To believe in oneself

"Persist and verify…The power that we abdicate to others out of our insecurity — to others who insult us with their faux-intuition or their authoritarian smugness — that comes back to hurt us so deeply… But the power we wrest from our own certitude — that saves us."


Rosanne Cash / excerpted from Brainpickings

Orientation

The concept of "orientation" allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space-that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance. And yet, for me, learning left from right, east from west, and forward from back does not necessarily mean I know where I am going. I can be lost even when I know how to turn, this way or that way. Kant describes the conditions of possibility for orientation, rather than how we become orientated in given situations. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger takes up Kant's example of walking blindfolded into a dark room. For Heidegger, orientation is not about differentiating between the sides of the body, which allow us to know which way to turn, but about the familiarity of the world: "I necessarily orient myself both in and from my being already alongside a world which is 'familiar'" (1973: 144). Familiarity is what is, as it were, given, and which in being given "gives" the body the capacity to be orientated in this way or in that. The question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we "find our way" but how we come to "feel at home."

Ahmed Sara, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, London. 2006. pg. 6-7

Two posters for the summer!

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The Craft of Smell

In true sense, the work of art at the Sassoon Dock was the containment of people in an overbearing envrionment of smell. It is the smell that defines the dock - which kept intensifying and reducing as one moved across the different chambers opened up for art installations at Mumbai's historic dock. One notices the largeness of these left over spaces that have remained locked for a long time. Opening these to the public makes one appreciate the architecture of a dock. 

The smell becomes a part of you in a while, after which you are reminded of it through different installations within the exhibition - the toilets, the sea, the perfume and so on. At the risk of becoming too obvious, the assertion of smell as an art form was refreshing. It takes one out of the sanitized environment of the white cubes and brings you to reconsider the city wherein you are constantly negotiating olfactory environments. 

Typography and Graffiti was an important part of art, primarily because it was curated by ST+ART Mumbai. Different parts of the city were taken over by street artists from all over. The exhibition saw a new politics in art making. Most importantly, it opened up the docks, which, while leaving, are the strongest memory that remind you of the city as a key trading harbour. The jetty, the warehouse, the left over luggage and sea leave you in a wave of history that is so close, but yet seems so far. It was totally worth visiting the place taken over by art!

Pashupatinath / Kathmandu

One of the most powerful experiences that I had in the city of Kathmandu was visiting the Pashupatinath - a living temple of the Hindu deity of Shiva.