the exhibit

how to create a temple.. expanding horizons

archiving discussions

layers

borders & identity

2012-2014














                                       2001-2011

play borders

Bombay in Bergen?

personal geographic history 3

2012-2014 Mumbai i see from here

One of the things that I started off with and that have been complex to decipher and then decide about is what kind of identity I should have here because it’s not what I have in Mumbai . It is different I am different here.

 In the three semesters I have been here the first one was about Norwegian interest in second homes and the changing nature of second homes, the broader idea here of second homes is identifiable to the farm house craze people with money have in Mumbai where you have been urbanized enough and earned enough to yearn for a different life a life of simplicity and simplicity of means. OF course the means don’t remain simplistic.

The relationships between the concepts were largely similar however in Norway the idea of the home and the second home became a part of the national identity a part of being Norwegian. Which I don’t believe is the case in Mumbai at all. It is almost the other end of the spectrum being temporary with respect to housing might be counted as a part of the identity of Mumbai.

Even with all the similarities and connections my easy acceptance of the double homes is may be not what I should have done as an outsider. I was one of the three non-Norwegians on the course.

Before I came to Norway I spent 6 months on the south west coast of Finland doing a winter internship in a city about the same size as Bergen called Turku. Our boss gave us some tips on the first day, he said if people don’t smile at you in the street; don’t think it’s you it’s because people here are not social on streets. It’s too cold for that. Most Finnish people couldn’t fathom why or how we left our warm country to come to this frigid land. In the summer it was like a new city with different happy people.

In the second semester here, I took a course that took us to the migrant villages of China, Guangzhou in specific. Here I was a representative of a Norwegian (European) group. The environment and climate is very similar to Mumbai, the food, the language very different. It was a strange negotiation of comfort and discomfort also no clear thought on how I was perceived, based on how I looked more European or more Chinese or just Indian? Also in terms of environments it was easier to pick out the differences and not the similarities (as in semester 1)

The third semester was an investigation of the city lying between the discourses of security and freedom. We looked at London and Israel as case study cities for different reasons. London’s population consists of about 7% Indians which is the largest ethnic minority group.

The city is so diverse it’s hard to tell who is local and who isn’t which makes the question of identity in relation to ethnicity/ nationality questionable; thus making for an interesting case.

In Israel it was like being in china again, but strangely enough I don’t look Israeli and they can tell that I am not local and it wasn’t because I was constantly in a group of mixed white people. I was told it was my eyes. I looked around me and always felt that it would be very hard to distinguish between or identify correctly a person of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Arabic, Iranian, Pakistani Origin.

Also changes when I am the only one from India and then another guy shows up! Effectively in a position to challenge all that I have stated. I instantly fear that he is one of the Indian clichés / stereotypes that obviously exist just like on American TV.

This leads me to ask is identity relative always comparing to the context. Also we are at will to establish new definitions for a national identity for every new audience.

On a different but not disconnected note,The distances between places are at an all-time lowest at this point in time where it is possible to get from any point A to any point B fairly quickly. Also the need to make the journey is reducing. The everyday details which would be the things most missed by distance can be shared via skype, whatsapp and other such applications.Every destination is a *window away. A world of portals and wearable accesspoints. The limitless liminal spaces expandes constantly cableless and growing forming loops and new connections.Looks like physically the liminal space is largely under water in the inner space(term from scuba diving manuals)where the cables connecting the world wirelessly lay.

personal geographic history 2

2001-2011 Mumbai i grew up in.

This period is interesting as it has a lot of firsts that I can actually remember of my own accord. The stories are recollections of events and not narratives supported with photographs (for e.g. spherical baby)

In this span of time I moved from school to junior college in Fort (south of Mumbai) and then to architecture school in juhu(north but now mid north of Mumbai ). With the fast expanding borders of Mumbai Chembur has now fallen into the central district of Mumbai from being on the north eastern periphery. I began to use public transport the trains and the buses independently and creating a already travelled map of the city constantly gaining over the untraveled map of Mumbai.

the first time I travelled by myself on the much fantasized Mumbai trains was to get to junior college , St Xaviers College, Fort,  Mumbai. Chembur, fell on the shortest and slowest line, the harbour line which runs by the eastern water front. Quite a few of the stops are named after sea creatures including Chembur which is a kind of a crab. It is also the side(of the city) with the refineries and processing units, storage yards for the port. The fast moving train on the elevated train track  gives a low flying bird’s eye view ( similar to the view from my old house at the second floor where you were close enough to the street to have a conversation with a vegetable vendor and far enough to see the whole street).  The scale of the structures with respect to the human being is industrial (massive), the structures are opaque but in distinct shapes requiring no transitory spaces between them so you can understand it quite well visually. The covered volumes are usually large and singular from the inside. As I was elevated I felt like I was hovering around and in between them.

