Bombay / Mumbai

I left Bombay 16 odd years ago. So every visit, is a snapshot in time. I witness Bombay transforming into Mumbai, a different city from the one I fondly remember growing up in. I often find myself searching for familiarity, an accidental artifact omitted by the wave of reconstruction, a compound wall, a tree, an edge, a gutter, a road, a building even, embedded like shrapnel within the new, accumulating dust, soot and memories. Like China Mielville’s The City and the City, the two cities coexist one renewed other in decay. The street I grew up in has changed from four storeys to twenty storeys, spaces in between reduced to mere offsets. The building that has my childhood home lies in ruins, abandoned and uncared for in light of imminent reconstruction. Views of the surrounding tropical landscape once afforded by these four storey buildings, have been replaced by collage of windows. Windows that bombard you with varying shades of light and sounds from lives of others that look towards you as voyeuring, co-witnesses of an imminent, deliberate, collective tragedy...Only place where my beloved suburban Bombay survives is in my friend, Kiran's home in a small gifted painting, preserved in time for us to reminisce and savour nostalgia of spaces lost.

Tower top study and trailing thoughts

 

What if top two sought after floors for Penthouses spread through, not two but 13-14 floors creating additional value through multiple duplex-penthouse like conditions. Is there a possibility to illustrate creation of greater value through eroding the top of a high end residential tower on prime city land?

A study I am doing while in Athens (Greece) surrounded by Athenian Polykatoikias that seem to rather nonchalantly provide much needed semi public open spaces in the form of terraces for predominant housing units in the city. A good book for reading up on these is The Public Private House: Modern Athens and its Polykatoikia by Dr Richard Woditsch. Some preview images in here.
What is interesting is Athens celebrates and appreciates terraces as an architectural element integrated within its urbanity while other cities have moved away from provision of terraces or balconies for their citizens and thereby leading to its value as a luxury add on (penthouse flats).
The terrace or the balcony works as a transitionary zone, neither completely public nor private it allows for a degree of openness towards the street frontage facilitating passive surveillance and safer streets, animates the façade and street section (vs brick clad "dignified" monoliths of London's new built developments), facilitates micro-climate through planting and thereby temperature variations, allows for distributing accessible per capita open space. What is most endearing is this element of architecture is not exclusive or luxury, it is available for most of the citizens who live in Athens.

There is value in this architectural element especially in post pandemic times, so as a design professional always ask why no terraces and balconies? Why could there be terraces during council estates or when they built the Barbican in London and not now? How did Charles Correa manage to give terraces in Mumbai to LIC residents and now they aren't possible despite the boom in real estate? and if someone responds the math doesn't add up...keep calm and carry on, but aware you are in less generous city.

Something about exclusivity of architectural elements by class that is rather pissing off, imagine if access to lifts were based on being wealthy and the rest had to take the stairs? or if there was segregation of toilets by class? because the math for providing everyone a higher spec did not add up? wouldn't that be outrageous?

Space Vacated

I remember the first day of my architectural training (1999 Bombay) started with the then Director of the school giving us an introductory talk. He emphasised on the diversity and flexibility afforded by architectural education where numerous students had gone ahead to do work that was only peripherally connected to the act of building. 
This flexibility over the years has allowed professionals to use the knowledge gained, towards working with NGOs, starting Art practises, Film making, CGI animations, Robotics, Cooking…turning into Magicians et al. While some have been genuine choices, others have come about through helplessness to find a legitimate venue to intervene as architects.
The individuals who stressed on structure of knowledge / way of thinking have moved to other professions from where they attempt to map, critique, frame ideas. This move has resulted in an intellectual void, a vacated space which has been filled by: 
1) Individuals who have the necessary inheritance and entitlement of networks and capital required to build and intervene as architects and with ease facilitated by having trained in the knowledge of structure, like Haussmann they are blameless extensions of the current system.
2) Labour force which wants to continue in the profession but being financially compromised through student debt / pressures of day to day subsistence, incapacity to take risk etc do not have a voice, so most tend to submit to the “that’s how the world turns” scenario.
This has compromised the quality of design as well and the discourse in the profession of design. It can be a multidisciplinary team with an all-encompassing multidisciplinary effort, but the final deliverable is built environment. The concerns are still to do with proportions, form, space and order. Not having capacity to interpret the “big picture” (gained through countless excel sheets, onsite interviews, GIS, etc) into specific interpretation as a committed form / space, according to me is wasted effort.
I feel to once again produce meaningful work that serves communities / people / society we as designers need to reclaim that space where design is envisioned, designed and delivered. When we do, through experiments and some failures we may bring back sense of hope and purpose that the profession was meant to have.

Bombay Pixels

Some friends I have could go on for hours talking about the assertion of individual identities on Bombay's skyline...any simpler explanation from me like "maybe there are 6 people joint families in every room"...nope...
Some who come from Ahmadabad with stronger roots into Indian-red-clay-tradition could provide me explanation  of the cultural context and how the particulate pollution outside that settles on the wet clothes works as a herbal remedy etc...if I even start "maybe...225 sq. ft of accommodation does not really allow space for wet pajamas."...nope...
Some with more urban-metropolitan leanings tend to come up with rather cute branding terms like "Bombay Pixels" etc and normalise things...sometimes actually even revel in the beautiful complexity that is Bombay...the pollution - intoxicates you, the density - supports you, the complexity - enriches you and corruption...nope...stop patronising.
5th December 2017 to 28th December 2017....groan.

