berlin 1
and berlin was pretty, capital p and all pink 🙂 am sure ‘pretty’ is not the word very commonly used to describe the city, and maybe one of the adjectives berliners would not be too happy with… but i really thought that the city is pretty…
i loved all the stones, and the shades of grey and black and ash it brings as a common background colour for the entire city.. and the red and dark brown/black combinations, the sheen/reflectiveness of glass and cold/opaqueness of steel combinations, the yellow and green and black of the leaves on the roads, and all the colours of the graffitis… the east and west berlin walk signals… the greens and the water… the greens and the water 🙂
umm… well i liked the city… this description is not only entirely subjective, but am also talking only about a bit superficial niceties… there are lotsa issues with the city of course… the gentrifications, the polarisation of the city, marginalisation of migrants, failures of the education system, dependence on social security, the burden and commercial possibilities of the ‘alternative’ culture etc… and i did had insightful cross-cultural discussions about all that… but really not in a mood to talk about that hehehehe
the surface of berlin is pretty… my kind of pretty… a grey base and lotsa colours… and beautiful textures of the base… with all the multi-pattern pavings… okay, allow me be po-mo (terrible labeling) and to say that it is all in the surface… there aint no depth… or rather the depth is right in the surface… berlin has one of the most democratic surfaces i have seen in a city… you talk about any social issue and you would have a graffiti on that… or stark contrast of bricks in renovated and non-renovated buildings standing next to each other in districts facing gentrification… or different historical archi styles next to each other… the history and the present is right there on the surface…
and so for a person alone in an unknown city, walking with a map trying to figure out which street will take me to the workshop venue, the city offers plenty of excitement… expectedly, it would be a very different experience to live there… but am not here writing a description of how it is to live in berlin… this is a note on how it is to walk in berlin… and i walked and walked… and if you are in berlin you should walk and walk… and frequently sit down with a radler (beer+lemonade)… preferably besides a river/canal/other water bodies… but maybe it is not so nice to walk in all the neighbourhoods in all the times… i dont know about that… i did had a disturbing a funny incident when two guys were walking behind me, around midnight, singing a song in english about welcoming foreign people in germany and how germans love to beat people up… might be a late night sense of humour… might be something else… but that is not enough to change my opinion of the city… and of course, this late-night-incidence side of berlin reality is represented on the surface in nazi graffities… which is also duly contested by large anti-nazi graffities… all on the surface… so when i talk about the colours of the city, dont tell me i am not political enough lol
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Tags: berlin, colour, graffiti, images, memory, politics, stone, surface
town plans are thus no mere diagrams; they are a system of hieroglyphics in which man has written the history of civilisation, and the more tangled their apparent confusion, the more we may be rewarded in deciphering it
cities in evolution, p. 170
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Tags: planning, quote, semiotics, urban
Scanned the xyz book of contemporary world poems
for a poem that talks about my contemporary world.
For a poem that talk about my contemporary love for you
for a poem that talks about my contemporary difficulties
with loving you.
Dear reader, you aint the ‘you.’
i assure so
(“till the [flickering electronic display] lets you say
it speaks to someone else than you?’1 lol).
It’s another Sunday and
Sundays seem like perfects days for writing poetry
even if this really ain’t a Sunday for me.
It is not difficult for me to love you because
i don’t love you.
It is not difficult for me to love you because
i love somebody more.
It is neither difficult for me to love you because
there ain’t a contemporary world poem talking
about our love.
There are some.
But they all masquerade as different poems
written by different people from
different contemporary worlds.
Mahatma Foucault once said,
why can’t i keep my poems free of ‘theories’?,
(no, that is not what he said)
“[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed…”2
Sometime i am in this poem
Sometime in that.
For example, last evening
the wonderful whirling spring pre-andhi
took me and the flying lady zooming into
Pablo’s
i-wanna-know-you-like-the-way-the-storm-knows-the-trees
not-so-contemporary world,
ignoring absolutely
the glaring absence of
the flying lady
in the first place.
Or say that glimpse-of-side-face
lady in black
smiling soft as i stroke the dog
walking away from the premier as abhishek
outbarks abhay,
i don’t know where she took me
but she clearly took me somewhere,
somewhere
where black is age and is good
and i get to mother
her
and the dog.
