Teaching Online During Covid

This morning, I was thinking what would have really happened, after all, if we stopped teaching for 6 months given the impositions of lock down and house confinements to abate COVID-pandemic. How would life change in the larger scheme of things and events at all if education just stopped for a bit? Why have educators been desperate to find modes and means of transitioning their instructions into some or the other way of online teaching? What was so urgent? Would the world doom if growing minds did not study for 6 months, or even one year? Indeed, one could argue that education, of all other things, is one sector that could most easily operate online. But what view and biases do we hold of education when we do make that statement? Do we mean to say that education is merely a passive from of passing or receiving information that has nothing to do with the presence of two bodies in any physical space? Do we mean to say that classroom is simply a transaction of information that can happen anywhere, anytime? Do we mean to say that it is nothing but pure administration - in both, bureaucratic and institutional terms - that schools are merely institutional mechanisms for delivering potions of lessons, dosages to those involved in the process of learning? In sum, what is teaching and learning, and how does one reduce it to an online interface with such forceful and quick ways into the mode of online medium?

On the one hand there is huge amount of debate all across the world on pedagogical methods that have become outdated - those that donot deliver students relevant skills for the exponentially changing world. Companies like google and facebook seemingly no longer recognize degrees of institutional training while seeking candidates. Students learn on the go, in many cases become autodidacts by consuming the already available content or by engaging not just online, but also in their own areas of practice. Indeed there is a huge disparity in terms of awareness and guidance. But even for that scenario, I am forced to think, what would have one year of delay cost in educating oneself? I am finding hard to reconcile how, where on one hand, there are debates to skip out of the rut of teaching in the typical modalities of sessions and lectures, whereas on the other hand, much if it succumbs to the unsaid pressure of continuing to carry out the same ways of educating online, in the most chauvinistic manner. In other instances, we are often advised to look at the world in the larger scheme of things, to think of time in a larger scale of the universe - and suddenly, all that is crushed and crashed into the medium of web-space. What essentially is going on? Why such a desperation?

We are certainly held in a double bind. The only rationalising theory that seems to drive our actions is the compulsion of living in a capitalist society. Engines of education have to keep themselves running so as to assure the flow of economy, in the macro as well as micro dimensions. At both the scales, the only dimension I can think of is the drive to maintain regular flow of money. All decisions are hurried and hushed to get to online track so as to maintain the rhythm and rhyme of regular payments. The narrative of "life must go on" seems merely a cover up. Life would have went on even if students were not studying under their so called teachers. Just that the kinds of the learners of any age would have found other things to engage in - online or otherwise. They would have found some ways to escape or engage with life. At home, they would have learnt gardening or cooking, or even cleaning. If allowed out, they would perhaps simply stroll, or observe - and I wonder how would these activities productively contribute to the lessons in class that sooner or later, everyone would come back to. And at this point, it is interesting to also consider the other way round - how is this phase of online learning going to impact physical learning when we do get back to it? Are we going to be chauvinistically celebrate the maintaining of the institutional continuum? Are we going to thump our chests for saving the six months of the magnanimous project called life? I have been disturbed with all these thoughts over some time now - this whole hurry and insecurity to push life into the computer space. Indeed, this is not to say that for many this is an escape from their troubled domesticities - but should we be addressing the escape, or finding alternative escapes for our lives? We need to think more rationally.

Arriving at the Terminus

published in "Treasure at the Terminus: Stories in Wood and Stone", Public Relations Department, Central Railway, India. 2019

courtesy: The People Place Project

Arriving at the Terminus

Anuj Daga



Many of us who have grown up in Mumbai have ritualistically crossed through the halls of CST to reach our place of work, meet a friend, extend it as a landmark to a stranger or simply board from its premises an outstation train. In our constant hurried passing, we may have missed observing this magnificent building so as to consider it closely. It merely takes a delayed train to slow you down in this rushed city, and draw your gaze into the building’s intricate, layered details that transcend you into its hidden, forgotten worlds. It is here that the building begins to unfold the myriad stories that take us back in time – allowing us to live an alternative urban reality. CST intersects with our lives at a range of scales and informs our identity(-ies) at several registers. One may be able to excavate within its artifice, several histories as well as the way we come to address the contemporary landscape. Ideas of colonialism, urbanity, modernity, mobility and everyday are intrinsically tied within the object of the CST.

