My Mumbai musings in the monsoons

I love you Marine Drive - buildings rising from the ground, cloudy foggy skies, with a grey impending gloom, and dotted with the pink, blue, red, white bodies - sitting, huddled close together creating a space between them, jogging, walking - facing the sea, away from the city into the vastness of the Arabian Sea. A image I will not forget for a long time.

Slumdog Millionaire

Some thoughts….


Slumdog millionaire is a post modern film. It is also so important because it is a film that clearly brings about the dichotomy in two ways of knowing the world; and it is a film about history; knowledge; and how we come to know what we do.


We learn our history through an institutionalized, state sanctioned and governed system of education. But this film is about the history learnt; a history of the city, its events, its dates being at the periphery of the state and the periphery of the city, and yet part of it.
Where history is not linear but inherently violent and it is a lived not learned history. It is lived and created, through systems of survival, streets, tactics, rumors; through cheating, stealing, robbing; be it as a guide to Taj Mahal or stealing shoes of tourists at the Taj Mahal, or knowing that Ram had a bow and arrow on his right hand, through a communal riot. Where stealing or cheating is the only way of knowing and you create your life experiences from these, remembering every detail on the way, absorbing and absorbing, watching, observing. They can either be considered as illegal acts, illicit acts or as stealing from the state’s body or those privileged from the state sanctioned system.


The movie made Mumbai its home; it was the slumdog’s, call centre chai wallah’s perspective, it traversed places and situations that no movie I remember has in a long time. And yet what is love here, love is hope, love is rescue and you need love and you need Amitabh Bachchan, because he makes it seem possible to emerge victorious from the surrounding decadence.


As I lay there watching the movie, all I wanted to do was cry and cry. What was I doing in the United Sates as an urban planner, when the city I loved and I had grown up in needed people with my skills more than ever? What am I really doing here? Mumbai seemed like the planet of slums and yet it was not only Mumbai, I could probably say that about so many other cities like New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata.


It also made me angry at directors like Karan Johar, Yash Raj, who spent millions and millions of rupees in Bollywood, in fantasgmoria, in godfather like underworld dons, in glamour, and hallucination, when a non-Indian was able to not only understand the fundamental dichotomy of different modes of knowing, but contextualize it in India. Though this is not to say that only “natives” of a country have the intellectual capacity or insight to personal and yet political narratives of a country, but seriously where are our directors? We have had movies that speak from the underdog’s perspective but they have been inherently nationalistic, paternalistic, and parochial. Danny Boyle has shamed the likes of Karan Johar and Yash Raj.

More on Pain...

Pain is discomfort. It burns, it threatens to crumble you, disintegrate you, ashen you such that you will lose your solidity, it inflames, like the new skin peeling of your fresh wound. It is pointed.

It questions the hegemony of institutions one is part of by opening oneself to the pains of being objectified, racialised, judged by making it personal, by making it subjective. The avowal of pain allows us to embody ourselves. (I reckon, more intimately than pleasure, but I am willing to accept that I may be wrong… already) It disrupts continuity of oppressive (whatever that may be, capitalism, patriarchy, sexual normativity, physical wound) experience by injecting subjective experience.

How does the perception of the hysterical woman change then?

Something I want to research on...........anyone want to fund me?

I want to start at the psychiatric space. The psychiatric clinic in Sunflower Hospital, Juhu Scheme, Mumbai. In the basement of the hospital, hidden underneath the superstructure of our lives, I want to visit the countless upper middle class families who come to this clinic to discuss their “private” problems in private. Each space leads to a smaller cell to hide and the more you’re hidden the more comfortable you are. Outside in the waiting room, everyone is a partner in an imperfect ideal.

Starting at the healing or remedial space, where families come to unite their fragments, usually the fragments in their mother’s, wife’s bodies, I want to explore the construct of the hysterical, irrational wife in the psychiatric space where these treatments take place. The body to be "treated" is usually her body. The domestic space, hidden from the world, through the psychiatric space, further gets enclosed, gets undiscovered and mystified into the darkness of the human mind.