And i am all over these places
and more
‘dispersed,’ ‘juxtaposed.’
So it cannot be
‘main tha, tu thi aur thi dilli bas.’
i am not only in dilli
there ain’t no bas.
But my love,
so are you
you ain’t only in dilli
even if in dilli,
often
not in the same one
as mine.
We travel
over dilli
and in other places
and love all over
sometime together
sometime alone.
i know love
i know,
i really do
that
it ain’t just us two travelers out there
and you know some of them
and i know some of them too,
like the flying lady i just mentioned
(who is now busy zooming above evenings
other than
my pre-andhi windy one here ).
And thus we reach the difficulties of our
contemporary love,
is it that we two are in love
or are we two fellow travelers tangled
in this web of traveling lover-hoods?
Do we wait till that ‘golden’ moment
when the lover-hood
champions over
the traveler-hood
and pins us down
to
dilli bas?
Is this all then
a masquerade,
reverse to the one those poetries are into
while they are the same poem they appear as many,
are we actually separatist lovers acting
as part of the same group of travelers,
pin-downers acting as let-goers,
lovers of certainty preaching contingency?
I hope not.
I think not.
Nope.
It ain’t about getting
its about becoming.
Its not about becoming (lovers)
through getting (you).
Its about becoming
through coming together
again and again
sometime by design
sometime by chance.
We aint like the xyz book of contemporary world poetry
bound together within the same cover pages
out of contingencies,
like that of existing
in the same con-temporal world,
but more so because of the
physical ‘binding,’
the poems inside always under the fear
that the glue may dry up
and the pages might fall of
get distanced.
But we ain’t losing anybody here
because we don’t have anybody to lose
in the first place.
We are poems
who have (or will
or may)
come together
again and again
in dilli
and in other places
and through the synekism,
the energy
the stimulation
generated out of these
com-ing together
be-ing together,
we have (or will
or may)
become lovers
still traveling
still loving.
“… na hai yeh pana, na khona hi hai
tera na hona, jane kyun hona hi hai …”
>>
1. Vikram Seth. (1990) ‘Across,’ in All You Who Sleep Tonight
2. Michel Foucault. (1967) ‘Of Other Spaces’
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Tags: love, poetry, travel, vikram seth
calvin…
calvin has almost entirely changed hobbes’ life (and vice versa too, as hobbes guesses)… or rather, to be closer to the truth, has modified all the little bits of pieces that the life is made of, and the overall experience of those multi-directional changes has been an emancipative one…
but the question that remains is whether calvin is just calvin or is it calvin and susie together… and thus the true twin… ?!
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Tags: calvin, hobbes
on ‘home’ and jack sparrow…
i used to complain that i cannot ‘name’ people… that is to say, i cannot invent nicknames for people so that i can mention them in my blog posts, and at the same time keep their identities teasingly unrevealed… though somewhat guessable… a dear dear friend of mine has got this gift of inventing such ‘names’… and i used to complain that i cannot do it…
but it seems that the new year has brought some gifts for me, and one of them being the partial clearance of this ‘naming block’ (as in ‘writer’s block’)… so my dear mib (mean intelligent babe, an older ‘naming’ though), let this post mark my unleashing of ‘names’…
>>
this post directly takes off from recent conversations with wonder woman: the ultra-speed multitasking superhero… the discussions were respectively on difficulties i am facing in renting an apartment and on various issues related to love and politics (including love of politics and politics of love)… the latter discussion was inspired by a wonderful performance by kabeer suman…
as is commonly known, for some time now i am having difficulties renting an apartment… i know exactly in which locality i would like to have a place – munirka… i also know in which streets of munirka i would like to have it… but it seems that those streets do not have a vacant place which i would like to rent… as wonder woman pointed out i almost have a fair idea of the room i want… or rather the qualities i seek… but then again i would be happy to be surprised… in the sense that i am open to get attracted to a room that does not exactly match my ideas… in any case, the room must have a spatial charm that gets hold of me… the space of the room must make me feel at ‘home’…
but the feeling of ‘homeliness’ is also a thing re/produced through performances of the ‘homely acts’… for example the way i claimed my space in ‘the flat’ through doing chores in absence of calvin… i, however, am a person who has lived in four different houses with his parents, two different houses with his maternal grandparents and paternal uncle, three more houses in kolkata, and one in burdwan, and two rooms in jnu, and a house in delhi, and ‘the flat’ too… and all these houses i can call ‘home’… and right now i am looking for another ‘home’…
