to know what is being lost and what is already history. While change is inevitable, it does not take much to preserve the few markers we have with our past, our childhoods and growing up years, but it does take sensitive transformers like designers Rahul Mehrotra Associates (RMA) to do so consciously, and gracefully.

Situated at the entrance to the Museum campus, right across the road from (the gallery formerly known as the Cowasjee Jehangir Hall) the Visitors Centre is built on the same site as the Children’s Centre that was host to several programs in the past, but mostly mono-natured, lectures and workshops on museology, aesthetics and culture. What is fondly remembered is the lecture space with its shallow-vaulted ceiling and clerestories, its three large doors and the deep porch that faced the Indo-Saracenic pile that is the museum itself. In the creation of the new Centre, RMA have, to their credit respected our memories by retaining these remembered elements but with a vocabulary that is completely of the present millennium.

If anything the porch has been made even deeper, transforming into a more inclusive social space, a place to hang out and consume bits of this and that before entering the lecture hall, or even simply gaze across a sea of green at George Wittet’s many copypaste elements from the architecture of Bijapur. The Centre is built of stainless steel and glass which, through its sheen and multiple reflections, gives an altogether lighter aspect to the open areas around the building. The porch is like the deck of a ship, with its metal elements and a deep awning held up by slim, hinged columns of chrome. You also become aware of a whimsical water metaphor because the stainless steel soffit of the deck becomes a rippling upside down pool reflecting the columns, lawn and You as you move under it.

The Visitors’ Centre derives from a modernist tradition of pavilion-building that channels the Glass Boxes of Mies and Johnson. It employs many syntactical elements- a raised plinth, deep roofs on both sides to provide shade; the overhead plane held up by slim shining supports used sparingly, a sheltered glass enclosure of indeterminate function. The architecture gains significance by not kowtowing to the visual fakery that is the bane of most buildings that come up in the vicinity of important older structures. The bonsai Gateway that is the public pissoir at Apollo Bunder, as any fule kno, will always be an example of the wretchedness of designers ignorant of visual semantics (and plain commonsense). The Visitors’ Centre, on the other hand, stands apart, but, because of its position and ephemeral visage evokes a gentle dialogue with the ponderous structure of the museum, enriching both in the process.

As frequent visitor to the Museum, I have been delighted at the changes that are taking place in the institution itself. There are new Galleries; older ones have been refurbished with better displays and audio guides in the interpretative paradigm of New Museums the world over. The Visitor’s Centre is an extension of this modernisation, and has newer functions like a souvenir shop and a (soon to come) cafeteria other than the lecture hall and ticketing. The Museum Shop, despite its infancy, has all the good standards I associate with those in the Great Galleries of Europe and I would strongly urge you to visit it and give it business. Unlike the Children’s’ Centre that it replaces, this building opens out on both sides, with a main entrance towards the road. Although this does give a separate character focussing on existing trees and the Souvenir Shop, it does cause a circulation niggle. The entrance to the Museum grounds continues to be through the older gates. A visitor sees nothing to begin with, which means that she first has to make a sharp ninety degree turn to face the ticketing.

There was an opportunity to open out the entire front of the pavilion to the public street by bringing down the wall in front of it. This could have created its own little plaza that continued smoothly from the public front of the Jehangir Art Gallery. A visitor could then have directly climbed the plinth to the ticketing and other facilities and entered the grounds through the Centre. A small gesture of good manners could in fact have helped business by making the Centre a contemporary front for the modern museum that the Prince of Wales museum seems determined to turn into. The Souvenir Shop could have been accessible directly from the street. More to the point, this could have become an exemplar for the city at large which is currently building higher boundary walls and more gates than it has ever done during its existence.

The Jehangir Art Gallery remains the best example of urban good manners. It has an unashamed and unrestricted face to the street and the Kala Ghoda plaza, wide steps for all to sit on under an inviting and architecturally arresting canopy. City Tour operators often refer to it as the Moojhum and visitors get to see the art on display for free, and don’t even realise that they have missed the building behind it. On the rear of the Gallery is the deeply loved Samovar Cafe that has weathered many storms and continued to be a place for gathering of art lovers and good food. Like the Visitors Centre, Samovar has its longer face on the lawns of the Museum. Unlike the Visitors Centre, it is separated from said lawns by an entirely unnecessary barrier of chain-link fencing. It would be a good idea, now that change is in the air, to bring down this wall too, extend the deep roof of the Cafe and open it out to the Museum garden. The integration of all these buildings and activities would make them greater than the sum of their parts.

All that is needed is a modicum of urban trust.

All photographs here by Mustansir Dalvi, Smita Dalvi (c) 2011

School of Art, Bombay

2011-08-28T21:26:00.002+05:30

Sketching Class at the Sir Jamshetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art Bombay, circa July 2011

The Architect's Alphabet by Rudyard Kipling

2011-08-19T20:48:00.002+05:30

The Dean's bungalow at the School of Art Campus in Bombay, in which Rudyard Kipling was not born.

The Architect's Alphabet
by
Rudyard Kipling

A was an Architect: B were his Brains
C was the Chaos he wrought when he used 'em
D was the Dissolute course of his Drains
E was the End of the people who used 'em
F were the Fools who allowed him to build
G were his Gehennas of brickbats and lime
H were his houses, bacteria filled
I am the poet who left them in time
J were his Joists- but they broke with the rats on 'em
K were his Kements (I adhere to this spelling)
L were his Leadings- you couldn't swing cats on 'em
M was the Mildew that clove to each dwelling
N was his Notion of saving expense
O were the Odds it would cost like all Tophet
P (please insert for the sake of the sense)
Q were his Quantities, P was his Profit
R were his Roofs which were waterlogged rafts
S for they Sagged (S is also his Sinks)
T the Tornadoes he told us were draughts
U were his Usual Unspecified Stinks
V was the Vengeance I vowed on the head of him
W was Wrong and Waiting and Waste
X is King Xerexes (God knows I have need of him!,
Y and a Yataghan wielded with taste)
Z are Zymotic diseases, a host of 'em
Ambo's my architect, I have got most of 'em.

A poem written by Rudyard Kipling in the 1890s in the margin of a notebook belonging to architect Sir Herbert Baker. 'Ambo' is Ambrose Poynter, an architect, cousin and friend of Kipling. Obviously, Kipling was less than satisfied with his work.

This unpublished poem was discovered in 1968 by the anthologist Kenneth Baker.

I acknowledge the wonderful book 'The Art of Looking Sideways'by Alan Fletcher (Phaidon Press) as the source.

Why don't we do it in the road?

