all that glittered

beijingbrown:

Most of you know that my father passed away late last year. Loss is always unexpected, but his death hit me particularly hard in a way that I couldn’t explain.

It’s taken me six months to put these thoughts together. My comics have always personal, but drawing this was intense in a way none of my work has ever been.

I hope you find some resonance in it.

dhrupad:

Mera Apna Sheher (My Own City), directed by Sameera Jain, deals with the idea of Delhi as a highly gendered urban landscape, “where the gaze, the voice and the body are at all times under surveillance”; it sets out to find, through the daily lives and adventures of a set of women in Delhi, whether a woman in the city, as she moves between anxiety and comfort, can ever be free. 

[…] The notion of women under “multiple surveillance” is at the core of Mera Apna Sheher, which turns the idea upon itself to see what the everyday in Delhi reveals. Leading the quest, with a pen camera in her bag, is Komita Dhanda—an associate professor at Lady Irwin College, who is in the mood to loiter. “Unlike men, women are constantly looking for a sense of legitimacy to be in a public space,” Jain remarked during a press interaction.

Starting out with more obvious public spaces like a tea stall, a corner cigarette-paan shop and a regular dhaba—places that are always crowded but generally off-bounds for a solo woman—Dhanda tries to melt in, to be one with the many, projecting an easy comfort in, and entitlement to, public spaces that are the domain of every middle-class, upper caste, young, able-bodied heterosexual man. Men’s reactions to her presence, recorded so unobtrusively that they seem incidental, range from passing amusement to jittery discomfort, tremors revealing the gender fault-lines beneath every level of the urban experience.

“The very presence of women in public in seen as transgressive and fraught with anxiety,” write academic Shilpa Pahadke, journalist Sameera Khan and architect Shilpa Ranade in Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, a book that shares with the film its central concern—women’s right to the city. “So long as women are able to convey the dominant narrative of gender—that they belong in private and not the public—they get conditional access to public space. To signal refusal to adhere to these codes often invites censures, sanctions and violence.” The book makes a spectacular case for women’s right to loiter, questioning why in India women must walk a straight line between one “sheltered” space and another. It dares readers to imagine an Indian city with street corners full of women. “A man may stop for a cigarette at a paanwalla or lounge on a park bench. He may stop to stare at the sea or drink cutting chai at a tea stall. He might even wander the streets late into the night. Women may not… She is either mad or bad or dangerous to society.”

The men in Mera Apna Sheher are constantly trying to make sense of Dhanda. She refuses to display any sign that she is either accidentally in a public space or is there out of a certain necessity: no hurried air, no tapping buttons on her mobile, no earphones, no files against the chest, no mangalsutra or sindoor. After completing the more elementary excursions, she decides to relax in a park—not exactly an unreasonable instinct. Sitting on the grass, she has a long phone conversation before she stretches out on her side, facing two men who are lying at a considerable distance, but close enough to be disconcerted. They start by ignoring her; then they try, visibly, to figure her out; finally they just sit up and stare at her, apparently with more bewilderment than sexual threat.

Jain has said in interviews that she and her team would often not monitor the camera, discovering some of the moments much later and being stunned by how well they captured the subtleties of gendered spaces.

In a scene towards the end of the film, Dhanda invites the Delhi danger. She stands by a street at night, in a busy-looking part of Delhi, perhaps to catch a bus or hail an autorickshaw—or just to linger. What happens next is a daily hazard for any woman who walks on Delhi streets, or worse, stops. A passing car pulls up slightly ahead of Dhanda. She ignores it. The car reverses slightly. She stays indifferent. The car comes closer. She takes a few steps back. The car almost closes in on her before she walks away, laughing, towards the film crew. Delhi girls who are on their own frequently strategise their street behaviour: waiting only at bus stops, keeping a serious expression on their faces, never looking back at slowing cars. A failure to project respectable purpose and attitude could lead to the assumption that they are soliciting—which is not only a dangerous impression to convey, but is also a culpable offense in India.

–SNIGDHA POONAM, “The Unbelongers”

(via pyotra)

ayqaart:

“Fresh off the boat” by Ayqa Khan

(via motiya)

(Source: litafficionado)

khwabgah:

Delhi Modern: The Architectural Photographs of Madan Mahatta

Delhi as the national capital, went through a huge expansion and was refashioned into various ordered zones/divisions along the lines of the first modern urban planning in the country, (Master Urban Plan, DDA, 1962), under the supervision of US based planner Albert Mayer. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), a single planning and controlling government body established in 1957, conceptualised its master plan to cope with the haphazard growth of the city, following the huge numbers of migrants that had streamed into the city during partition and after Independence. From the 1950s to 1980s, new areas were earmarked to be part of city’s modern plan. The separation of work and industry, the discourse against congestion, and the marking of legal and non-legal habitation in city was the central thrust of the plan.[1]  It ensued materialization of neatly charted architectural spaces like multi-storey factories in commercial spaces, housing complexes, skyscrapers, hotels, cultural and public buildings. Examples of these include, Gandhi Memorial Hall (1962), Indian Institute of Delhi (1968), Hall of Nations ( Pragati Maidan, 1972), India International Center (1962), The Escort Factory ( 1964), the Ford Foundation Building (1968) and the Asian Games Village (1984).

As huge public debates engulfed the views of the public around  issues of national importance such as the bullock-cart economy vs. modern economy, western modernity vs. non-western society, infrastructure/technology vs. uncouth citizens; a modern architectural plan with cosmopolitan appeal imprinted within the design of cost-effective (steel, cement and glass) high rise public buildings emerged as a visible sign of the nation’s aspiration for modernisation. Free from colonial influences and neo-classical architectural baggage, it was between the 1950s to the 1980s, that the first generation of Indian architects trained under Walter Gropius (Habib Rahman at MIT in Boston) and Frank Llyod Wright (Gautam Sarabhai), along with others like Achyut Kanvinde from Harvard and Charles Correa from MIT, who arrived in Delhi to be part of the challenge of constructing a new architectural language for sovereign India.

Interestingly, Madan Mahatta, the first trained photographer in post-Independent India from the Guilford School of Arts and Crafts, Surrey, England, happened to be commissioned by these architects to capture ‘making’ of their buildings. On his return from England in 1954, Mahatta joined his family studio (located at Connaught place, Delhi) and worked across all genres of photography. He was the first one to work with a Linhof camera and wide angle lenses, which allowed him to develop some of his finest architectural photographs. Shot on medium format monochromatic film, the ‘Delhi Modern Architecture’ series taken over 30 years (1950s -1980s) captures the modernist regularity within Delhi buildings by focusing on the cubic shapes, freely composed facades, flat roofs and neatly charted out horizontal and vertical lines. Flooded in natural light and shot from different angles, Mahatta’s photographic compositions bring forth the architectonic quality and visual clarity, to the modernist order, volume and form of the buildings. Documenting three decades of architectural vision, these images not only capture the interplay of form, function and aesthetics within modern designs of early post independence architects but also narrate the history of India’s struggle to find its own modernist identity.

(via pyotra)