i am sure there are people who have stayed in more numerous and/or varied ‘homes’ but the point is ‘home’ does not yet signify for me a relationship with a singular place… i keep moving from home to home, but do not come back to the home… and i wonder whether that is a good thing… good not in an absolute sense, of course… but in a very personal/subjective sense… clearly, at this stage of life, i do not wish to have a singular ‘home’ to which i come back… what bothers me is why is that… guess i want to sail the seven seas now… and without a home port… and that gets us to cap’n jack sparrow… but such sailing, and especially the immediate reference to cap’n sparrow, has a certain ulta-masculine element… and that is what REALLY bothers me…
now whether jack sparrow is masculine or not is a question i would not dwell into… clearly he has homoerotic fan-following but that does not invalidate the possibility of his masculinity… so leaving that question apart, i would move into the discussion inspired by kabeer suman…
suman’s performance (including the songs and the reflections on his life and times that he was offering) and the discussion thereafter hovered around themes of love and politics… suman has travelled through many loves, as well as many political inclinations/supports… and there was certain unavoidable similarity in the way he deals with both… as we discussed, for us, the generation that gew up in to the age of liberalisation, suman represents an intensity of the previous era… when we say the ‘previous era’ we directly refer to the era of naxal movement… a question that reverberated around out minds is that have our generation lost that intensity (both in politics and in love), have we become more cold calculators (both in politics and in love) than hot passionates? of course passion is here still… as wonder woman pointed out an unusual example of contemporary passion/intensity – riots, and the scores of young people who carry out such acts… but when it comes to actual political thinking, deciding the course of action, we are perhaps far more cold… or at least the coldies outnumber the hotties in positions of political decision making… which made was wonder can there actually be a ‘movement’ (instead of a planned political maneuver) again, led by our generation? the apparent hot popular politics of jnu students’ union, just to give an example, is just an illusion – it is fueled by very cold political calculations happening from hostel rooms, and not in the ‘dera dalo’ places… curiously, the most hot, passionate political organisation of the campus is also the one most commonly ridiculed for their lack of political foresight – an issue that i dont want to comment upon now, as it demands a more detailed exploration than it is possible here…
this hotness/intensity of suman that we refer to is explicit in the ways he supports mamata (trinamool congress) and her fight against cpi-m, and is also similarly present in his repeatedly publicly expressed love for sabeena yasmin (whom he is married to)… and simultaneously, suman speaks openly about his past political affiliations, and loves… the ‘openness’ do betray a sentiment of i-have-moved-on-and-they-haven’t-so-it’s-their-bloody-problem-and-i-don’t-care… it is this sentiment that got me disturbed … not because it is an entirely hypothetical sentiment, but because there has been times when i have lived that sentiment, and am sure that goes for most of the readers of this piece… it betrays a denial of my complicity to whole lot of things, for the consequence of which i don’t care, or don’t wish to care… and there is something masculine about that… and that bothers me a LOT…
the strain of this sentiment in suman’s performance did not disturb me because of what it reveals about the person suman is… it disturbed me because it reminded me of a certain common strain of personality (which i believe i share with many people out there) that i am not very comfortable having, and struggling against constantly… and i also believe that certain to have elements of masculinity in it… though by saying that i do not by any means claim that such strain, since masculine, is found only in men, or in heterosexual men – guess masculinity is more pervasive than that…
and we come back to jack sparrow… however not to give a concluding remark upon his character, or to this particular loud thinking on homes, ports, sea, sailing, politics and love… what bothers me is the contradictory processes created by changes that takes place within persons, and the habit of proximity created by staying together… it is only too natural that people change… of course cpi-m has been a progressive force at a certain point of history, which it is clearly not today… so for the people who have been politically active (not necessarily within organisations, but say people like sumon) throughout the period of last 30 years, it would not be surprising to find them shifting their allegiance… but what about the once-progressive organisation, what about the once-loved-person? don’t we remain complicit enough so as not to have the luxury to say i-am-moving-on-and-if-you-don’t-then-it’s-your-problem? well in reality, we often abuse that luxury, but at the cost of what? is it possible to reconcile the apparent contradiction of ‘change’ and also a more equal bearing of the burden of ‘not-change’?
