Learning NYC

A colleague at my new office (MoMA) told me today that a member of the MoMA who is on his visit to Mumbai for an upcoming exhibition to document urbanism in the city, sent her an image of a telephone booth (that is generally operated by visually challenged people in our city) to her as one of his documented images from the city. This colleague of mine seemed surprised with what the person inside the telephone station was doing! I tried to frame the context for her and later the conversation drifted into a history of the way in which long distance calls were made, and received. For me, it was difficult to take a position for this condition - this colleague was clearly finding the existence of such a condition outdated. By framing the context, would I represent India as still much behind in the "global" race, or non-developed? What would she make out of my contextualizing explanation? Would she think of the place, considered today a megacity, as something that is still to see so much?

I immediately contrasted it with the fact that even sweepers had mobiles today, but these telephone booths would become places to make anonymous calls, international calls, and so on. But another dimension that I got thinking about was that how, an everyday object like the telephone booth in Mumbai, becomes an object of curiousity for an 'outsider'. How then, so many things become matters of documentation for different cultures. Soon enough, I came to a comparative cross axis, thinking about what become objects of curiousity for me in the US. And the list was endless. Although I do not know in what light the MoMA member shall interpret his observations in Mumbai, but I certainly look at the new urbanity I am in here, through my critical lens. I don't have any glorified understanding of this place (New York),  but only look at things here to understand how people here think, as compared to us.

The buttons at the signals to cross the streets, the computerised systems, the non-manual booths and kiosks, the streets saturated with signages, the large spread-out or multistoreyed parking lots, the straight endless roads, the criss crossing numbered streets and avenues - all dictate a highly structured world. For any one coming from this environment, Mumbai will be an absolute mess. But both, Mumbai and New York are amiable cities, and what makes them such is people. The number of chance encounters with people and finding that you are part of some or the other network through which you can connect to a common event are very high in cities. You see people from different places, races, ethnicities and don't find yourself as alien as you would find yourself in a small town. 

Moreover, the city conditions people in similar fashions. Amongst the curious objects of the city, are also people - typified by the city life. People dozing off on the trains, sleeping on benches, spitting on the street, talking to themselves, shouting aloud abusing others, waiting for elses on the bus stops, shrugging about the missed signals or trains or buses, hopping in the rains without umbrellas, ignorant of the next person - you see bits of yourself somewhere in all of them. You relate to these conditions of the city in people if you have grown up in any city across the world as charged as New York or Mumbai. 

Traveling back on the subways, like the Mumbai locals, after about 9 months, I find my body fatigued exactly like before - something I never experienced in the town of New Haven. What is this fatigue, what happens to the body? What gets inside? Why do we doze off on the trains in the morning right after having a bath, when we are just beginning our day? After some basic pondering, I have come to the conclusion that it must be some simplistic exchange of energy systems when our body is subject to a speed other than usual. The way in which the city makes us move up and down tends to accumulate some potential energy in our body perhaps, which is not transferred into any other form. This potential energy until transformed, makes us feel heavy on head! Or is it the quality of air that we breathe? This might be such a silly theory, absolutely irrational. What's the harm in thinking about it anyway if it placates the restive mind?

But traveling in trains is always enjoyable. As I have written before, long before, I like to see the way in which the city gets framed and reframed in motion - through the windows and doors of the moving vehicles. 

I don't feel too alone in the city of New York - there is always activity to look at, unlike New Haven. Yesterday for example I trailed to look at the Seagram Building by Mies Van Der Rohe, which is right next to my office. And I absolutely loved it. Today I was told by my friend that there is another building right across the Seagram building designed by SOM as well as one by Saarinen. The aspect of "design" is so prevalent in this city - I believe that people are generally aware of design and style and like to know about things, and how they come into existence.

The amount of people that visit MoMA everyday is phenomenal. I see queues to its exhibits even before the Museum opens. The galleries are never empty - also, being summer, it remains overcrowded. All kinds of people visit it - MOMA is the place for contemporary art. I must detail this aspect on another post. But New York has given me back my experience of a city, rather, it has allowed me to relook at Mumbai through an altogether different perspective. Although New York seems extremely organized, it can be absolutely messy with its grid iron streets (primarily Manhattan). The character of the city is similar at most places and it is as easy to lose track as to orient oneself. Perhaps one needs some orientation with the signage. Otherwise, it's just my Mumbai hangover through which I constantly transgress the rules of this city.

But in what I have written above, I have hardly covered anything that I really wanted to say. I guess thoughts just evaporate when I ask them to become words. I am sorry about that. Meanwhile, this piece of junk will be all I post for this post.