As we begin to travel these time-lines, we encounter multiple revelations about the way in which our own lives are intertwined into this grand urban artifact. Recounting some such journeys through CST may bring value to its presence, but more importantly to discover paths we may take to confound into ourselves. Being the first railway station built in South Asia more than 130 years ago, announced as a World Heritage Site in the early second millennium, what does it mean to arrive at CST today? How does it become a visual metaphor that indexes values of enterprise, promise and hope for a city like Mumbai? What future does it behold for its public and how does it find place within our everyday? These are questions I would like to explore by discussing the project in five scalar modes of arrival.


1. The arrival of the British

The presence of the British colony in South Asia can only be felt as it comes to engage as well as create a new public sphere for the natives through its modern institutional apparatus. The introduction of the railways in this light, has been fundamental to the endavours of the British for establishing connectivity between the different regions of India to aid purposes of trade, communication and defense. The machinery of postal system, policing and many others principally depended on the development of railways as the mass mobility system. Such institutions were eventually opened for use to the natives, who subconsciously imbued modern sensibilities within themselves in attuning to new ways of movement, gathering and communication. In opening up all these new ways of connecting and communicating, the railways restructured a medieval life into modern, it stitched the pastoral into the industrial. Being the first railway station, CST marks the onset of such institutional shifts, in essence, the arrival of the British colony on south Asian land.

While introduction of new means and methods reoriented native life, the British too were rapidly learning the new territories they came to claim. The representation of oriental nature and culture within the British palette can be studied amply in the architectural details of CST. Tropical flora and fauna intricately sculpted into various parts of the building indicate the wonderment of British in the Oriental land. Crawling reptiles and jumping monkeys on column capitals, leopard and crocodile gargoyles, lush leaves and peacocks spanning arch windows of CST amply speak of the curiosity of the new landscape that the British colony came to occupy. It was precisely the resource laden South Asian territory that attracted the British. Instead of exploit, today, the CST building might as well be celebrated as an emblem representing such bountiful landscape.

Architecturally, ideas of structuring and organizing large scale public and office space are best demonstrated in the planning of the Victoria Terminus. The meticulous attention towards management of multiple traffic flows – vehicular and pedestrian - can be studied in the archival correspondences and annals of British record. The lofty free flowing spaces thereby designed towards ordering effective public and private movement within the building calls for appreciation of architectural foresight. The design of CST lends organizational principles for public transport buildings that are worth considering for layouts until the present day. The conjoining of the long industrial platform shed to house the trains with the ornately crafted bureaucratic headquarters is synthesized uniquely through the introduction of intermediate public spaces within the scheme. On the other hand, in its C-shaped courtyard type building form, buffered with semi open verandahs folding around a covered driveway, the building marks the arrival of the public institution that mediates in its form, the relationship between the Colony and its subjects.


2. The arrival of the locomotive

Large groups of people gathered all along the two sides of the railway track from Bori Bunder to Thane on the inaugural day to witness the spectacle of the engine driven locomotive for the first time in their city. For the natives, it was unbelievable to imagine a carriage running without harnessing animal or human energy. The railway engine alluded to a mysterious black creature spewing out smoke, magically escaping space and time – a device almost straight out of the mythical texts! The collapse of myth into the modern machine marks the arrival of the locomotive within the native peoples’ lives. With time, the technology of the steam operated machines was understood and put to wide scientific use in setting up industries or looms, or even the early cars that reshaped Mumbai’s physical and cultural geography.

The railways drastically changed the experience of space and time within the Indian subcontinent. Firstly, with the coming of locomotives, the travel time between places reduced drastically. Distances that took three days to traverse now could be covered in a matter of few hours. A post which earlier took ten days to deliver could now be sent in a day. Evidently, the railways gave a tough competition to the existing animal-driven modes of transport both, in speed and carrying capacity. Secondly, it allowed wide panoramic views of the Indian landscape in a quick passing of forests, fields and mountains extending new ways of appreciating the territory the natives themselves inhabited. Lastly, moving on its dedicated levelled tracks, the train was much more comfortable than the bumpy rides of the horse or bullock driven carts, uninterrupted by externalities of extreme weather.

More important than any other, the arrival of the locomotive, for the first time, produced the notion of a moving public. Forging new relationships while traveling with large groups of strangers underpins the social agency that the railways opened up. To be sure, the initial overwhelm, hesitation, unfamiliarity, wonder and surprise towards the new mass-moving machine must have bonded people over and along the train journeys. The CST has historically been thus the house of new friendships within the emerging city. Although the strong hierarchies of class within bogies have loosely remained as a colonial hangover until today, in being chained to each other held on the common track, the introduction of the train gave a secular direction to a composite society held together in its contradictions.


