Memories of space

Memories of space tend to remain with us long after the physical space itself ceases to exist. I remember spending my lazy summer vacations in our ancestral home in Karol Bagh. I remember the post-office at the end of the lane, and Sharbati, the press-wali with her coal iron, as she stood at her table against the walls of the small central park of our mohalla. I didn't know then all that I know now, that the barber who came every second Sunday to our house on his bicycle to give us a haircut, or the safaiwalli who came to collect the garbage with her children, even the vendors who came from time to time, selling ganna and mungfali, would disappear along with all our neighbours when the waft of the new era, the Age of Loss would start to flow, weakly at first then like an exponential equation, it would come squatting at our doorsteps, waiting for us all to give way to the progress of land-economics.

Today, Karol Bagh like all old residential clusters in a city gripped by the high fever of real-estate is a crumbling fragment of its former self. It has become a myth, a forgotten story in its own life-time, and its contextual heritage has been replaced by signages of globalization, of McDonald and Western Union money exchanges, and of the commercial bazaars of Chinatown. Walking down these residential colonies today, I see people erecting prison walls around their properties, high fences to keep them safe at night and meticulously screening their guards and their maids at the compound custom clearance offices, a process not very different from immigration at the Airports. Others I see, tearfully leaving behind a part of themselves to become lost in the ignominy of suburbia.

?Across the highways today, I see alien buildings evoking an overarching sense of Lovecraftian universal horror, giants on a landscape still surviving on food grown in narrow fields next to sewer drain-rivers. Moving through the city at night, in the backdrop of these monumental machines, dinosaurs casting shadows on the concrete roads as we weave through their fat feet, suckling on the heavy concrete bosoms of gargantuan flyovers, I can see abandoned cows grazing on the median greens with their totem pole trees in metal cages.

What is your truest shade of blue oh sky, for in the dust blanket of this morose city, it is only when the ghostly myth monsters of the monsoon walk across the human construct, unaware of our roadside picnic on their eternal migratory path, that one can sense the passage of a system that we were once a part of. Because we are alienated now, not just in our actions, but also in our dreams, vacant, like the space between the risers of steel pedestrian cross-overs, there is nothing that is familiar, nothing that arouses within us, a sense of ourselves in our city, or its continuous redesign.

We are the children of online almanacs who never have to ask history to tell us who we are, for we know it all too well. In the graffiti splattered urban villages and the mod-café hotels, in the biddi-smoking chai-lovers at metro junctions, and in the rudimentary brick designs of the ethno-modern architects, we in all our divergence know exactly who we are.

But why then, in the countless journeys we take through our cities, on the broad expressways, in rickshaws over flyovers, through residential colonies with bamboo gates, and bypassing the district business centers, we cannot remember where we are. And on occasions, neither can we recall when we are. We are a generation bred for forgetting, a generation without a disturbance, a generation without the trauma of disruption.

We need today, more than isolated acts of architectural resistance, an anonymous act of urban design that can address the dynamics of continuity in space-time of the city that we lost to colonialism, and its aftermath in an era of freedom's compensation, a dramatic new movement that stitches together the disciplines of real estate with the multiculturalism of our social sensibilities to create places with distinct identities.

And it is there, within the margins of the contradictions of globalizing India, and the sharp contrasts between our cities and ourselves, between the cracks of concrete and the righteousness of religious institutions, in the pluralities of our sociologies, and the multiplicity of our clichés, in our loud, brash, chaotic streets and our somber afternoon siestas, it is there, that the concept of Public Art can be effectively employed to create metaphors for ourselves- our Identity, the spirit of new India, the ‘us’ who are still seeking the meaning of ‘being us’. And it is there, that we can create perhaps the lost framework of our time and the perception of our cities within in.

For Art makes a city an individual by offering the choice between recognition of patterns and ignorance of subaltern symbolism. Art is the quiet revolution in the mass of humanity and the terrible madness lingering behind the eyes of a few; art is a filter, a prison, an exclusive claim, yet art is the voice of all peoples. Art is the City, the circular self-organization of oil in water, water in sky, dirt in clouds, time travel.

But how does art transcend from an individual’s medium of thought to a collective philosophy of its time, and how does one capture it in the public realm? What is the avant-garde in context of urban planning, and when does it become a catalyst of awakening, a bridge to a new era in learning, a school of thought, not yet thought up but brimming at the lips of us all like a popular song, that no one has sung yet, or a history no one has lived?

And how would this anonymous act of urban renaissance affect those who chanced upon it? Would it bring them together, a spectral order of artists and urban planners dreaming together the colour of the curb stones, or citizens and servants assaying the absence of walls and the shades of trees? Would it remind them, this fluctuating spectrum of aspirational caravans floating across the stark skies, that they once shared a name, a purpose, and a city.

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(c) Vitasta Raina. You can reach me at [email protected]