10 Comrades

I love Bombay; while I think of it sitting in the comforts of my London home, thinking it is about time someone made a difference out there. But while I grow beard and hatch plans for revolution I think about the colourful comrades I met while back in Bombay.

I felt it was important to record these colourful comrade-specimens before these last animals of a disappearing species go extinct, driven away to greener pastures. "Yes it is important to map the people, not the space!" a friend of mine exclaimed with finger pointing to the sky in the manner of Lord Krishna dispensing Bhagvat Geeta. Space didn’t matter, people made space and if we map people space would fall in space..or place, depending on whether one is Cartesian or Phenomenonlogisticalist! (A new field of phenomenology but only 1000 times richer discovered in a recently found papers by Jacques Derrida who uses excerpts from Gaston Bachalard’s hand written but never published papers that almost got lost while he on the verge of clinical claustrophobia tried burning his work, to suggest "it does go much deeper" and we have only scratched the surface in phenomenology and its sequel Phallogocentriology).

So here goes:

Please note, despite these comrades also being my very close friends, I as an unbiased writer/mapper, have tried maintaining a cold, detached and almost scientific attitude while interacting with them and writing about them (though we only know too well there is no such thing as the unbiased eye, maybe unbiased spleen...maybe, but one can never tell). So in the manner of David Attenborough in Madagascar, I in Mumbai note and report:

Comrade 1: (Day to Day constructive acts comrade): Jigisha Khandelwal born to a filthy rich industrial tycoon, was also coincidentally an optimist, optimism not stemming from her Marwari wealth or her schooling from Eton, Harvard and Yale, but from her deep faith that just like her fafda eating ancestors had invented philanthropy in India, she too could make a difference.

 She explained her family employed 5 people (job creation!!), a gardner (Santosh), a maid (Sakkubai ofcourse), a driver (Mangesh), a guard or watchmen (Tejbahadur) and a cook (Lata tai). She said these people are like a family to us. On enquiring why Sakku bai (who was meanwhile sweeping the floor around us) had stayed for past 40 years in exactly same spot while Jigisha and her family became more prosperous, Jigisha gave a shriek of anger. She pointed angrily to Sakkubai and said she IS a family to us and is here by her choice. Sakkubai by now having guessed the discussion in English may have involved her, asked alarmingly "Jiggi beta sagla kai tikh?" (Jiggi dear everything okay?). This is when Jiggi beta did something shocking, she got up, hugged Sakkubai and went to have a bath (not because she felt that was hygienic thing to do but it was time for her to have a bath), Sakkubai after the hug continued looking at me intently for couple of minutes in the manner of a suspicious bull mastiff and went back to sweeping the floor (not because she had to sweep the floor but because she liked to...supposedly).

Comrade 2: (We got the whole thing wrong Comrade): Mandar Apte had grown into a grizzly wearing a very tight marine blue lacoste t-shirt that seemed to work more as corset and give Mandar's breathing a whizzing quality. He was the the first to recognise me, while I desperately tried to look away. I had to look away as this guy had earned himself a pungent aura of sweat and piss. We shook hands and without wasting time Mandar exclaimed in the manner of Zac Galifinakis in a standup, "we got the whole thing wrong dude! hahaha", his manner suggesting that he was now enlightened by the right way to go about "the thing". I was able to continue the conversation by holding my breath for 2 minutes, after which I would excuse myself and go a little away from the table, take massive gasps of fresh air and come back. Mandar fortunately for me didn’t notice that, he was too euphoric singing Jim Connell's Red Flag and waving his 3 pitchers of beer (all held in his grizzly paw) in the air and laughing hysterically.

We sat there for 4 hours past midnight, in a dingy bar drinking beer and Mandar explaining how everything we had thought of was way wrong, but on insisting on the point of right way to go about “it”, he would give vague burps and order more beer.

Comrade 3: (Demonstration Comrade): On hearing I was in the city, Hari Prasad had visited home, wearing a biege kurta from Fab India. Hari having done his MA in Indian languages, spoke fluent Bodo and Dogri and had studied history of Gondia between 3^rd Nov 1265 AD to 22^nd Jan 1285 AD (he was the only historian specialized in that region for that time period). He was actively demonstrating in various protest marches for and against various issues affecting and not affecting India. "I love candle light vigils, they have such a peaceful quality..., for some time as a break I think i will be sticking to them, maybe after couple of months I may take part in a rape protest", Hari said with a certain sense of satisfaction. On enquiring about his health he replied, "I had joined in on the anti corruption hunger strike, but the government just won’t budge and we had to call off the strike because everyone was so damn hungry bhai!” Here was a man who had made demonstration a way of life. While leaving he removed a donation box and asked me for donations for tribals of Andaman and Nicobar islands. I gave him 500 rupees, he looked at me with disgust in his eyes and asked, "we are demonstrating for children’s safety on the western railway tomorrow, will you join us?" On replying no, he spat in my aquarium and left.

Comrade 4: Undercover Comrade (Poor are genetically inferior, lazy and therefore poor comrade): Rajiv Kukreja born to a developer had grown with us but always seemed to censor his thoughts, but no more he said as we sat at the dinner table in his 8 storey 'bungalow'. He went on to elaborate, however rich he was he worked very very hard to earn money while the poor laze reluctant to even earn their livelihood! This time I had the pleasure of spitting in his aquarium.