3. The arrival of the migrant

Mumbai has largely remained an aspirational city due to its primary anchor in trade and entertainment industry. Historically, as the birth place of the cotton mill as well as cinema in India, Mumbai has territorially as well as visually reached out to the masses across the country drawing them in for labour and leisure. The CST has remained a significant physical and symbolic medium for such travel of people and ideas. In Hindi cinema, an exterior longshot image of CST building announcing the opening of a film, is synonymous to the idea of Mumbai: it maps the entry into the world of work and enterprise and the dreams and promise of the land. It’s quite tautological to think that for those who travel to the city through popular cinema or in real, the first sight of Mumbai has often been the monumental Victoria Terminus.

CST has forever remained an important sight seeing landmark for the tourist circuit in Mumbai. A newly built viewing deck at the crossroads in front of the building allows travelers and enthusiasts to enjoy a prolonged uninterrupted gaze of the city icon. In consuming visually, the building brings up simultaneous emotions of being and outsider and insider within the city. The onlooker is compelled to contemplate upon one’s changing social proximity with the city while held in its embrace. These thoughts bridge the initial awe of the migrant to routine everyday of the city dweller, allowing to trace one’s past to the present. It is in this way, that we meaningfully fold in our “outsider” migrant identities towards that of belonging and claim.

Undoubtedly then, CST stands today between a circle of markets represented by various communities who came to Mumbai and settled over the eventual years for purposes of trade and business. Simultaneously, a large population of labour serving the textile mills came to offer Mumbai the distinct chawl type which supported a unique density of urban life and culture. While the railways went on to connect these neighbourhoods over time, the terminus became the official terrestrial gateway for the population traveling from inner peninsula to the peripheral city of Mumbai. In doing so, the CST marks the arrival of the migrant that gives the city its cosmopolitan character and a thriving cultural diversity.


4. The arrival of Mumbai

With the settling of the newly built terminus and the smooth functioning of the trains, a large number of wealthy and prominent citizens came to invest in the expansion of railway lines to the extents of residential towns in the north. These are the philanthropists to whom we owe the infrastructural development and image of Mumbai. Further, realizing the potential of the new mass transit system, surrounding areas began to flourish. The C-shaped typology of the building was steadily assimilated into the bureaucratizing built environment of Mumbai. Many key buildings of Mumbai were commissioned to be built adapting the motifs and manners of the Victoria Terminus. The Taj Mahal hotel by Jamshetji Tata is one such example that asserts its power using the architectural language experimented in VT. Subsequently built public institutions, gymkhanas, bungalows or even chawls in the city are modest typological expressions of the terminus building.

Over the years, the local trains have come to be understood as the ‘lifeline’ of Mumbai - those that collect and redistribute people in the city. The railway is the primary mode of transport that people use to commute in Mumbai. Of the three prime lines that broadly run north-south along the entire city, two culminate into CST. To arrive at “Mumbai” essentially means to arrive at CST – it is the historical demarcation of Fort (precinct) whose ramparts were brought down to release and reclaim land for the construction of the terminus so that the city could extend further. Until today, coming to CST is coming to the Town – not just the colonial town, but also a place that embodies the urban essence of Mumbai – a city known for its work culture disciplined fundamentally to the timetable of the railways. Until today, local trains in Mumbai are identified in their time-stamps.

As the representative image of Mumbai, the CST has been constantly restored and retrofitted with new technologies, amendments and extensions. The electrification of the steam engine during the 1930s, the conversion of bogies from DC to AC, the constant upgradation of railway compartments towards creating comfortable environment within the trains, the appreciation of concourse lengths and heights - all remind us of the historical shifts that the building, its patrons and the public have laboured together over time. The addition of underground subways, new discreet outlets for the public have all been designed respecting the original vision of the place, however debatable. The recent colourful lighting of CST’s exterior invited ample criticism from conservation architects and the public, which only indicates concern over how people see the building as a reflection of the city. In keeping pace with time, a public building like CST ceases to become outdated and validates Mumbai’s contemporariness.


