MMRDA Entry Register

If you look closely, you will understand the inventiveness of this book. Expand the image and look at the first and last columns.

The above idea was put in place by the security staff of MMRDA (new block) so as to avoid the constant turning of the book in 180 degrees for taking details of the visitors.

Visitors notebooks have become a common place after the millennium in most public places as well as private housing complexes in cities of India, particularly Mumbai, as a manner of keeping tab on anyone who enters within their premises. Security guards are required to take the details of visitors that include their names, addresses, contact details and signatures. The entire affair is quite strange for over years, the act has almost become perfunctory. Both parties - the guard as well as the visitor is casual about the register, seen in the material condition of the book and the instruments (pen). No one knows who finally checks this data, and when? What happens of these countless pages of information at the end of the book? If one sits with these registers after their completion, they could provide us an interesting geography of visitors to a single place - the flows of people and objects precisely.

This is indeed a valuable cultural product - one that indexes the manifest of (in)securities arising due to certain events in a certain time in history in urban areas, taking a unique form along with its assisting infrastructure of security scanners (in public places) and acts of body-frisking!

In an age where rubberband and paperclip are personalising the object of a note book, how does one think of book as a communal entity within which several people write at once? In the above case, for example, the book is filled in by numerous individuals, from different directions and multiple handwritings. It is these engagements in space and time that give the book its ultimate form. The above example is exceptional as it helps opening up so many dimensions of use, regulation, aesthetic, record keeping, sharing, space - and so on. The construction of the register is simultaneously regarded and disregarded.