Comrade 5: (Comrade Comrade) (elder brother of Comrade 4, they haven’t exchanged a single word for the past 30 years which is shocking as they are 31 now): Amol Kukreja used to live in Bandra in a plush flat, but he sold everything off to buy a small printing press and a flat in Nala Sopara. The newspaper he tried to publish called Nava-Horizon didn’t do very well and he had lost all his money...maybe because he had tried printing newspapers on inkjet printers. He offered me a soup being cooked at home, I refused, because I had seen him put an old shoe in the pot. He had stood by his principles and presently wanting to share a shoe soup with me.

Comrade 6: (with and against comrade): Geeta Joshi whose Napoleon complex had only given her a strategic vantage point to develop a “with and against” “mechanism”, in quotes highlighted by her with hooked fingers gesture. She explained me this with and against mechanism, which certainly had done her well. She said how she worked for multinationals interested in entering the Indian market, but with the money she earned she would publish a book critiquing the very same companies, hoping that the book would sell, spread the word, make her some more money in the process and most importantly give her some conference invites. On the whole this was a theory of “spontaneous simultaneity” (orang utan hooked fingers gesture for in quotes again)

Comrade 7: Reluctant Rich Recluse Comrade (commonly called high on pot comrade): Could not meet Harshad Shah, as he was reclusive, high on pot and reluctantly well to do, as the name suggests.

Comrade 8: Small microscopic inserts Big Global change comrades (plural because they are twin sisters one a Virologist and the other a IT programmer both trying to invent a virus): Nanda and Manda Malwankar spoke alternating words thereby completing a sentence, with the punch line being said in chorus. I believe this feat in communication was possible due to their strong and common sense of faith that the key to change is often a small strand of hair lost in the Atlantic or the Grand Canyon or Deccan Plateau (which ever decreases the chances of finding it the most). Virologist believed greed could be cured because it was all genetic, she just had to make a virus, while the IT programmer believed that infecting all transaction with a computer virus that could deduct fair taxes and create a leveling field, both had named their future creations Anna Hazare.

Comrade 9: Lost Battle Alcoholic Comrade (usually hangs out with Comrade 7, who also pays for his drinks and other expenses): Rohit Vora having failed entering into any of the top universities abroad with his thesis on “Role of Educational Institutions in Global Capitalism” had sadly taken solace in alcoholism.

Comrade 10: (Happily Married Comrade or Also can be referred to as Nostalgic “Those were the days” Comrade): name speaks for itself.

By now you may have realised that these colourful endemic individuals living their day to day lives trying to adapt to the fast changes taking place on their seven islands (it is actually 6, but 7 sounds so damn poetic that they counted a float to be the seventh, which also had the only Maharashtrian Koli fisherman sitting on top) as they evolve new limbs, appendages, feathers to compete for food, nourish their young ones and finally simply to just survive.

At this point in time it is difficult to tell if they are pimping or limping their cause!

Elephants in Bombay

1) A City Ages

City:
Mumbai over the past few years has come to be a city that is in a constant state of construction. As if the audacious concretization aspires to compete with the speed and scale of natural deterioration within the city, where built forms catch dust, moss, cracks and crumble, very often at a rate faster than the human bodies that inhabit it. Signs of age seem to climb over every object, building and person like creepers that grow slowly but with a fierce determination rooted in consciousness of the inevitable outcome.
Presently raising the FAR/FSI is seen as a solution to trigger regeneration, but I only wonder what would happen in another 40 to 50 years when these 20 to 25 storey towers grow old and are crumbling, what would be the collateral then? How would the deficit between the true cost of maintenance and affordability based on earning capacities be rationalized  What kind of maintenance model will be required if the option of raising FSI is no longer viable? Or will a constant flow of infrastructure projects allow continuous expansion? Either which ways, this dialectics of ageing and reconstruction are here to tango till the bubble bursts or life here becomes unbearably agonizing and people migrate to second tier cities.
Through this turmoil of injections of new infrastructure, new construction, old decaying fabric, the city is in a state of constant change and that too with rapid speed, making it unable for someone to completely be able to grasp or even conjecture the nature of an intermediate state it tries to evolve towards.

Most of the spaces of my childhood memories have been forgotten by the city only to be replaced by skeletal concrete monoliths that form a wall depriving the city the very symbol of future hope, the line where the sea and sky meet, the horizon.

Friends:
Most of us are now old enough to savour nostalgia, a feeling that comes when the balance between past reaches a critical limit in relation to the future, enjoying memories of what it used to be like and city that Bombay once was and how it has come to be Mumbai. The utopian optimism of being able to fight back, small intervention-big change attitude has been replaced by either proposals that are geared towards damage control (Zizek's capitalism but with a human face) or intense mapping exercises (AMO's this is the present, now and here and no use resisting it), and so interestingly most sentences in most conversation seem to start with the word "interestingly", summing up the total disconnection that professionals have from the built environment, restricted to purely being witnesses that record, re-record and represent these recording in subversive ways to balance the guilt of impotency.
Like everything else, age has caught up if not with them then with people close to them, as they try to find solutions to the state of ageing in this city.