jack sparrow, however, is sure that his first and only love is the sea… at least that is what he says… and me not going into pointing out the scenes where he betrays contradictory emotions… so by proclaiming his one and only love for the sea, he steers clear of his complicity in all other relations – because love comes first… which does sounds to me like a reasonable position, at least cap’n sparrow do bear the pain of not being able to afford ‘love’ with anybody else other than the sea… the pain of that loneliness is visible on jack sparrow at various points of the narrative, especially in the context of his impossible love with liz swann… the sea is a cruel lover…
well, for me, i am not too sure – whether i love the sea or want a home port.. and i am happy to lay the responsibility of not-being-too-sure to the current stage of life i am in – ‘i am too young to say whether i want a home port, let alone which port is my home port’… but is it that a deliberate procrastination? perhaps… but i dont see a reason to hurry it either?
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Tags: calvin, captain jack sparrow, feminism, jnu, love, masculinity, mib, munirka, politics, wonder woman
darshan…
from epics telling the stories of princes going to rescue their princesses, to those of heroic sailors braving the perils of the sea, to that of the quest of the ringbearers to the fiery ‘mount doom’, to that of the journey to see the last message left by god, to those of the poet/baul asking the majhi (boatman) to row the boat across the bhobo-nodi (the river of life), to the video/computer games where the protagonist has to be taken across lanes having traffic from different directions and velocities, the imageries and motifs of journey/quest/yatra has dominated narratives across regions, cultures and ages… those are the stories of perils and obstacles that have to be fought with and overcome/overpowered to reach at the moment of ‘darshan’, when one meets the objective of the journey… ‘meets’ in the sense of actually meeting the person or the object one seeked, or meeting/realising the goal/target one seeked…
the (sanskrit) word ‘darshan’ refers to the act of seeing, the act of meeting (appearing, either physically or fantastically, say in dreams) and also is the sanskrit word for ‘philosophy’… an interesting linguistic reminder of how the (philosphical) means are inseparable from the end that is being attempted to achieve… how the end determines the means, and vice versa… and thus how the end cannot be achieved if the means are in contradiction to it…
discussion of the word ‘darshan’ apart, this post is about a dusty streetside vision, entered into randomly while sunk in utter velapanthy along the dusty dusty dusty gurgaon road, which suddenly brought into presence this imagery of quest/yatra into an otherwise everyday experience of looking at a temple across a busy dusty road, from the opposite footpath…
suddenly the cars and trucks passing by become metaphors of the obstacles and perils, and the street become the river or the sea or the subterranean chasms of moria… the photographic vision is on a quest to have a ‘darshan’ (to see, as well as to meet) the temple on the other side of the road… as i kept clicking pics, half a bus or the entire car kept resisting the photographic vision to capture a picture of the temple unblocked by the car or the bus… so the photographic vision kept going on with the quest… to have a complete (not in complete as in ‘complete’ sense, in the sense of a pic of the temple unobstructed by any vehicle on the road in front) picture of the temple… to have a darshan…
and darshan at last… 
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Tags: darshan, delhi, journey, street, temple, vision, yatra
they are straight out of the pages of shirshendu (a bengali writer)…
both above 70… travelling in a ring road bus (delhi)… one of the longest routes, if not the longest route among delhi buses… sitting together and conversing about everything from price of onions to shahrukh khan taking off clothes to new bride in the family… and all that at the top of their voice since their hearing abilities have become weak… so even above the great roar of old dtc (delhi transport corp) buses, the whole bus is resounding with this conversation… the grannies, of course, care very little (or perhaps not even aware) about all these strangers listening to their stories… the co-passangers’ moods range from amused to annoyed…
they were also discussing how small the puja space is in the new flat one of their grandson (perhaps of both) has shifted to, and how difficult it was to sit there and perform the ‘griha-prabesh’ (entering-the-house) rituals … the flat, however, is far larger than the last one…
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Tags: bus, chr(c)tr, delhi
chr(c)tr 1: the bridge player
[an introduction to chr(c)tr series:
the series features various characters i have come across in urban public places… these characters are simultaneous real and imagined, as they are inspired by actual people but since i have not conversed with any of these ‘original’ people, clearly my descriptions of them are based upon my imagination…