2011-08-09T23:22:00.002+05:30

1.
Why don't we do it in the road?
Why don't we do it in the road?
Why don't we do it in the road?
Why don't we do it in the road ?
No one will be watching us
Whaa-aay don't we do it in the road!
(Lennon/McCartney)

2.
"I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.

"Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.”
(Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose)

3.
6.30pm at Bombay VT Station. Platform 1. The Harbour line.
It is the cusp before full-blown rush hour. A young couple, uncharacteristically entwined, walk the length of the platform towards where the first class compartments would arrive. The boy, almost all in black, encircles the girls waist with one arm. The girl is slim and short, a petiteness further enhanced by a really tight pair of jeans and a top that fits only too well, has, over one shoulder a biggish ladies bag with several dangly bits. She wears fashionable heels, giving her an inch or two. With her free arm she clinches the boy back, tightly. It is unusual to see such a public display of affection, especially in a railway station in the evening.

The boy can only see her eyes.
The girl’s face and hair are obscured, wrapped completely, a dark dupatta forming a very makeshift naqaab. Both are engrossed; they bill and coo to each other as they wait for the train. Soon, the Vashi train trundles in, quite on time. The girl raises her head and gives the boy a peck on his cheek, right through the dupatta. The boy disentangles himself and gets into the general compartment. The girl walks a few steps down to the Ladies First Class.

Even before she finds a place to sit, with one smooth motion, she whips away the dupatta from her face, her hair falls to her shoulders, and once again she becomes Everywoman.

Bombay, or what’s left of it

2011-08-04T00:13:00.003+05:30

This was an occasional piece written for the Mumbai Reader 10 (2010, UDRI, compiled by Pankaj Joshi and Isaac Matthew) published last year. Given the speed and unpredictability of change in Bombay's urban space currently, I am posting it on this blog to see whether it still holds good.

Bombay, or what’s left of it

It all depends on the way you look at it. Our city is too diverse and too variegated for one single future. It is the sum of its parts and each part, in turn, is the sum of its parts, and so on, ad infinitum. Nowhere is this expressed better than in Mumbai’s inner city- Bombay.

Limits

What are the limits to the inner city? Everything south of the mill lands? Everything south of the Mithi? Neighbourhoods and precincts in our city are undefined, subtle, constructed out of mutual agreements rather than constructed of discreet boundaries. For definition instead, we have generic Wards. ‘C’ and ‘D’ Wards in Mumbai are the archetype of the Inner City, of the Bombay of public memory, identified not by colours on a map, but by paths, places and domains, resonating with neighbourhood names –Kalbadevi, Bhuleshwar, Tardeo, and landmarks- Panjrapol, Gaiwadi, the Cotton Exchange. The urban character, its fabric, its people and its apparent chaos and filth all make it what it is. With the current penchant of making-over all that is old in the city, one wonders what of this will sustain, even a decade from now. For far too long decisions about change are made by foregrounding visual blight as a tool of damnation- garbage, decrepitude, rundown areas, leaking house-gullies, open wiring; all these and more are reason enough for wholesale change. Eyes, of course, are the easiest to fool.

Preserve

Current models of redevelopment assume the helplessness of the residents of the Inner City to better themselves; that these hapless denizens require the benevolence of their ‘betters’-developers and legislators alike. It is assumed that tenants and landlords coexist in an extended no man’s land, thanks to the vagaries of the Bombay Rents, Hotel, and Lodging House Rates Control Act, 1947. Interestingly, it is the Rent Act itself that, over the last sixty years has helped preserve and sustain the egalitarian character of the Inner City. Owners, landlords, tenants, sub-tenants, leave and licensees, common-law occupants, parasites, saprophytes, the homeless and their relatives, friends and pets all make the broad spectrum of life that fill these streets and enrich our city. The enforced clampdown of rents and sales for decades prevented sudden gentrification of these valuable areas, preventing the polychromy of shared existence to be faded down to the monotone ‘Owner’.

Over the rest of Mumbai, as its peripheries ballooned northwards and general affluence rose steadily since the early eighties, the idea of owning a piece of the property pie eclipsed the idea of rented property in the minds of its inhabitants as the only ‘safe’ model for living. Today, home and material estate have got mixed up in a bind, severely strained by the limited space of a city bounded on three sides by water. This has led to a siege mindset, where the real survivors are Owners, and people who need to rent ‘transients’. Little wonder then, that speculators have had an open field over the last thirty years.

Commodity

Today, when even the possibilities of northward expansion seem to be exhausted, the city is turning on itself, trying to survive by devouring its own children. Every area in the city, salt pan or mangrove, green field or brown, lived in or decrepit, outer or inner is fair game. In the hyperdense inner city of the C and D wards, land is the key commodity for speculation, of forcing a value on paper, of commodifying a human need for profit. This paper value multiplies without restraint simply by assigning a perceived agency to it, either by speculation or even legislation. The recent modifications to the Town Planning Act, the eponymous clauses 33/7and 33/9 legislate the densification the already dense.

These Santa Clauses for the speculators posit redevelopment of inner city areas as if they are tabula rasa. The recent proposal for the area we now know as Bhendi Bazaar is a case in point where several hundred structures are proposed to be consumed into thirty or forty high rises. The inevitable result of this would mean the erstwhile tenants would be under severe pressure to move away, those who can afford the many zeros per square foot would move in leading to wholesale and instant gentrification and demographic change. Modifications in the existing fabric, creating filth-free gated communities, with gated mindsets will lead to a substantial reduction of communal wealth that is the street, the plaza, the playground. What politically correct, un-cosmopolitan, pristine and monolith will replace the grungy surprises, the get-your-hands-dirty delights of the much loved and much visited Chor Bazaar?

Property/ Value

Physical land in our inner city is acutely finite, so how can it be sub-divided, ad infinitum? Historically, landed property defined feudalism. Owning land or real estate generated income for the owner without the owner having to do the actual work of the estate. Landed property was a key element of the feudal pecking order, and freed the owner for other tasks such as living the high life.

In the early years after America shucked off the British yoke, its economy was largely agrarian. Land ownership led to social divide, exploitation and slave ownership. Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice (1795) defined two kinds of property- one, Natural property, ‘which comes from the creator, such as earth, air, water’ and the other ‘artificial or acquired property, the invention of men.’ Paine felt that equality in the latter was impossible; but equality in the former was necessary. ‘Every individual in the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of property or its equivalent. …the condition of persons born after civilization should not be worse than that of those born before. The earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.’ Thomas Paine stressed that individual property should be manifest only in the value of improvement, and not in the actual ownership of land. ‘Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land, owes to the community a ground rent (I know no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds.’ In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat, in his book Economic Harmonies, defined property not as a physical object, but rather as a relationship between people with respect to an object. What one owned was not the object in itself but the value of the object. As such, Bastiat believed that the increasing proportion of communal wealth to private property would result in grater and agreeable egalitarianism.