Apart from the view which is very unique from the rest of the city I think travelling by the train is a very humbling experience and I greatly value it, It is like cutting a section through the city and moving through it simply observing; not just the structures but the people who inhabit it and also your fellow observers; who become a part of the picture as do you.

Accessibility to a reliable transport system lent independence and ambition to me.

At Xaviers, there was a boy who joined the newly begun call centres for a few months made a lot of money, to tune that an architect would not make after a masters degree at that time. He could now buy a lot of things. More people began to make a lot of available usable fast money when there was a general shift from the industry driven blue collar city to a service industry driven white collar city becoming dependent on foreign investments. Obviously the things we could buy also started increasing. very obvious display of wealth encouraged by media. extreme consumerism encouraged

Our building went in for self-development  in 2003-2004.It is a situation in which the development potential i.e. the FSI(Floor space index) of our plot had gone up so we decided as a co-operative society that we would build another building on the same plot and everyone would receive 50% more area in a new apartment in the new building. This is not in keeping with the increasing trend of handing over the property to a developer who buys of the development rights and completely builds the new building himself while giving compensation to the residents

In these ten years especially from 2006-2011 there has been a gigantic increase in house production. Ownership of property and the idea of real estate as a means of investment has taken root very quickly. Every plot is analysed by its development potential to maximize the buildable area by extorting the land and also by buying additional applicable FSI. This maximization has sadly not meant accessibility to a home. Infact it is playing on gentrification when advertisements appear for your second home” on front pages of the newspaper in a city with the largest floating population!

One big difference from the previous ten year phase is that display of wealth has gained a sort of rationality. A strange play on if you have the skills show them. There was always economic divide?/ inequality as exists in any society but it was never visible. There existed standardization in lifestyles that did on function on display. Wealth was gold hidden away in lockers. On the street there existed a kind of degree of equality which seems to have evaporated really quickly.

How much space does one actually need? If there was no limit how much could I spread? Would it all be enclosed  within walls? There is the curious incident of the duct enclosing, to enlarge often abnormally formed space which no one paid for but the builders earn out of. The rarer a commodity gets the more valuable it becomes. Such is the case with space in Mumbai and the toilet in specific. In Mumbai your are allowed to build a certain amount , staircases and ducts are not counted in this calculation in other words they r free. A duct is a vertical shaft usually outside the toilet window façade, meant to contain the pipes running through higrises for maintanence purposes. the minimum width of the duct from the wall of the toilet is 0.9m, this increases with the height of the building.

In the house; it is very common, in fact it is a norm now to have bathrooms attached to each bedroom. More so, the ducts outside the bathroom are also enclosed making them sometimes double the size but often in weird configurations.

Last year, I went for a house warming party to an extremely lavish apartment in the vicinity. It was the fanciest and also the strangest bathroom I had ever been in. Just the wash basin counter occupied the entire length of the originally intended bathroom. It lead to a perpendicular corridor with small rooms on both sides. On the left was the water closet and on the right the bathing area. One would spend a few seconds just to travel/commute within the bathroom!

It has become very popular in Mumbai, to pursue a master’s education abroad. This happened because it was possible to get easy loans from banks. One of my seniors in architecture school quit his masters education midway and moved to a very welcoming Dubai , recovered his finances and moved back home. However, this also encourages multi-national partnerships professionally which exist in all the places and in no specific place. Their fulcrum lies in the liminal space between the involved partners. These are not large organizations investing and making physical impact in other countries but partnerships and professional collaborations that function out of no physical occupancy at all in a global virtual connected world.

personal geographic history-1

1987-2000 Bombay i was a child in

I was born on the 7th of December 1987 at 3:30 pm after the doctor returned from her lunch which had she not taken precisely then I would have been here at 11:30am. There was no hurry of course; I was a planned caesarean baby. My parents even chose the date to co-ordinate it with one of my very wise uncles’, whose wife’s ( my aunts) birthdate was coincidently when my sister was born 45 years later after 48 hours of labour pains borne by my mother.