Grandparents:
My grandmother who has crossed 85, recently moved in our home. Her frail and fragile body bears witness to this city she lived in, her entire life, Dadar Shivaji Park (1937 to 1951),Thane Charai (1951 to 1960), Goregaon Pandurangwadi (1960 to 1962), Cotton Green Kala Chowki (1963 to 1985), Mulund (1986 to 2012),Borivali (2012 onwards). Having short term memory she constantly enquires of her grandchildren once an hour which my father patiently responds to, in manner as if the question was never asked before.
My maternal grandfather lives with my aunt and struggles through with similar problems of age.
This state of vulnerability and return to innocence according to me is the most merciless but yet in some ways appropriate form of redemption to our existence, and deserves the dignity that this fast paced, aggressive city very often cannot afford.

A Thesis on old age homes:
A friend of mine, Namrata Kapoor, few years back had researched and designed an old age home as a thesis topic. One of the issues that she dealt with was the relevance of having old age and its supporting institutions within the city and and not exiled outside the city limits as is the case with lots of old age homes here. I wonder given the changes that have taken place within this city and the aggression that seem to increase exponentially with increase in density and shortage of resources, would the question of "is old age relevant to this city?" needs to be reframed as "is this city relevant for old age?"

The process/state of ageing here is not a noble one, dignified with responsibilities of holding our collective past, neither is it Clint Eastwood commanding respect and a farewell with a finale, rather it is a sad process of decay and suffering and old age only inhibiting memories...bearing witness to this nature of change to me is somewhat like asking a grandparent do you remember me and seeing their eyes desperately search for signs of recognition in your face, just as i search for fast eroding spaces from my childhood in the city of Mumbai.

2) A City comes of Age
Optimism:
As Bombay grows in infrastructure and density, amid all the chaos there seems to be a sense of optimism from some people whom i spoke to, of things changing rapidly (for good or for worse was not of much concern, but the speed), and within that rapidity one has to fish opportunity at the precise moment it jumps towards you (think of Alaskan bears catching salmon). This strange optimism only seems to be growing, as if with a little more toil, little more risk and little more compromises the battle with the city would be won; dreams, desires and aspirations fulfilled. As one of my friend back in Bombay said, over the past 1 year he can see the boom of a booming economy. 

Faith:
Another one explained that a lot of things presently seem to work purely out of good faith, like the experience of crossing a highway and having good faith in the driver that he wont run over you, while the driver having complete faith in you breaking the traffic signal and crossing from unexpected places, so his speed is slow and he is more alert than an average driver abroad. 
The complexity that Bombay shelters provides for a constant source of study, research, mapping, representation and interventions, built and unbuilt, professional and academic of various scales. the opportunities and potentials are endless..the unrest will follow..."it is only a matter of time...have faith..."

3) Elephants in the City

To me witnessing changes in Bombay is like the experience of seeing elephants in the middle of the city. One is immediately struck by awe at the magnificence of the beast, only to dwell on how the animal survives and then looking carefully at damages that the city life has done to it. It is surreal experience with certain sense of strange optimism mixed with melancholia(?). There are no absolutes here, as even elephants dissolve away in the noise and smog of the city.

The Ball Project

Prajakt Patil a friend and former classmate from KRVIA, has done something which very few of us have been able to, an active on field intervention within the context that we so dearly love and love to talk about.

While we remain bar-tendering each other various bottom up theories of understanding, mapping and intervening in a city like Mumbai without thinking of the interface or re-representation required so that these mappings go beyond the closed socio-economic circles and to the people, community and groups being mapped and represented, Prajakt and his colleague have done just the opposite. 

The sheer simplicity of their method and clarity of intent absolves them of any naivety that may get leveled onto them by anyone (bearded academician doing complex mapping exercises to gain funding from contradictory sources but intending to subvert the hierarchy through 'wink wink it could also be read otherwise' paraphrasing).

Vitriol aside, but this is a truly brilliant work that needs all the support and appreciation that it deserves. Here is a slide show that Prajakt was happy to share and explains the aim and method adopted. Truly brilliant work.

Istanbul

(Elevation of the Asian side of Istanbul as seen from the Bosphorus)
Few weeks back in India some of my friends (who are planners) and me were involved in a debate around possible development trajectory for cities with large percentage of informal housing, multiple tenancies, incremental development etc. Our discussion was mostly around Bombay and how 67% of it is informal with an additional 20% old city housing and so acknowledging it to be a 'slum city' or 'informal city' could be a first step towards finding the right solutions. Seeing the role of the designer under threat and not really believing in 'people / community knows best' I tried to defend otherwise, but after my recent visit to Istanbul, I believe maybe there is a possibility of developing multiple decentralised solutions that incorporate the presence of the informal and at the same time have a diversity of design intervention that plug into such a landscape...
...its all up to our favourite underpaid intern sitting in some basement to crack this now....

Kiran's Window

London International Documentary Festival

My friend Mukul had two of his film screenings at the London International Documentary Festival, Vertical City and Certified Universal both of which were being screened at the Horse Hospital. I could make it for the Certified Universal, a beautiful short film with the audience relishing every second of the film as images from films and the city fused together to form Bombay.
I remember reading Berger where he writes there are numerous paintings of water lilies, haystacks, sunflowers and nudes, but only a few come to be truly beautiful where the artist and art merge and are inseparable. For me Certified Universal was one such beautiful film in which I see the city, the film and Mukul, all tightly composed in 14 minutes.

Watercolours

I received this in my inbox today sent by a friend. If you are in Bombay and you were a student of Architecture or Arts sometime during the past 20 years, then this is an exhibition you would not want to miss.