These lessons from the past are still relevant and can be put to effect in seeking solutions to redevelop of the inner city of Bombay. Some of these prescriptions may appear counter intuitive, but thinking outside the box is the only option available in recent times. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative (from the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals) must therefore be invoked: ‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.’ To paraphrase Kant crudely- ‘Do unto others as you would have everybody do unto everybody’. Using his sage advice, here are a few, perhaps counter-intuitive ways of seeing a possible future for Community living in the Inner City.

Define the Limits of the inner city

Our city has to overcome the ‘one size fits all’ approach of the Development Control Rules. Colaba and Virar cannot be developed by the same standards. It is the wholesale application of the DC rules that wreaks the maximum damage on the well defined fabric of many of the older areas in the city. Controls need to be stated, most certainly, but from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, making local conditions a priority rather than monetising every thing into units of FSI. Define neighbourhoods, even streets, as units for development. The inner city is a sum of parts, a mosaic of subcultures, and palimpsest of historical accretion. To achieve this, an institutional setup needs to be envisaged where residents and administrators combine into a unified, democratically run association of inner city management.

Create a model for Participation, not Ownership

Every permanent resident should be considered a part-owner or shareholder in a neighbourhood. Individual ownership, tenancy and occupation should be limited to ‘built property’, not the land on which the property is built. The inner city is old, and worn down. A massive restructuring of infrastructure is necessary. In order to achieve this, developers will need to be called in to technically and financially assist reconstruction. Each developer should therefore be compensated by a right to avail an equivalent area of Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) outside the inner city for proposals of buildings with unit areas not less than 1000 sft. This would imply that the developer can build and profit from housing for middle and upper middle income holders, adding to housing supply, while not further congesting the inner city.

Free the Ground Plane for Public Use

The Ground Plane shall be excluded from individual holdings completely and be administered and developed by an association of inner city management. Amenities for the benefit of local users shall be created, and accessed by pedestrian movement alone. Vehicular accesses could edge neighbourhoods and enter them only at specific points, and as cul-de-sacs. The areas under buildings can be used as they are used now-for social interaction, community activity, rituals, even production with mutual understanding between neighbours. Vertical living, currently being much touted as the only solution to the congested city, can therefore be re-examined critically. Residential and office spaces can then be taken off the ground, increasing individual safety and privacy.

Preserve Urban Memory- the fabric of the inner city

We live in a city of history, of onion layers of memory. These layers allow us to take the city for granted. That is as it should be, for knowledge leads to ‘ownership’ that ensures a sense of well being in the city. Any rebuilding must preserve erstwhile (names and) footprints, and the street character layout, complementing the essentially pedestrian nature of inner city streets. Any sensitive reconstruction must display an appreciation of heritage and its effective conservation; most importantly preserve egalitarian nature of the inner city. There is a city beyond that the eyes can see. It is intangible and it is vast. It is as Whitman describes himself, full of contradictions: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’.

World over, inner cities age and ripen with the respect and care of its inhabitants. Our inner cities are older than most, yet most alike in form and character. They define Bombay, or what’s left of it. Let us leave some parts of the city free from the jackboot stomp of the speculator and accept that its residents are capable of determining its place in the new order. Unrealistic individual aspiration leads to a clamour for perceived rights, without accounting for responsibilities that come with it. If each one does not return to the city rather than merely take, we all stand diminished. We are, in a sense our own worst enemy.

The right of women to do as they damn well please

2011-07-24T22:39:00.002+05:30

My review of ‘Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets’, by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Penguin Books, 2011. The review is published in the latest issue of Indian Architect & Builder.

(excerpt)
'Why Loiter?’ is about the ultimate freedom a woman demands in an urban space: the freedom to do exactly what a man is allowed to do. Mumbai, the progressive city, denies this just by being what it is. Perhaps the most important liberty a megalopolis should offer is the choice to do nothing. To loiter. To have fun. To be a flaneur, to go walkabout, to regard the city and its life as it happens, with no purpose in mind at all. The problem is, if you are not some kind of useful cog, you are a deviant, and a surveillance obsessed society will not accept this. It is difficult enough for men in Mumbai to loiter without being seen as vagabonds.

Port City Multiculturality

2011-03-01T23:04:00.004+05:30

At the Marseille St. Charles TGV, I turn to my fellow traveler, he, with the wife, three smart phones and two blond children. I smile goodbye. “Waalekum Salaam” he responds.

Francois, mine host, greets me warmly, and, as he leads me down the grand steps outside the station, tells me that this city is France’s most multicultural. We walk down the Longue des Capuchins and the flavors of multiculturalism assail our senses. Hotels and street side stalls present cuisines from the fragrant Orient. Lebanese, Moroccan, Turkish and Arab fares grab our attention. Sweets steeped in sugar syrup, sweets made of burnt milk, sweetmeats not unlike barfis bulge lusciously from corrugated paper canapés. As we turn right into the main thoroughfare La Canebiere making our way towards the quay, the Vieux Port, hotels and street front menus written in chalk on blackboard all show the day’s fare, all halaal. Right on the Quai de la Fraternite, on the Neuve is the Jaipur, an Indian Restaurant. Khalil, mine host, is a Pakistani from Peshawar, and offers you naans you could go to war for.

You could look at anyone on the street and know neither ethnicity nor nationality. France has legislated prohibition on displaying religious affiliation on clothing or person. Everyone dresses similarly, exquisitely. But buildings and artifacts, sights, smells the music and speaking in tongues betray the confluence of cultures that only happen in a robust port city.

What is an architect worth?

2010-12-11T14:20:00.002+05:30

What is the value of a professional architect?

This question came up, when, in a recent round of placements for Architectural Interns, one of India's largest and most prolific architectural firms offered interns from my college Rupees Five Hundred per month (Rs.500/-) as salary for placing them. You read that right. Both times.

Apart from being deviant, perverse and downright ridiculous, it is unfortunately not so far from the norm as far as architectural interns in Bombay or the rest of the country are concerned. In architecture colleges, the coursework is for a five-year duration. The final semester of this long course is a term of professional internship where a student joins a firm to understand the nitty-grittys of professional practice and also be an active part of the team of architects that execute projects. They are never intended to be observers or by-standers. Students who join as interns are made to work without any fixed work conditions, and depending from office to office, have to work 12 hours a day or more, and even during weekends. They are (mostly) not reimbursed travel expenses for commuting to work and, as some say, 'hamare office mein chai ka paisa bhi dena padta hai.'