I think what they did with my birth set the pattern for the rest of my life I took two years to say my first words which there are two versions of this story; were “mamma papa” (how diplomatic and articulate!) especially following a babbling sister walking and talking at 10months.in the second version my first word was” bua” what we call the same aunt whose husbands birthdate I share. Walking is another story again, in all my childhood pictures I am a rotund ball a ball that must be supported and secured in its location for fear it might start rolling! Cleary I was testing geometries to ground my understanding of structure for when I would be an architect.

My sister and I were children of artistic and travel oriented parents. My father is an architect and my mother is also an architect though not my initial training but by practice. A year after I was born my father moved his practice from the heart of the city to the more geographic heart of the city also where we lived. I mostly spent most of my time in the new heart, which was the whole city to me except on weekends when we went outside Chembur. In fact I don’t think in my daily sphere I covered the whole of it either. It wasn’t something important for me to get a sense of it in entirety the kind that a map now gives me. Then the places were associational. Every place I visited had a purpose the function made the place. New non-functional places were friends’ homes. I live right beside a south Indian temple and I have a church and a mosque at a 5min walk in either direction. We could hear all three temple and church bells and mullah’s azaan (call for prayer). My friends and I played within the compound walls of our buildings, slowly moving outwards along with expanding sense of adventure and ages, encompassing streets in between and sometimes beyond our houses. An urban playground is very dynamic we had a good variety garages, stacked up piles of construction material, short one storied buildings and then the two storied ones, scaffoldings for painting the building going grey after the rains, the community hall that we are forbidden to play around in the back alley behind Manali’s building, the car that’s been rotting in the building compound, the stage they once built, he sand piles from the repair work and of course the old and fat trees. Terraces, .. Nothing really was locked. Only if the owner was a cruel child hating person. My mother is not from Mumbai she didn’t grow up there unlike my father. She has different recollections of our urban childhood, it involves the aspect of fear, she recounts her tale of my sister knocking on the big glass sliding windows we had in our living room, of our home on the second floor (which is the third one above the ground level) perched on a bamboo in the scaffolding grid with the other kids on successively lower points. My sister was very proud on having scaled this height and wanted to come in, my mother wasn’t so keen on watching her leap the remaining 60cm so she sternly instructed her to go down the way she came up and watched with nervously as we began our descent.

There was this pani puri(famous street food) vendor in camp who had the best pani puri in town, we went to him often, the area was called camp. Strange name, it gets it from original being a refugee (post partition)   camping area with barracks. These repetitive barracks are what gave it a sort of socialist feel not visible in other parts of Chembur and a few places in the city especially now. The people living here were no longer campers but the name stuck. This area also was home to the biggest golf course in Mumbai, called the Bombay Presidency Golf Club. The club spanned quite a large area and was divided by a two lane, two sided traffic road. There were small gates to cross over from one side of the course to the other. It was the entrance I used to get very quickly to my golfing lessons. It was like a secret sneaky passage even though it was wide open with no walls and just a metal grill gate.

Games with teams really make clear in your mind a certain idea of boundary which is simple enough to be transferred to countries and continents, effective even on ascending scales but not the other way around. There is very little sense of personal space, that is something you learn when you leave and all you have in personal space and you begin to occupy it. I didn’t really have any friends from abroad growing up, some whose parents worked in Muscat/ Dubai and hence were born there. In my group of friends we came from different parts of India and our common language was English and to some extent Hindi.

Indian economy was liberalized in 1991; I don’t think I remember any immediate transitions. One of the few transitions I did see where coffee shops, they became popular when I was in my last years of school and popped up everywhere. Also billboards many more came in. The drive I cinema at Mahim which you could see when you drove on one of the first highways of Mumbai closed down.Pepsi and coca cola and cable TV came to India. The automobile industry was liberalized. Variety became the spice of life. International (largely American)clothing brands, foods, sitcoms, cars became more and more available. The advertising industry reached its adolescence with me and we have grown together since.

modelling maitreya

dissecting snatch

program