Here is the rest of text from the email:

"Kamla Raheja Foundation presents an Exhibition of Prof. Shriniwas Kudalkar's Water Colours and Illustrations.

Shriniwas Ramchandra Kudalkar (b. 1934) is an alumnus of Sir JJ School of Architecture (Batch of 1954). Fondly called Kudalkar Sir, he is a teacher par excellence who has been teaching at KRVIA for the past seventeen years since 1994. He has also taught at Sir JJ School of Architecture since 1964. He is an inspiration for students and colleagues by virtue of his ability to craft each of his Building Technology lectures- beginning with the plans and fleshing out the details thus bringing to life the process of construction.

Not many people know that before commencing his education as an architect, he had already completed a certificate course in fine arts and also apprenticed with a commercial artist.  His students at the JJ school in his early years of teaching have had the good fortune to witness him painting during their study tours.

On behalf of the Kamla Raheja Foundation, It is with immense pleasure that we announce a public exhibition of his paintings in at least three locations beginning at KRVIA- 10th to 17th March 2011 (1pm to 7pm except on Sunday).

An inaugural function of the exhibition reminiscing his earlier years of teaching will be held at the KRVIA on 10th, thursday at 3pm, followed by tea at 4:30pm.

Out of a collection of 174 of the surviving paintings in his possession, we have selected around 50 paintings and a few artworks and illustrations."

I hope I get to see some images from the exhibition.

Lions of Baghdad

(Rene Magritte's painting titled Homesickness, done in 1941. Image source: http://www.surrealists.co.uk/viewPicture/131/)
During the Iraq invasion/genocide one of the bombs happened to fall on the Baghdad zoo, granting some surviving animals a taste of sudden 'freedom'. A daily carried an article on this incidence of lions in the middle of Baghdad very similar to the cover photograph of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes (from the Gulf War) but only more surreal due to the city around. The juxtaposing of the beast, the war and the urban area around made up for a very surreal image that till date only existed in Rene Magritte's Homesickness. The atmosphere/subject of a surreal painting had come to be our present state of existence, where freedom is an abstract concept and democracies have become just another tool of subjugation.


(Images from the Graphic Novel "The Pride of Baghdad" by Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon)
This incidence has inspired two things, a graphic novel called "The Pride of Baghdad" and a recently released Greek play with the name translating as "Lions". Both the mediums, the graphic novel and the play choose to look at concepts of freedom through this incidence, with narration from the lions' point of views as they witness the war, escape to freedom and stroll along the burning streets of war inflicted Baghdad only to die at the hands of American soldiers who appreciate the beauty of the beasts but have to kill them to protect themselves. After the war, Iraq is being rehabilitated, the animals have been domesticated and the zoo itself is being 'Disneylanded' with American Freedom.


(some images from the greek play "Lions" by Vassilis Mavrogeorgiou and Kostas Gakis, with a google translate here and a greek review here)
My own sense of freedom seems to have been stripped off and every day pushes me a little more to get institutionalised within the rush hour jostling, tiffin carrying, law abiding Dilbertian office going crowd for whom living dangerously constitutes giving a print command without a preview...

Material World

(Generic building typologies in Bombay, First image is Raheja Universal Towers, Second image is of Ariisto Heaven I coming up at Mulund West. Image source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1234)
Adolf Loos rolled in his grave and maybe dug deeper, while Mumbai Architects, Contractors and Builders actively participated in ornate material orgy at the ACE Architectural Materials Exhibition in the NSE Grounds, Goregaon. Except for a few technological innovations most stalls exhibited cladding, draping and tiling materials. Finishes of various textures, colours and ornaments to clad generic designs and make them true reflections of different individuals' equally generic identities.

(Image of NG Royal Heights at Andheri, image source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1234)

(Flat Layout diagram of VS Group of builder's, image source: http://www.vsgroup1.com/floor_plan.php )
Interior design as a field here has become something that validates exploitative building trends like reduced ceiling heights, smaller rooms, bad construction quality etc. and works around these "challenges" to change finishes, break some walls, invent 'innovative' furniture (maybe cupboard during the day and your bed during the night kind of bullshit) and turn one generic space into another.
Modernists have died, instead what remain are petty contractors bickering over percentages of material costs, whose interiors are expensive, impressive to look at but still very very generic, sterile and with no formal imagination, and this exhibition reflected all that.
Or maybe it is just me...

Bridges over Chronopolis

(Collage by artist Boris Bilinsky, City Art work for Metropolis c.1926-7, sourced from the Tate Liverpool website: here)
Like the Overload device from Surrogates (where every individual experiences the environment through a robotic surrogate), Bombay's density ensures that every facet of life is pickled with an overloaded complexity, sometimes irritatingly to an extent where everything is an abstraction of an abstraction, a post production of sorts that has completely forgotten its borrowed source. The combination of massive densities (12 million of us in 30 degree Celsius, shit, sweat and dust) and less resources turns the train stations into highly contested spots where concerned 'citizens' (local residents claiming authority/ ownership through their rights towards property), shopkeepers, hawkers, cops, eunuchs, beggars and commuters all stage a daily show of physical endurance, of Olympian proportions.