Despite this, many interns join architects offering them an internship salary of anywhere between Rs. 2,500/- to Rs.7,500/-. Few firms offer Rs.10,000/- or above. The highest I have heard is Rs.18,000/- which a student of mine got by joining a firm in Delhi. I have often wondered why, no matter what the pittance offered to them, do students get reconciled, even happy to a salary that amounts to an insulting amount of bheekh (largesse)? The reasons interns give us are:
1. It is a good architectural design firm.
2. I always wanted to work with so-and-so architect.
3. I am getting to learn so many things.
4. I will do my internship here, and then change when the mandatory time period is over.
5. I will get a good recommendation letter from the firm when I apply for post-graduate studies.
6. I am not the lowest paid (in comparison to my peers) so it’s OK.

Why do architects not have even a twinge of conscience when paying sums like these? Architectural firms come in all sizes. There are many one-person proprietary firms with few projects and resources, and then there are some monster firms with staff strengths of over 200 employees and office branches in several cities. Paying such low salaries is not necessarily restricted to size, as is evident by my initial example. Mostly it is a culture of conditioning. And added to that the arrogance of self-aggrandizement. The reasons firms give for their salary structure is:
1. Students don’t learn anything in college. We have to spend time teaching them.
2. They don’t stay with us for a longer duration; they run away the first opportunity they get.
3. We are a small firm; we can’t afford to pay them more.
4. They will never get a better experience than in our firm.
5. They won’t sign a bond to stay in our firm for (x) years.
6. Everybody is doing the same thing.
7. We don't really want interns.

It is by plunging to the lowest common denominator that both employers and interns perpetuate this culture of exploitation. In my irritation and frustration (we have, for several years, tried to get our students placed in offices that pay what the interns minimally deserve, but have not succeeded), I propose that, instead of wasting their half-decade long learning, skills, experience and talent to people who do not value them, they should instead join the unskilled workforce and get jobs either breaking stones or sweeping floors.

Here is the definition of an unskilled employee: An unskilled employee is one who does operations that involve the performance of simple duties, which require the experience of little of no independent judgment or previous experience although familiarity with the occupational environment is necessary. His work may thus require in addition to physical exertion familiarity with variety of articles or goods.

Just as a comparison: an architectural intern is one who does operations that involve the making of architectural drawings and models (the drawings made on computers using specialized software), making site visits, doing site supervision and measurements, meeting clients and other professional consultants, visiting local municipal agencies for procuring certificates of commencement for projects, etc., helping in the creation and checking of tenders and bills of quantities, writing correspondence, sending/receiving drawings and other documents, and doing pretty much everything required by the employee; which requires five years of professional learnings, but whose independent judgment is of little or no value, with no previous office experience, although familiarity with the occupational environment is necessary. The work may require, in addition to physical exertion, familiarity with variety of articles or goods.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of argument let us consider the architectural intern unskilled.

Unskilled workers come under the purview of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, which is a legislative protection for workers to receive a minimum wage, and a fundamental premise of decent work. With effect from November 2009, the National Floor Level of Minimum Wage is Rs.100/- per day. Minimum wages are fixed for work up to 9 hours a day and 48 hours per week.

For employment in Maharashtra, the Labor Department, Government of Maharashtra makes the following provisions for unskilled stone crushers/breakers: their basic wage varies from Rs.169.23 to Rs.192.31 per day. The total minimum wage for stone crushing/breaking varies from Rs.227.63 to Rs. 250.71 per day. That works out to Rs.5,918.38 at the very minimum for a 26 day working month (a 6-day week).

Unskilled sweepers and scavengers have a similar basic wage and their total minimum wage varies from Rs.194.87 to Rs. 217.95 per day. This works out to Rs. 5,066.62 at the very minimum per month.

To the best of my knowledge, almost one out of every four architectural firms I know of pays their architectural interns less than this. Even using the national floor level of minimum wage, an intern's salary should amount to Rs. 2600/ per month. Certainly not Five Hundred.

A generation of architects has already been warped by this despicable mindset. Architects as employees have no long term loyalty to firms; keep jumping jobs for a pittance in salary raise, develop a mercenary mindset and go abroad the first chance they get. Employers keep taking interns with three month commitments; manage without senior architects, run their show like road contractors offering daily wages to all comers, all this while publishing their work in the glossy magazines.

Sure, this is not in violation of any Child Labor Laws, but them it isn’t much removed from that either.

Just in case you find this hard to swallow, you can read this rather dismal chain of posts from a discussion on ArchNet.

All Wage Data from http://www.paycheck.in/

My First Serial Killer

2010-11-28T23:29:00.001+05:30

I saw Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970), I'm not sure, but probably around 1974. I was nine.

I watched this film in blurry black and white on Bombay Doordarshan. This was a time of fledgling programming by Bombay's only television channel, leading to its golden age in the mid-seventies. Foreign films were a weekly staple, as I remember, under the program head of 'Montage'. For me though, looking back now, Chabrol's film was one of many firsts: it was my first introduction to world cinema, it was my first sub-titled film (something I unquestioningly accepted as normal) and it was my first serial killer movie.

Of course, what stood out for me was the last bit. As kids we were all brought up on a bloody diet of killing, murder, bloodshed, what have you... you know the wholesomeness of growing up, none of the namby-pamby stuff.

One scene in the movie stood out, clearly imprinting in my memory. I have recalled it many times since, I must have been pleasantly traumatized by it. A schoolteacher takes a bunch of children out on a picnic to a cave site in the hills. They sit by a stone ledge and open their sandwiches. One little girl open her buttered sandwich and exclaims 'Its raining!' The teacher says 'It's not raining.' The girl cries out 'But its red!' and looks up. A bloody female hand with freshly dripping blood pokes over the ledge. Everyone screams. Oh, how we loved watching this then, a bunch of kids in our neighbor's home (the only television set in the area at that time) and replayed it over and over in our heads and in our games. Drops of blood being an index for murder is a corny cliche today, but for us kids it was an affirmation of our own imaginations and fears.

By this time of course I had had my fill of horror stories and horror movies (only through books and magazines, trawling the depths of Poona's British Council Library, where I practically grew up). A particular favorite was the Encyclopedia of Horror Film and Cinefantastique (full of pictures, both scary and naughty-that's where I discovered King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, The House of Wax, the Thing, the Blob, and everything undead), and of course the monthly Films and Filming magazine that I could never get enough of. Watching these actual movies would come much, much later. No, I consumed texts, still images and above all movie posters, lurid marquees in books and magazines and outside on all the cinema theaters I passed everyday in our school-bus on our way to school, fueling fantasies and populating the visual libraries in my head.