Why?
Where hysteria has been perceived as an "illness", I want to understand hysteria as a form agency for bourgeois women in India. Families usually go to the psychiatric space when there is a break down in the family, in the domestic sphere, when the patriarchal household is consumed by the hysteria of the wife, mother. Her agency takes the most painful form here, for that moment in time; she claims subjectivity through pain, through the avowal of her pain. (The psychiatric space is the space of disavowal of her agency, where patriarchy regains control, sometimes at her wish, sometimes not). At that point, pain is her only self, it is the pain of expression of subjugation, domination, powerlessness, unrealised, unfulfilled desires, that is avowed...What kind of opening does it create? I dont know yet...

The Beauty of Borat..............

Borat has invoked such strong reactions from people from those who claim to like him to those who have filed suits against him etc.

But theres something else that has happened. Which I call his beauty. He has become everyone’s alter ego. He has ruptured the heterosexual space and has created a space for heterosexual men, to talk about sex illicitly and dirtily in the public. And within that dirt he has allowed men to express their desire for women, which is dirty but erotic, which is dirty but titillating and because it is dirty it has desire. And it has allowed heterosexual women to respond, engage, and flirt in this dirty space.

When guys talk, they talk not as themselves but as Borat and in that sense are liberated from having to bear the moral consequence or conscience of their talk. He gives them that space. For example, when my friend rounds his forefinger with his thumb to make a “hole” and hits it against his palm and says “it is a taeeght”…. Or “I like-uh taeeght”…He talks like Borat. Or when he talks about “the vajeen”….Infact, he is Borat. It is Borat talking through my friend’s body. And hence when I listen to him, I don’t get “offended”, I laugh, I respond. I enjoy the sexual interaction. Because I think Borat is talking and not my friend. We’ve created a strange hallucinatory dirty space between us. As we talk we are making fun of Borat. He has been internalized by us and given our evil, dirty side, our alter ego an identity, his identity. Once done, he has allowed us to detach a part of ourselves, externalize it, bring it out in the public in his identity and make fun of him. We have othered it and then enjoyed it. And in that process he has a made of ourselves more public, or a “repressed” discourse public.

Now to think that if every man spoke like that, the woman would like it would be a misconception as well. Secondly I am not legitimizing his movie but am more interested in seeing how men and women have appropriated him in their daily bodies. Though does he give heterosexual women the same space to talk or does he silence them? I do agree that he does not give me space to talk about my body the way it liberates men to do so.

Our trip to China town

Starting with me.. Me and mayur met at Bryant Park, close to Times square and decided to discover / see china town...

A thriving market right next to the subway, opportunistic? The light seems to carve a path through the tunnel of shops and their awnings.

The vendors and their goods spill out on the pavement.





Looking past this "chaos" to find order beyond. Empire State building in the background.

The fire escapes and their shadows create (beautiful? ugly? romantic?) much of the textures of china town and lots of the older parts of New york. For anyone looking for a characteristic architectural element for these areas, this would be the most predominant.

There is no "boundary" that divides Little Italy and China town,

except these decorations and a significant difference in the condition of he buildigns. They are well maintained here and there are lots of restaturants and drinks and people overflowing on the streets.

A curious onlooker. The only one we found peeping out of his window. It was surprising because where one story unfolded on the street with wine, gellatoes, singers, tourists, beautiful dark postcards (I should have clicked them!) there was no parallel story above the street. It was quiet, self involved and seemed to reflect these sounds back, almost scorning them. (maybe thats why the street seemed more active as well)

Our trip to China town

and ending with mayur at my house...

Rachu, buvi and me: Our night out....

Look at us..........

Could they be more in love?

Me and rachu trying to rekindle our Goa (study trip in 2002) lesbian love....

Buvi and me waiting in anticipation for the "photograph".
(Me actually.. she was all ready!)

I love this snap.. its blurry but gets us

Its so crazy.... we were at South Street Seaport in Downtown Manhattan, the piers of which like fingers pierced the Hudson and were now converted to a very active public place with restaurants, bars offering spectacular views of Manhattan island.... and all we were interested in was us... We did n't care about context, about subject.... we were high on us and in love with ourselves.....