(Art work by Hugh Ferriss done for the Metropolis of Tomorrow. More images uploaded by Kosmograd here)
So in such a scenario the State Government attempting to untangle this complexity by distributing people in various levels through pedestrian bridges is hilarious and amazing at the same time. If the government goes as crazy with these pedestrian bridges as it went with the paver blocks, then we may even have an amazing cobweb of bridges crisscrossing above the city. In case of Bombay I believe, various bridge typologies like the flyovers, sky-walks, highway pedestrian bridges etc are similar to Viktor Ramos's Bypass Urbanism project, where the urge to bypass the chaotic complexity below is more stronger than desire to bridge places.
It would be interesting to see what nocturnal activities find refuge in these bridges and would they turn into corridors of sleeping, homeless bodies or isolated echo-tubes reverberating with memories of the morning stampede.

(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
Contrary to the delicate, minimal almost invisible structures preferred in European context, I like these elephant foot, over-reinforced columned bridges (a "creative" response to a design challenge by a Municipal engineer no doubt) which in some odd way celebrate the half a million people-crowd marching to their jobs everyday, every year and rest of their lives, like some Soviet monuments.

(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
I also wonder if finally the pedestrian too, like the motorist has found a good vantage point to enjoy the city but from a comfortable distance without getting his feet dirty. Maybe in some more years we may witness the first ever pedestrian traffic jam on one of these bridges with people stuck for 4 - 5 hours due to someone walking in the wrong direction.


(Photo by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar of Skywalk bridge at Borivali)
Few years back I had also heard a proposal to deal with the train crowding during peak hours, where various government and private offices could be told to stagger their opening and closing hours by half an hour, thereby distributing densities in different time slots. What is amazing is this possibility where the city continues to accommodate higher densities but divides those densities through time and space, different populations of the same city living in different time zones staggered by half an hour and different levels that get built slowly one above the other, somewhat like a combination of J G Ballard's Chronopolis and Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City. The level and time occupied by a person would be based on the economic status.
The only question is at which level and time zone difference will the city be when Violence erupts...

Two Articles

2 very good articles by Arundhati Roy:
1) The Monster in the Mirror
Which is on the terrorist attack that took place in Bombay (hope the MNS isn't here)
2) The Greater Common Good
On the Narmada Dam project, forwarded to me by Aditya Sudhakar (Pottu).
update to the above post:
I found an article written by Ramachandra Guha reacting to Arundhati Roy's above article Greater Common Good...his article titled: The Arun Shourie of the Left
...to which she reacts in the following interview: Scimitars in the Sun

Shivaji

The State Government of Maharashtra after making a provision of Rs 200 crore (almost 4.5 million US Dollars) in its budget, appointed a technical committee headed by Chief Minister Ashok Chavan that has selected 3 architects from among 11 competing firms for the project of installing a 305 feet high (92.69 metres) statue of the Maratha king Shivaji. The statue will be on an artificial island off the shore of Marine Drive in the Arabian Sea and will also accommodate a library, a museum and an amphitheatre.
The short-listed firms include RG Patki Architects Pvt Ltd, Nitin Parulekar Architects Pvt Ltd and Team One Architects (Bharat S. Yamsanwar). In a state starved for infrastructure, amenities, social housing, with a growing farmer suicides this project is a strong indication of the sorry state of our so called democracy. The Indian Institute of Architects has approved of this so called "International Architectural Competition PWD Maharashtra" on their website.
Maybe in due course of time going by the nature of interstate politics we might have the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal littered with statues of different sword yielding, gun aiming and finger pointing local leaders representing different groups of politics, religion, caste, sub caste, tribe, race, language, region and everything that constitutes our cultural diversity. Sad, we can just stand and watch, while our representative-goons in politics recast history into skewed monstrosities. It is time to dress in white, hold hands, light candles and throw flowers (dominantly fashionable method of protest adopted by the very aggressive urban bourgeoisie in Bombay). Idiots.

Buried Treasure of Bomb Bay

Around 1940 two men Madhukar Vaidya and Pandurang Achrekar worked at the Bombay Docks. Every month they brought back with them their nominal wages and loads of stories to their families. Port stories of smuggling, tax evasions, fire and many more, of this geography that got touched by vessels and ships that came from far off magical places. These stories were passed on from them to their children and finally inherited by the grandchildren. One such story that I had vague memory happened to resurface in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay lost & found. A story which grandfathers working at the docks unfailingly describe to their grandchildren as the day it rained gold bricks, the day of SS Fort Stikine (14th April 1944). Mehta describes:

“The disaster of the Fort Stikine is with us still. Bars of gold from the ship were being found as late as the 1970s, during dredging operations at the docks. But there was a mountain of more base debris from the explosion, and the British municipal authorities chose to create a landfill out of it. They started filling in the Back Bay, where the mangroves used to be, in what is now Nariman Point..."

Thus the raining gold bricks from Fort Stikine laid the foundations for the development of highest commercial real estate rental space in the world (1995 @ $175 per square foot or $1880/sq. m.). This was also a point in time when the War actually touched Bombay, as it was the smuggled ammunition/explosives cargo that caught fire and was responsible for such a big explosion. My grandfathers described this incident to me as experiences at ground level, which I tend to imagine with sepia tints, of the sound, the smoke, the debris and most of all the gold & silver. For me this is one of the very few stories where personal, urban and global histories collide into a single narrative of conspiracy, buried treasure and everything else that makes cities & its people
...And to this day somewhere in the water lies a buried treasure waiting to be discovered by the brave soul who can swim through human faeces, industrial waste, Ganapati clay, animal carcasses, plastic bags, feathers, dead beggar and other day to day things that we choose to avoid direct confrontations with.