Chabrol, of course, I saw for the first and only time time that evening in the mid 70s. I found the scene again today, after nearly 40 years, and in glorious color here. And yes, the scene played put pretty much as I remembered it. Amazing, how I must have internalised the whole thing. A few years later, still a kid, I wrote a murrrderrr ishtory of my own called 'Whatever happened to Aunt Alice?' full of killing and assorted bunkum, where the first clue to a possible doing-in were three drops of blood on a bedsheet. Yes, yes, I did Google the title today to find that it was a film made in 1969, and I must have seen the title somewhere, what did I know? Plagiarism does not exist when you are ten. I must have seen the poster on the right, it has a gory familiarity, the blood is just about right. Also, this just occurred to me: the image of the bloody hand on the DVD box mirrors the hand in Le Boucher. Some amazing triangulation happening here, both inside my head and outside of it.

But of this I am sure of:
when those drops fell on the little girl's open buttered sandwich, I saw them fall in red.

Things to Ban (1)

2010-10-20T13:38:00.000+05:30

BAN THE

A New Beginning

2010-08-25T21:49:00.002+05:30

My piece in the End Of The Line issue of Time Out Mumbai can be read here.

Here, I try to make sense of living in Panvel.

Marad hona toh aisa hona

2010-07-04T16:22:00.003+05:30

from

'Marad ona toh aisa hona'

Amul Banner from 1986

'Mera rona to kaisa rona'

Other Amul banners featuring God's Own Hand down the years.

Diddled by Germany in the past too.

carded for substance abuse

Millennium and its discontents

2010-06-26T22:52:00.002+05:30

The one big problem with the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson is that the bad guys never, ever have a real chance of winning.

Like Greek tragedies in reverse, things go steadily downhill for the antagonists as destiny and fate, or Salander and Kalle Bloody Blomkvist decree their ultimate annihilation and/or demise. The inevitability of an Evildoers Apocalypse makes you just canter along merrily for the ride, your heartbeat and pulse rate remain at balmy normality as it all plays out and the Gurrl mit der Dragon Tattoo walks into the sunset with her stolen billions. After a point, patience does get stretched.

Very rarely in a novel in the thriller genre do you encounter such has-been, past-the-expiry-date, doofus-brained villains, all with two left feet and un-opposable thumbs. One of the many perpetrators of atrocities is actually a geriatric in a wheel-chair who is almost perpetually connected to a dialysis machine, even as he plans to shower fire and brimstone on the equally gormless Salander and Blomkvist.

To sustain an interest in nearly 2000 pages of adventure you must at least have the occasional possibility of mortality for the main characters, should you want to root for them. Here, even a bullet in the head brings no grief, and is little more than an excuse for 200 odd pages of hospital procedural. It is understood that the protagonists are not going to be bumped off (not until the very end of it all, if at all) but at least there should be the fear of such a possibility and the dread that comes with it. Even a kindersroman like Harry Potter makes us, on occasion, feel that something very, very bad is round the corner, and the anticipation of what might be raises goose pimples, as it should. Mikael Bastard Blomkvist and Lisbeth Insouciant Salander and their clueless peripherals go their merry ways like a fairy/doll house tea party in Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Forest.

The utter safety that this narrative provides is probably the reason for the books’ success. Larsson jettisons drive and anticipation for wish-fulfilment and vicarious voyeurism. If you choose to identify with the good guys, it is promised that only good things will happen to you, and you can string along until ultimately good things do happen. Larsson satisfies many forbidden urges- breaking down all barriers of the privacy of others, while keeping your own secure, procuring vast sums of money by dubious means but never getting caught (also experiencing the pleasure of spending vast sums of said monies on pleasuring the self), and of course, screwing all and sundry on two legs. How many of the main characters does Bonking Blomkvist make his conquests? Five, or six, by my last count. Pity he doesn’t swing both ways, or Larsson could have made him sleep with most of the bad guys too.

Salander’s actions, on the other hand, are a result of childhood abuse, but most of that is in the past. Her present is all about the exploitation of the system she finds herself in without responsibility or consequence. Even rape is an opportunity or strategy to get even. Victimhood for her is like some other person, another body that is constructed in the present and put to use for personal gain. Talents like cyber-hacking and passive-surveillance allow her to do pretty much anything, almost like a denizen of Krypton in Metropolis. There is never failure. While reading you are carried forward in the sugar-rush of procedures and methodology of police work, the judiciary, journalism, sting operations and publishing, of the life and mores of millennial Sweden, while all is accomplished as smoothly as a hot knife through butter.

Spare a thought for the poor sods at Tehelka. They must be gnashing their teeth in horror while reading these books. They know a thing or two about consequences.

The Romance of Red Stone

2010-04-19T21:41:00.007+05:30

You are cordially invited to the book launch of

The Romance of Red Stone

An Appreciation of Ornament
on Islamic Architecture in India

Photographs by Yashwant Pitkar	Text by Mustansir Dalvi
Published by M S Lehri Super Book House Mumbai	Hardbound 11” x11” 256 pages

Friday 23^rd April 2010, 5.30pm

at the Claude Batley Gallery

Sir JJ College of Architecture, 78/3 DN Road, Mumbai

Ms. Tasneem Mehta,

Convener, Greater Mumbai Chapter of INTACH

Honorary Director and Managing Trustee

of Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai

has kindly consented to release the book on the occasion.

We look forward to your presence
on the evening of the 23^rd.

YD Pitkar MM Dalvi

About the Book

In The Romance of Red Stone, Yashwant Pitkar presents architectural ornament as a feast of craftsmanship, an enduring romance with shape and stone in its unending variations. Pitkar’s photographs allow the viewer to appreciate Islamic ornament on architecture at a level removed from the formal- as an articulated surface. An architect first, then a photographer, Pitkar’s images reflect his love and admiration for the buildings of Delhi, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, amongst others, which he captures in a way he knows best, up close and personal.

His unique photographic gaze is like that of a Mughal miniature painter, or a Company artist, taking the viewer close to the buildings, enough to shut out the dominating forms of the architecture to be immersed right into the aesthetics of surface. For those familiar with these buildings, the photographs allow a return, a recollection of architecture as a phenomenon, giving a sensual experience of places visited; an effective feel for the infinite craft.

Pitkar’s images also work at a deeper philosophical level. The viewer is made aware of the inner meaning of aesthetic representation, of the different ways of inducing the immeasurable. The plays of multiple superimposed levels and of forms and patterns continue like an incantation beyond the photographer’s frame suggesting the infinite.

Mustansir Dalvi’s text complements Pitkar’s photographs by guiding the reader to an understanding of the variety and symbolism of ornamental forms that grace Islamic architecture, especially in the Indian context. Ornament in its many manifestations transforms the architecture, dematerializing immense monuments into elegant jewel-boxes. Dalvi shows how artisan and patron came together in India in a unique integration of two divergent world views and cultures to create a lasting syncretism of Islamic and Hindu traditions that reached its zenith in the architecture of the Mughal period.

