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.
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.
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