Bombay Meri Jaan

Las Meninas: I lived in Bombay for 25 years or a fourth of a century, in units of historians for whom time and space have to be encapsulated in magnitudes that allow for comprehension of change, like the slow motion capture of movement of plants by David Attenborough. My visit to Bombay after almost a period of two years is like a stop motion animation that simulates movements through the recording of frames of differences, between what was and what is, with me constantly collecting differences in the name-place-animal-thing and everything else that changed or moved. A new building along the corner, a redevelopment of a club, a new gate, new shops, lesser trees, more dust and everything as aggressive as it is supposed to be in this city exactly the way I left it. When I was away from it, I lived in its nostalgia, romanticizing the informal (which I believe is our only way to reconcile with exploitation so obviously before us and our helplessness to do anything about it), talking about The Alternative (our only sense of hope and redemption, hinged on a typology detail.... takes me back to my school days) and schemes, strategies and tactics (our means of avoiding direct confrontations and giving Guerilla warfare a bad name); but now the brackets seem to antithesis the words, like the thin layer of heat-dust that seems to bother me where ever I go, my very own, personal spores of blame.
Maybe I am in a state of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas where the mirror keeps switching the object, artist and the observer, mixing subjectivity and objectivity into a yin yang polluting every argument, rhetoric or fact that I knew. But as John Berger (Shape of Pocket) puts it, the best paintings are the ones where the artist and the object fused together into an inseparable mass of narratives, maybe these blind spots within my experience of Bombay may provide for some new method/perspective of mapping.
Mapping: While I am on the topic of mapping, the predominant nature of interventions being carried out within Bombay’s academic circles seems to be of mapping, if mapping is indeed an intervention (I have begun having my doubts about that). Like multiple individuals with different cameras with varying focal lengths, zooms, filters we continue to map the city from various vantage points, some through our professional sphere and some as a personal indulgence, but we map, tirelessly. The data gathered in the Mumbai Reader alone is more than enough to provoke all sorts of interventions, but unfortunately through fire and floods we wait with expectations and nothing happens. The maps form an archive and the archives a museum, with no repercussion within the context that we map so tirelessly.

In this city, mapping seems to be a tool to keep 'thinking' interventionists pre occupied through strategic deployment of culture capital and prevent us from getting militant! (This too is a fucking joke, when it comes to the bourgeois, holding candles, flowers and hands like a bunch of fools, appropriating Gandhi as and when possible. Like Zizek explains Gandhi's tool of Non-Violence for those times and situation was extremely violent, it WAS very much an intervention that made a DIFFERENCE. Today it has turned into a circus). If the exercise is mapping for the sake of mapping then it is a different issue, but if not then I strongly believe we need to know why? And who is the audience? Or else it is just a process of intellectual bartendering of theoretical - cocktails and circulating knowledge within restricted social circles, with mapping reduced to an exercise of creating aesthetics rather than a tool of active intervention (maps created by the Situationists). At this point in time, I believe we desperately need something new…

Mumbai Reader: Talking about new... after coming home I saw the copy of Mumbai Reader (UDRI publication), it was at least 6 times fatter than what I was expecting (which in case of books is a good thing), but I just couldn’t help but notice every article, every paper clip being a well articulated rant, furnished with excellent data and concluding with the most elaborate declarations of helplessness by Architects, Planners, Social scientists, Lawyers, Political activists etc. Makes me wonder if we are always going to be helpless within our professional spheres or is it that someday we may turn into Arvind Adiga's White Tigers, born just once per generation a rare spectacle! But all this militant revolutionary spirit aside, the Mumbai reader looks very promising. It has some clear articles with on ground conditions and concerns, written by people selected due to their expertise in a particular field and not necessarily because of their linguistic or theoretical manoeuvrability, so most articles have a ‘reporting’ flavour. This according to me is a good thing, as for everything else we always have the Delhi reader.

The paper used for the reader as well as the overall dimensions are just right, it looks good and reads well, but once in a while I wonder why is it Mumbai Reader and not Bombay Reader (stamped "read Mumbai where Bombay" just like in government documents that required to be changed).

Map: On one of these days, while surfing through the net, I came across a Mumbai train map like the London tube network diagram. This seems to be a clear indication of the expansion of Bombay city as imagined by the government and the global-powers that are facilitating it. Clearly Bombay is going to be 'under construction' for atleast a decade. I don’t know how inserting so much infrastructure is ever going to be possible?