Eclipse

2010-01-26T19:31:00.005+05:30

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?

2009-12-20T00:41:00.001+05:30

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?

2009-10-19T12:31:00.010+05:30

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.

.

Sartorial Alternatives for a Pestilent City

2009-08-11T22:33:00.030+05:30

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:

"Agar paas aane ki koshish kee, to main golee khaa loongi! Saala soovar ka bachcha!"
.
Who would you feel comfortable sitting next to on the Vasai Fast, eh? Left or right?
.

Nah! Won't work. Not really.
.

Not this, neither.

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

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!

1969, July

2009-07-21T00:06:00.002+05:30

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

2009-07-20T23:41:00.009+05:30

20th July 2009
When we were kids, ‘Apollo’ meant the Gateway of India. The harbor around the Gateway (we still board boats to Elephanta and Alibag from here) 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 moment in the history of the human race, this is it. Nothing before nor since 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 the 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 mark 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, on the walls of restaurants, on Volga ice cream wrappers 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, waving. Armstrong, Aldrin. As they swept past us, I looked at them, and waved and waved and waved.

The Cavalcade that took the Apollo 11 astronauts though Bombay on October 24, 1969

Photo Source: www.oldindianphotos.in

Thank you Sam Miller

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.

Indian First Day Cover commemorating the visit of the Apollo 11 astronauts to Bombay

Photo Source: www.indianstampghar.com

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.

A Diachronous Delving into Dhan Te Nan

2009-07-15T22:51:00.010+05:30

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.
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.
.

Blind in Granada

2009-06-29T10:17:00.006+05:30

"Dale limosna, mujer,

que no hay en la vida nada

como la pena de ser

ciego en Granada."

attributed to the Venezulean writer Francisco Alarcón de Icaza

Give alms, my dear girl,

for there’s nothing worse in life

than to be blind in Granada.

The Court of Myrtles
.

The Court of Lions

The Mirador

The Generalife

.Gardens of the Generalife

Granada is unprotected from people;

since nothing or no one can defend from praisings.

Federico García Lorca

Remember the time

2009-06-27T23:39:00.004+05:30

Michael Jackson’s explosion on our consciousness paralleled my years in college. ‘Thriller’ coincides with my second year in Architecture. Television was still the venerable and much lamented Bombay Doordarshan, and one evening they did a segment on the Grammy hopefuls. These were a long string of music videos- a relatively new phenomenon to us at the time. ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ were accompanied by David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’, Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’, even Sheena Easton’s ‘Telephone’. How do I remember all this? Because I had taped the show on an old fashioned mono cassette recorder using an external mike propped up next to the single speaker on the neighbor’s television set. I must have had this tape and heard and reheard it all through college, that’s why this stays with me. Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Live Aid all came in later years, but that year (1983) was seminal. Incidentally they never showed the Grammys, to the best of my recollection, and the memories of watching Jackson cradling his eight Gramophone replicas were from newspapers, I guess.

You knew Michael Jackson was someone else. Apart from being blown away by his dancing, it was his voice and the musical arrangements of Quincy Jones that would remain, and do even today. Just a couple of months ago ‘Thriller’ was reissued as a 25th Anniversary edition, bringing into sharp focus how we had grown, more than anything else. But the music is still fresh and continues to be part of my collection of MP3’s on my computer. Of course, after that that everyone was trying out the shaky-breaky dance movements with variable success. Mithun Chakrarvorty and Salma Agha rehashing the zombies of ‘Thriller’ in some long forgotten film still give me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it.

No one, however, could emulate the voice. In the midst of our continuing education into the Ages of Rock (Django Reinhardt onwards, by way of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Floyd, Dire Straits and beyond) Michael Jackson was our concession to POP, and he did Rock our Joint.

I remember going to the American Center Library to watch a special screening of ‘Thriller’ and ‘The Making of Thriller’ by John Landis. Why American Center? God alone knows, but even they probably acknowledged that the cultural scene was no longer the same without Jackson. The ‘Making of’ was the first for a music video, and the first behind the scenes look at filmmaking that I can remember. This was fun to watch. Jackson played his overgrown child persona and Landis indulged him (Middle to Close up shot, Landis to camera: “This is Michael Jackson. This is Michael Jackson’s toe.’ Followed by lots of tickling and giggling). Landis, of course, had just made ‘An American Werewolf in London’. ‘Thriller’ was just a reprise of that, but the prosthetic special effects were quite novel for the time (Long strand of hair growing out of face, canines sliding out of jaws like stilettos,et al). Life Magazine (defunct and lamented too) had done a many page photo feature on the great efforts it took to apply all this on the actor, and the film showed similar atrocities being heaped upon Jackson, before he could give his shots.

But the ‘Making of’ was remarkable for another memorable performance. It showed in its entirety Jackson performing ‘Billie Jean’ live at the Motown celebrations- sequined glove, white socked, with a fedora, Jackson unveiled the Moonwalk and forever embedded himself in the cultural space of popular music. I must check if the ‘Making of’ is on You Tube, it must be. The silken backward shuffle, defying gravity still gives a thrill, watching it after all these years. Plus, there is this quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that despite one’s forty five years and weighing twice that, one can still do a perfectly passable Moonwalk.

PS.
Hope you’re OK now, Annie.

Unexpected Pleasures-I -The Patio Festival, Cordoba

2009-06-13T22:37:00.012+05:30

It seemed that Cordoba would be a crushing disappointment.

We figure out a complicated way of visiting it- needing to travel there from Seville by train, train back to Seville and then board yet another for Granada- all on the same day. Having made bookings using the fairly limited windows of opportunity on offer, we land in Cordoba promptly at around ten in the morning- only to be told that the Mezquita is shut.

The Grand Mosque of Cordoba is now the fully functioning Cordoba Catedral. In an act of the most creative vandalism (after the conquest of al Andalus by Catholic hordes) the middle third of the venerable structure had been gutted and replaced with a grand cathedral that rises out of its innards like an alien chewing its way out of a human, as in the first film. From the inside, Catholic spaces rise cheek by jowl with horse-shoe arches of the Mezquita- not that we know it at the time. The minders at the gate point to some recently xeroxed notices announcing closure due to the investiture of priests that morning. Public access to be resumed only by three in the afternoon. Our train back to Seville is at three thirty, bugger it!

In a moment of inspired lunacy (Spain does tend to make one uno poco loco, in any case) we decide to hang around until three, give the mosque’s insides a once over in about five minutes flat and then run like hell for the nearest taxi to take us to the estacion- for we would see the mirhab, or bust! Ridiculous, but that leaves us with five hours to twiddle out fingers, and toes.

