Before I left for the USA, I remember obsessively capturing the city spaces in my phone camera. It was a ritual for me to empty the hundreds of pictures I would click every month into a well organised folder structure in my computer drive. I have more than about 2000 uncategorised pictures of the city and things I was clicking in general. I wasn't really a photographer, am not one even now. But there was something that I was "seeing" in the city then - something that interested me.
For my first year in the US, I took a lot of pictures too. Initially it was the newness of the place as well as the new phone that I was perhaps exploring. However by the second year and the end of my stay in the country, I started feeling too bored to take pictures. The place became boring to shoot. Moreover, it was so pretty that I was fed up of it. Further I also feel it was so strictly planned and each piece of architecture was so meticulously designed that it forced a certain kind of structured gaze of the camera. One could only shot those buildings in a particular way else they wouldn't give you the "right" effect.
After I came back in India, I have hardly photographed the place I encounter while traveling, essentially the northern suburbs. I have now been back for two years in Mumbai, and have merely added two more folders with a few pics added to the collection. In the beginning I was wondering if I have just grown out of the phenomenon of taking pictures. I thought that i had done it enough and would just be taking photographs for the heck of it.
Today, for some reason I feel that it is more about the part of city I traverse to and the mode in which I travel that has caused me to look at the city space quite differently. Unlike earlier, I travel to the north of the city instead of the south now. Essentially I move against the dominant motion of the city every morning. In some ways it is great because I escape almost all traffic and also that the place is much closer to my house. However what I have also come to realize is that actually the morning train travel to South of the city was much more interesting and visually appealing than the current northward journey.
Over my train journey to Dadar from Goregaon (North to South Bombay), for example, I would get actively engaged in looking at the emerging constructions and perpetually changing landscapes along the railways. I could see the incomplete buildings, layers of landscapes at a vantage points, old and new fabrics juxtaposed, the geometrical architecture of the stations framing the city, the follies of unused redundant platform structures, and so on. Moving through Dadar every morning too, was a fascinating encounter with hundreds of commuters as well as shopkeepers setting their stalls around the precinct. The walk offered one of the most intimate sensorial experiences. From the school (Rachna Sansad), one could see at a distance the way in which new architecture was slowly transforming the low rise, sloping roof settlements. Seeing this kind of a change as a distant observer allowed thought to constantly reel in the head.
The northern suburbs, on the other hand, have a very different vibe. Awkwardly fussy, the places are hard to fathom. There's no particular architectural character to any of the northern suburbs. Indeed there are sub cultures but as an urban form, all are pretty uniform. Moving through the suburbs is no exciting task. Most of these suburbs have taken upon them hideous-looking and bulky infrastructures like the skywalks that, while allowing you to trespass the chaos on ground, become endless bland corridors with little scope for human activity. Over my road journey don't get to see any thing, besides the glass malls and cellular residential complexes - those that become more and more gated day by day. There are no public buildings so to say, except the aesthetically devoid institutions like police stations and ward offices.
I don't know how to describe this loss - for the reasons are compounded. Firstly, I have not seen any thing worthwhile in the north, and that has resulted in a poor photo-documentation of the place! I wouldn't know what to talk about the stretch even if I took pictures of what I see around me! Such factors immediately point us to think - what architectural value does the northern Bombay hold for any one? Beyond the Prithvi Theatre or Juhu Beach in Andheri, one can hardly count any places of public interest in the north-western part of the city. Cultural institutions like Dinanath Mangeshkar hall, or many similar spaces are not designed to be public in nature. Acutely closed off to the public, cladded in glass and aluminium curtain walls, these precincts repel people physically as well as visually.Other places such as the Film City has forever been closed to locals. The BNHS and the national park are the natural reserves that have become mere functional recreational landscapes for most. Besides, these are not places that are easily accessible to everyone, especially those who live beyond the railway lines towards the West. In addition, these are hardly places where communal events for the city can be organized. A common cultural space where people can spend their time, loiter, engage in art, music, dance and such other activities is almost absent in this part of the city. Lacking cultural infrastructure, the north remains dormant, and garners no interest amongst the youth, who prefer to travel south for their recreational cravings.
I have also come to believe that in the absence of such events and happening, there is something distinctly identifiable as a "north-bombay mentality" - a deeply middle class, bourgeoisie world view that thinks of the south as work and the north as living. The students' worldviews (having taught at Rachna Sansad which attracted students from all over the city) differ, their ambitions differ - most of the times much narrow. These are repercussions of a space that suffers low cultural value in its built as well as intellectual environment.
It is true that these observations have become starker after witnessing the "suburbia" in the West. For a long time, "suburban" was a term so close to me that I never read as "sub-urban" but "su-bur-ban". It might sound laughable to the readers, but that the "sub-urban" becomes a second-grade life of the urban; a step down in hierarchy of environment, a "less happening" (as my sister-in-law would point out, who grew up in South Mumbai) place became evident to me only through my alienated experience of the American suburbia, removed from my own. Yet, the American suburbia is much more polarised than what we live in, and I will spare that comparison for a different time. Meanwhile, I look for ways in which I can make the northern suburbs of Bombay more interesting for myself, beyond the adventures of Essel World, Water Kingdom and the Golden Pagoda!