the begnali/hindi/sanskrit word for ‘character’ happens to be ‘charitra’… the words have this curious resemblance… so i removed the vowels and bracketed the ‘c’ in between…]
‘bridge’ is this very difficult card game… mastering it requires keeping mental track of all the cards that are getting played by all the players, and what the act of each card getting played reveal about other possible cards in the hand of that player…
this person is not a bridge player… anymore… he used to play… but nowadays, he watches other play… he watches and at the end of the game takes pride in pointing out the mistakes committed by each player at various stages of the game… and does that without having direct knowledge of even one hand of cards (since he is not playing)… for last several years, bridge players from his ‘para’ (‘mohalla’) has won each and every bridge championship in kolkata…
we find this character traveling in a bus… clearly not a place to play bridge… but he simply cannot keep his mind at rest from bridge… so he has invented this game for himself… he calls it ‘bus bridge’… everyday he travels on this particular bus (say 215) to work… throughout his one and half our journey, he keeps track of all the buses that this particular bus meets/passes by… he keeps track of all of them and in 5 minute intervals he makes the announcements:
’12C/2 6759 is late by 2:30 minutes today’
[12C/2 being the route number and 6579 the registration number of the bus]
‘they should throw 2985 out of the 45A route, for 3 days in a row it is coming after 7180’
[apparently 2985 and 7180 are both in the 45A route, and though 2985 leaves the stand 15 mins before 7180, for 3 successive days the former has reached gol park (a bus stop where both 215 and 45A buses pass by) after the latter one]
so he not only keeps track of all the buses (route numbers and bus numbers) that his 215 bus should meet at various points of its journey, but also keeps track of those buses which his bus ends up meeting when either his bus or the other buses are running late… so in his mental map of circulating buses through the kolkata city streets (instead of circulating cards through the players’ hands) he sees all those buses that not only meet his bus, but also might meet his bus, in case of various beyond-routine circumstances… especially keeping track of this beyond-routine possibilities helps him to exercise his mind to consider various possible consequences of a bridge player playing a wrong card, which ends up giving wrong signals about the other (yet-to-be-played and hence unknown) cards in his hand, and changing the course of the game…
people say that bus owners call him up to get info about their buses, but this seems unlikely to me…
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Tags: bridge, bus, chr(c)tr, kolkata
all these pics are taken inside delhi metro cars… and they tell stories of spaces and genders… and often a single pic tends to tell multiple, even contradictory, stories…
this is not documentation… all the pics are constructed to tell the stories, like any other story telling medium… although by unaware actors…
but does that mean that those stories never take place for real in such places?
> is that expression of fear or appreciation? there seems to take place an inter-generational consensus/communication…
> a story of stalkers or of the femme fatale?
> just a simple glance as the person-sitting-next gets up, or something more? the rod in the middle doubles as the demarcating line between two juxtaposed spaces of conflicting desires… the lowered eyes of the man-on-left in the first picture may be read as his inability to ga(y)ze as long as the male gaze (represented by the non-lowered eyes of the man-on-right) is dominating the frame… hence the two spaces of conflicting desires are not only juxtaposed, but hierarchicaly so… in the first pic, though the man-on-right’s eyes are not lowered, they are neither looking at anything within the frame… thats because the ‘object of interest’ of that space of desire is absent from the frame… only in the second pic, when the male gaze leaves the scene, we see the ga(y)ze to come in active presence (as it was always already present, but not actively so, not as an agency)… there also takes place a blurring of these two spaces of conflicting desire… though the material rod keeps demarcating the two spaces, the ga(y)ze from the left space enters the right space, as the man-on-right (and with him the space he created) is leaving but has not yet left…
> deep into introspection or fantasising?
> war of eyes? or love?
> cornered girl or seduced guy? the hands of the guy being behind alludes to both hand-tied-guy femdom fantasy, and also pinning down the prey with the legs imaginary…
> too many men, too little space… so gotta have the cowboy style face-off… gotta show who’s the baddest ass… the good [top right], the bad [top middle] and the ugly [bottom left]…
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Tags: delhi, gay, gaze, gender, space
mark wigley – quote of the day
architects are builders who theorize – articulate builders…
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Tags: architecture, quote
con(fessions/fusions/texts) 
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