In mindless concentrics, we walk around the streets lining the outer walls of the mosque- and as the streets get narrower until even two persons would brush shoulders passing each other, and the crowds keep increasing making the shoulder brushing mandatory, we come across the first of the unexpected pleasures that alleviate our dampened souls. Before we know it, we are immersed in the United Colours of Geraniums. May is the season of Cordoba’s Patio Festival.

Every year at this time the old houses that line the alleyways around the mosque bloom with flowers. A competitive sport this, every space- entrance way, courtyard, balconies and window box vie for the prize of Best Patio. The crowds that we vie with for space have all turned out to gaze at these amazing displays, and scurry around from courtyard to courtyard filling up memory sticks of mobile phones and digicams with impunity and making a godawful racket while they are at it. Marvelous!

The spaces where the flowers are arrayed are little cortiles in these havelis (favelas?). Alfresco, with a small fountain on cobbles or paving and a stairway to the upper floor. Some of these spaces are not even bigger than a living room in a Bombay flat, but that is space enough to fill. Every available wall has flower pots with geraniums in full bloom (la flor de los patios), traversing every tint, tone, shade and hue from white to blood red, standing out in stark afterimage from bright green leaves and stems. The Nasirids are probably to be complemented, for these flowers originate from Africa. All these concentrations of color stand starkly against whitewashed walls bathed in the midmorning Mediterranean sunshine. Orange trees, rose bushes, clambering vines, azules ceramic plates and occasional bric a brac add to the clutter.

The Mediterranean in spring.

That nature is at its most fecund is obvious at this time in southern Europe. In the Andalus, one cannot miss trees laden with oranges- Naranja, especially in Seville, Cordoba and Granada. The twin legacies of the Nasirids, irrigation and plantation, are now the hallmarks of the region. Oranges, pomegranates and roses (roses, everywhere), probably descendants of those planted by the erstwhiles engulf you- chance encounters with color are a constant source of amazement. And yet, in Cordoba, our dip into color is unexpected, and overwhelming.

Some of the streets where the Patio Festival is held are within the Jewish barrio and we have a quick stop-over at a small but very elegant synagogue, built into the warren of houses. This reminds us of our own little Bene Israeli synagogue back home in Panvel, but this one is ornamented on the interior with Islamic geometric patterns and Hebrew Scriptures in stucco. Nearly seventy patios are opened for viewing during this time, not that we see them all, and we move and pick and choose like magpies attracted by every bright color that catches our attention until we do not quite know where we are. And then, satiated, we make our way back to the mosque to stand (sans expectations) at the head of the line.

Pretty soon an anaconda of touristas forms behind us, and the powers that are, probably thinking us a really desperate lot, open their counters at two thirty. We race through the (initially) empty mosque and fill ourselves with the sights of the forested arches and foliated domes, admire the stunningly ornamented mirhab, fuss over the absurd juxtaposition of the cathedral in a Muslim praying space, wonder about reused Roman columns, are thrilled by the recently excavated Roman mosaic floor on display- all with an extra half hour at our disposal, satisfy ourselves (to the extent possible) and run out.

We did catch our train, after all.

Unexpected Pleasures

2009-06-13T22:30:00.003+05:30

On our recent trip to Spain and France, we got a lot more than we bargained (or planned) for.

At every place (Madrid, Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Barcelona, Bilbao, Nimes, Lyon, Chartres and Paris) there was something more, something unimagined that made our experience all the more richer. Mostly a consequence of being in the right place at the right time, these unexpected pleasures made our days count all the more. We have so much to look back upon now.

In the course of the next few posts, I will share them with you.

Miros of the Spray Can

2009-05-27T06:27:00.001+05:30

16 May 2009
Spain seems to have given its vertical public spaces (of about twice human height) completely to practitioners of graffiti. There does not seem to be a single space left unmarked and unsigned. Any road, even slightly off the tourist track will have these profuse expressions of hombres at large. Although we did see some graffiti on vertical surfaces of such height that would have required rappelling skills!

Many are artistic in the fashion of the Miros of the spray can, although most are (probably) gang related territorial markers. The most vibrant and colorful graffiti that we saw was on one bank of the Guadalaquir leading up to the Alamillo Bridge in Seville.

Techniques also vary- a new form used stencils- leading to some fine work, and also work that could be replicated quickly, challenging the one off aura of larger, elaborately sprayed neighbors. A lovely one was in English that said 'Lost your (image of a) button'.

What makes graffiti a truly citizens art in Spain is the possibility of protest. Since every wall is fair game, exhortations/protestations indicate the contemporary climate. There are CCTVs everywhere and official indications to that effect. That has not stopped, probably encouraged a large graffito: 'Videosurveillance NON!' Others we saw said 'Securidad Muerte!' 'Free Catalonia' and my personal favorite- 'Errata, Ergo Sum'.

Retro fit and Retro fit

2009-05-27T06:24:00.003+05:30

There is a refreshing nonchalance in the additions to the older buildings in Madrid. The obvious public example is the addition of the elevators in the Reina Sophia Museum. A pair of slick hi-tech glass and stainless steel towers are appended to the outside of the older palacio for easy access to upper floor galleries. Visiting the Guernica deserves such a rite of passage, I suppose. These glass boxes overlook the beautiful plaza that fronts the museum, justifying the use of the scenic elevators. The words Reina and Sophia are etched large on the towers evoking memories of the fad for super-graphics in the early PoMo day of the eighties.

The point is that contemporary inserts into historical spaces are not always a bad thing. Contrast this with Raphael Moneo's addition to the Atocha Station- another building evoking the eighties and some of the horrors that Botta and Bofill were up to at the time. The interior spaces are interesting specially the train platforms themselves, which are a delight. But I am not sure how the drum-like central circulation space and the cuboid clock tower sit with the fabulousl19th century glass and iron station.

On the subject of retrofit, the last word surely goes to the lift installed in our tiny B&B- the Hostal Luz on the Arenal. Fitted in (the perhaps two feet three inches wide) stairwell of an older four floor building, the elevator is exquisite in its modernity- with all the fittings- the stainless steel and glass that made the Reina Sophia's what it is. Wide enough to accommodate me, but not me with a rucksack, making me feel like a mujera in a tube top, traveling in it made up in style, elegance and convenience whatever it lacked in volume.

Slick!

Random Tweets from Madrid

2009-05-27T06:19:00.001+05:30

8 May 2009
I am writing this on a high speed train from Madrid to Sevilla (AVS), watching the rolling flatness of central Spain speed by.

In one evening, we were able to see Picasso's Guernica, Dali's The Great Masturbator, Lumiere's Employees Leaving a Factory (1896), Velazquez' Self Portrait with the Meninas of Felix II, Durer's Portrait of the unknown man and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and the Haywain. That must amount to something.