Cable TV: After a really long time of not having any access to TV, I was relishing the idea of surfing through thousand cable channels and watching TV, lying immobile for hours with my retina basking in the light of the tube. But unfortunately that wasn’t the case, I just couldn’t relate to TV any more, not even information and News channels. I feel never before has Bombay been more in need of thousand cable channels than right now. The TV is a machine in itself that compensates for everything that the working class here needs/desires.
It is Space: Lush gardens, foreign locations, bungalows and constantly renewed extensions to the private homes that watch it, like a small shack in a slum, an apartment house in Bhayander, a terrace flat on the 21st floor in Bandra. Like a small window aligned along a wall or splayed along the corner, it creates new spaces within homes of families mesmerized by the electronic light that is deployed to entertain illusions of life. It is the classic virtual Recreational Ground, much required in a city that has lost most of its open spaces. This space is the Garden, the Theatre, and the Circus - heterotopias balancing the city of discontent.
It is Surveillance: If London has its CCTVs, Bombay's Panopticon turned inside out -the TV belittles all forms of social control through a fantastic inter-pixilation of entertainment and self surveillance. Here all narratives across channels have the capacity of assimilating the flickers within society and plot against anyone trying to break away from this Rooster's coop. Here the Law brings every murderer to justice (and with a commentary by a really scary voice), Companies promise gifts of chance (and you may just be the lucky one!), Sports turn into Gladiator matches (opened just to distract people from fall of the Senate/Democracy) and women, children and men from good families suffer from guilt due to their wrong doings.
It is Religion: Like Nietzsche's Master-Slave morality, every character is ascertained as being heroic or villainous based on the difference of morality. Master (the villain) morality weighs actions on a scale of good or bad consequences while slave (hero) morality which weighs actions on a scale of good or evil intentions. This good slave morality preached by every religion- ‘opium of the masses’ now has a new Adhan and Altar- the TV.

Elections: The only thing that I did or rather could watch on TV was the election politics that had reached its final frenzy as the day of counting approaches. With electronic voting machines, a budget of over Rs. 1,120 Crores (election expenditure) and a massive population, this election was a spectacle in itself. Advertised as the opportunity to make a difference (15th opportunity mind you!) by celebrities, believers and non-believers alike practiced their right to Indian Democracy. Meanwhile the 'wooing' and 'mud slinging' by the future representatives of our country had the strength to completely nullify the pro active campaigns by the media like Bleed India and Jaago Re and encourage a few thousand more to dwell in apathy over the state of affairs. But the overwhelming majority which the UPA received was quite surprising and to some extent a positive development.

House on a Hill: One of the highlights of the trip was a long drive to outskirts of the city a trip to my father's utopia- his farm house, an orchard and lot of sun. The drive was very nice with me noticing the new 'interesting' things, photographing trucks, rickshaws and trees as they had never existed before. After the aggression, heat and dust inflicted by the city, this was a good space of refuge, where I could wander around aimlessly, photograph farm-flora & fauna and laze around reading, while my father played out Charles Darwin to every shrub, tree, plant and bee that had evolved in his path. He was happy here, making it a point to personally introduce me to every member of the plant kingdom with its characteristics, growth and sometimes even spiritual classifications. I duly photographed each specimen and asked inquisitive questions.
Meeting my family after a long time was like recharging my sense of hope and belonging. But sometimes I do feel a certain sense of urgency with regards to making it big and getting things right. Meeting up with friends was good. Met up with Prajna, Rupali, Prasad, Ranjit, Mukul, Rohan, Kiran, Vishal and Siddharth...all of them having been there for me through good and bad times in my life. I have realized there are no real choices in life, but only an illusion of having choices, all roads lead to the same place, a place where free will is a farce. With sophistication, most deviants have been institutionalized and the city sterilized. Probably this is the time that we from collective turn into individuals struggling separately in our individual “Pursuit of happiness”...or maybe all of this is not true, its just the heat-dust...my personal spores of blame...
Salaam Bombay.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
-Heraclitus

Furcht

Having lived in Bombay all my life and lived through, the 1992 communal riots (900 dead, 2000 injured), the Bombay blast (thirteen in total) of 1993 (approx. 300 dead, 1400 injured), 11th July 2006 train bombings (209 dead, 700 injured), and other acts of violence like slum clearance, urban renewal, building collapse, flooding etc.which get skipped by the media looking for more sensational numbers, I feel we become numb to these incidences. We awake or take notice only when the violence reaches our door steps. Just like everyone else, when I heard the news, I called home to be reassured of my family’s well being, then discussed about how bad the incidence was with various people over the next few days and read a little of Salvoj Zizek. Somehow I had become apolitical (well I was indeed political enough to watch the news, be reading the right book at the right time and have a great theoretical framework to explain my take on the terror attack, but...), I could not do anything. It was as if, we have a lot to lose if we become political, our careers, our jobs, our friends, families, our lives. I wondered what was it like for these kids to do what they did, to become 20 year old terrorists and symbols of absolute horror. To feel as if they had nothing to lose, to take lives and end their own with so much ease. I believe the difference between the bomb yielding terrorist and the gun carrying is the same difference that lies in the sentence of death through the guillotine and one at the hands of an executioner...the later brings the locus of public attention from the instrument of death to the executioner, and in this case the executioners were some kids with guns with little to lose and in all probabilities with minds incapable of comprehending the strings that connected them to a much bigger web. A web made out of numerous strings of national interests, communal discontent, personal greed into which all of us contribute, as highly trained professionals designing cities in poorer nations governed by dictator, redesigning urban spaces to facilitate entry of real estate market, drawing substantial profits from the exploitation of unskilled labour working under us and continuing being numb, brain dead consumers infested by desires that turn us into individuals and not a collective (with me along with many more of you, being guilty to all of the above). I believe ‘terror’ is not this ridiculous entity outside us, or some random followers of abstract ideology, but it is a part of our everyday, just like the financial crisis, we have done our bit to contribute to it in one form or the other. And even if we do muster a collectivity we will be still clueless about what to do....maybe make a painting, light a candle, write a book, an article or probably vent out frustration through a blog post, the way I have done.

“We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.”
-Ernesto