Grids of the Grocer

 

It's not only architects or artists who deal with geometries. Geometry I think is a part of every person. When I mention geometry, I am referring to complex patterns that are made out of basic shapes. While walking across the streets everyday, I look at how vegetable vendors arrange their pyramids of tomatoes, gingers, apples or other fruits. How neatly they make bundles of chillies, gingers, spinach in a grid. How nicely, the flower vendors make groups of a handful (palm-ful) of orange flowers and cap them with a red one. How they arrange the stack of leaves overlapping each other...

I wonder how the people who make the cane baskets make a multitude of shapes out of a single thread of cane...its like a complex structure of geometry used very simply. Looking at hats, baskets, containers all made out of basic long cane, I was surprised with the intensity with which they engage with an object (which is an everyday object for them). Bamboos, and the ways they cut it to make classes, cups, boxes and a range of other products...Wires - the way they shape it up into cycles, cars, trains, etc - or plastics, take anything. There is so much of it.

On one hand, where geometry is organizational (in the way of the grid) its also something that they structure their lives around.  It is also that they make into a structure (an object). Craft is thus important. It makes you realize of what you can do with objects, and how you can build on to them.

however, what i really like is that inspite of a rigid grid, the gingers are irregular. Inspite of the unstable rolling round tomato, it makes one of the most stable structure of the pyramid!! how interesing. They do it with a lot of love, in the heat of the sun, only waiting for all those pyramids to disappear at the end of the day! A basket of things to play - keep arranging, refilling their mats -the chickoos, the bananas...how they make the most interesting patterns.

Do they do it as a pass time? Or do they create an aesthetic of display? Does it appeal to people to see shining jaamuns as a regularised mountain of equal units? Making a mountain out of watermelons - and cutting a pyramidal cone out of it only to tuck it back in its profiled section? all of it suggests so much of articulation. I think we could learn from how these people deal with geometries...For articulation, for resolution, for finding ways of economising space, for finding out how spaces in-between are created, how colours interact... all of that.
And this only came up more strongly when I sat over a student's drawings resolving his circular space structure...if only he could inform him more with things around....

err...

But i would have almost missed the point...How does the grid so naturally come to the vegetable vendor? Sometimes I wonder how would Descartes react to this!? How would Euclid react to such natural instinct of making pyramids of papayas? And was the grid practised before it was discovered? Is the cartesian grid primordial? Perhaps questions which have been answered...i could just re-thread it...