I finally concede that there is a difference to looking at a great work of art in a book or even a high def image to standing in front of the real thing. Contemplating the Guernica- there is so much in the painting that just doesn't register in a reproduction, especially gray on gray. The delicate and harsh brush strokes of Dali need to be looked at with your nose at a distance of six inches from the naughty bits. So up yours- Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin!

The Museum of Reina Sophia has a series of photographs of Picasso's painting in various stages of completion, and the many morphs it went through, fascinating. As are the several paintings called Postscripts to Guernica. Picasso's Hombre with Goat is also a delight leading to a wistful wish- the Great Hombre himself should have made more sculptures. The twisting goat about to spring out of the man's grasp (who holds the beast almost in a wrestlers grip) is reminiscent of the twisting Laocoon.

Nothing quite beats taking the long(ish) walk from the Atocha past the Botanical Gardens and reaching the Prado to find that the entry was Gratuitas.

Our gracious landlady at the Hostal Luz is surely the reason the late Wren and the equally deceased Martin added 'onomatopoeia' in their chapter on Figures of Speech in their unlamented text on Grammar. She spoke no English and made up for it, quite successfully communicating in a mixture of machine gun Castillian and a wide variety of sound effects (Phut-pht-pht-pht!! bole to turn right)

Mario Miranda 's Bar Lady

2009-01-13T00:06:00.011+05:30

Mario’s Bar Lady
The moon presents itself above Bergstrasse edge,
disentangling from its wobbly twin on the Rhine.
White glory showers. Work weary customers
trudging in like obligatory raindrops beneath
a dim archway. A spark flies, every time
clicketyclack! heels connect with shiny stone.
A bearing swift, but in all her speed, never
a drop spilt.

Six gullets quenched by six massifs, delivered
vice like. She moves, mugs close to breast,
mugs that hardly compete with her enormity.
White apron flashes, paling the moon.
She makes her rounds: ‘Was willst du denn?’
Return order: everfoaming kegs and an aperitif-
a smile.

The brash customer mellows. Dependent on
deepening dimples, empties jealousies and terrors
with beer. Her nods advise, heaving breasts berate
whatever scratches her sensibilities. Empty flagons
can raise groaning feet, propel them homewards,
yet in passing, a mark is pressed with a wan grin:
Danke schon, Maria. ‘Bitte, libeling.’ She returns
to beckoning bar, ready to gush forth every time:
‘Bier, bitte?’

This poem was inspired by Mario Miranda's very lovely drawing posted here. This dates from March 1984, when some of his drawings from (I think) Germany in Wintertime were featured in Midday. I had cut this one out and ensconced it safely until today when I scanned it and put it up here for all to see. This is really from way back when- Indira Gandhi was still Prime Minister, and the back of this clipping retains part of an advertisement for a cola, now defunct called 'Do it'.

Rediscovering Mario Miranda

2009-01-12T00:57:00.016+05:30

On a recent visit to Goa, I had the opportunity of visiting a work in progress- a museum to house the works of the cartoonist Mario Miranda by the architect Gerard da Cunha. Apart from the delight of seeing a building at the bare bones stage (a delight for any architect, as any fule kno), it was the rekindling of association with the lines and forms, the crosshatching and the subtle colour infills of a cartoonist and illustrator whom people of my vintage 'grew up with'.

We knew Mario before we knew R.K. Laxman. Mario's illustrations filled our English textbooks- the venerable Bal Bharati. Right from 'This is Tim. This is Mini.' from Standard I to the later and deeper poems of Walter Scott (Kenilworth), we negotiated the byways of language mainly because of the illustrations that went with them. Mario could be funny, caricaturish but also dark and noirish as needed, and we absorbed this all. Mario's illustrations are now part of the visual vocabulary inside me and there is always a frisson, a kickback of nostalgia when I encounter (now rarely) his work.

His cartoons and illustrations were all around us too in the seventies and the eighties- mainly in the now defunct (and missed) Illustrated Weekly of India and several newspapers including the Times and Midday. These were of course contemporary and political, although Mario could, on occasion delight with full page spreads teeming with more characters that Michelangelo's Last Judgement but identifiable as people around us. Mario is from Goa, but for us Mario was quintessential Bombay- with buses, beggars, big bodied and bare bodied Bombayites teeming in Boribunder and Bhendi Bazaar. The word 'buxom' may have been coined specially for Mario's women- from the society ladies of Bombay to the fisherwomen of Goa- all bulging impossibly fore and aft.

Although Gerard da Cunha's museum is yet to see a single drawing installed, the architect must be commended for the monumental archive of Mario's work he has put together for a single book- 'Mario de Miranda', published by Architecture Autonomous and Art India. It has over 2000 images of Mario's work (sadly no Bal Bharati reprints though) from all the decades of his active life and it is a delight to possess. I have been immersed in it for the past few days and have no immediate need to emerge from it sometime soon. I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who knows his work (or doesn't).

Mario's work is also an architect's delight. In his later illustrations are single drawings of Goa, New York, Paris and Portugal, detailed and evocative of both time and place. Mario's work put together is a sociological document of many decades of work. You only need to see the New York suite to know that this is the city from the early Scorsese/Taxi Driver days and not the post Giuliani/post9/11 present.

Gerard da Cunha has also put an extensive exhibition of Mario's ouvre in the Cymroza, which I have yet to

see. Fortunately it is still up for a few more days.

...and in the end the memories of the Bal Bharati days still most vivid are Mario's renderings of hands- open and clasped, fingers extended and expressive, that speak to me across the years. Yes, they are all there in the book and are as evocative as I remember them.

The illustration by Mario displayed here is of the coming of the Konkan railway-

a wish fulfilling event about a decade ago for most of its denizens.

Memory is fickle

2009-01-11T23:37:00.004+05:30

Memory is fickle, as any fule kno.

The internet, particularly broadbanded, has been a great resource for retrival - for the remembrance of things past. Music, images, snatches of culture, bits of film, the books, comics the quirks of childhood and middlehood all bob about together like so much flotsam, allowing one to wallow about to heart's content. It is a life kept alive and enriched.

After four and a half decades, this trackback is oddly reassuring. One can go arm first into the mulch of the world wide web, feel about for an hour or two and come up trumps. This assurance is satifying. Saving to favorites and occasionally downloading allows the retention of these snippets of one's past in much the same unorganised manner as the protagonist tattoos information about himself on different part of his body in Christopher Nolan's Memento.

This blog is another way to tattoo for the short term memory challenged. Keeping the mundane day to day alive for no other reason than to wallow in later. I have never had much truck with keeping a diary. But going headfirst into the blogworld is another kettle of fish, as any fule kno.