5. The arrival of ‘everyday’

Over the latter part of 20th century, while the suburbia in the north sprawled as the place of residence, the downtown in south remained the principal place of work: the commercial district where most Mumbaikars travelled ritualistically to spend much of their productive time. A life of commute, commotion and care that culminated in the environment of VT lent Mumbai its ‘everyday’ identity. To enter into the numerous bodies with an estranged feeling of belonging to the city is what the terminus accommodated and mediated generously. It announced the feeling of fruition of the everyday that one desires for. It became a social shelter outside of home where one is able to meet a city of one’s own under one single roof. In bringing together people to consume a life of possibilities and promise, the terminus defines a distinct realm of the everyday.

Over the years, CST has multiplied its institutional role to transform itself into a shelter, refuge, home, museum, a stage for performance or has even served as a symbolic backdrop for protests. It is needless to mention that for the enormous staff that controls the operations of Mumbai railways from CST, the building is nothing less than home. Besides, for the public, the terminus has always been the place of refuge during heavy rains or other man made accidents. In several instances in the past, the transactional spaces like corridors or passageways have been lent for hosting mini public exhibitions informing the commuters about their city in small ways. Performers have used its hallways to stage street plays or flash mobs in order to engage or educate the diverse population of the city. CST introduces us to these multiple facets that constitute our everyday life and make it meaningful. It is an everyday that makes a million dreams real. It brought, and still continues to bring the same people regularly at a place and setting up a rhythm, a routine through which they enter into their “everyday”.

Over the last 20 years, the station has undergone several transformations – physical and cultural. In the spirit of overcoming colonial hegemony and bringing the building’s identity to terms with the contemporary times, the station's name was changed from Victoria Terminus to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in March 1996 in honour of Emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji, founder of the Maratha Empire. In 2017, the station was again renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. In 2004, CST was awarded the World heritage status, which has focused plans on the conservation of its premises. In 2008, the station bore brutal terrorist attacks, after which it was installed with a serious layer of security in the form of metal detectors and CCTV cameras. This has seriously affected its publicness. My essay has struggled between calling this piece of architecture as VT, CST or CSTM, precisely because of the mixed and layered relationship it has built within us with the city of Mumbai, that indexes its history. Although the city keeps sprawling farther into the northern suburbs, once in a while, we all crave to visit the station in order to remind ourselves of the identity we hold as Mumbaikars. The CST is now an object of longing to fulfil the dream of what it means to be in Mumbai. It is an icon that defines Mumbaihood, in which we begin to seed the dreams of a larger future.

Life in Lockdown

Life in Lockdown

I took this picture yesterday and have been thinking about it since. In many ways it became quite allegorical of so many aspects that have become central during this period of lock down during COVID 19. An old USB extension chord I purchased about three years ago was "brought back to life" since my new laptop has only two USB sockets. The extension is designed to look like a man whose limbs taken on the extra USB extensions, was my rescue for multitasking and connecting more than two devices to my laptop.In the picture, this USB human looks particularly distressed, entangled into the wires. At the same time, s/he is sitting within the black space (of the speckled table) which almost makes him appear suspended in a starry abysmal hollow space. The "power" light in red harks a kind of fatality in correspondence to the gently bent neck and leg that gives the overall posture of its body a sombre depressed demeanour. To a large extent, it talks to the people stuck at home feeling low in these times of the pandemic.But that is just one part of the story. The other whole parallel narrative that this image opens up is the pushing of the limits of electronic and web connectivity that everyone is largely reliant on during these days. "WFH" has become a new acronym for everyone (which stands for Work From Home). Social media is overflowing with webinars and online talks open to public. Several people have jokingly called it as a pandemic of webinars! Amidst all this, the human body is literally suspended in the e-space while physically immobile. Energized through new channels, such extensions are keeping us afloat, and mentally alive - allowing a new kind of normalcy. The colourful speckles in the dark vacuum together make up for a dual reading. I felt that the image brings out poignantly a range of emotions - the corporeal and technological reality of a large section of human lives during these gloomy times of the pandemic. The seeming ascent of the floating body here, suggests the hope of escape from these troubling atmospheres.

Ratheesh T at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

published in Art India
in Vol. 22, Issue 3



The Artist and his Backyard 

Ratheesh T’s detailed works capture the political intimacies with a small-town life in Kerala, notes Anuj Daga. 

Ratheesh T.’s oils on canvas at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of September to the 20th of November, 2018, seem to defiantly guard aspects of life that come to constitute meaning and identity within his immediate community. The nonchalant naked artist standing in the centre of the room in I Am (Cleaning Pond) greets the viewer rather defensively. The ripped wall of the house exposes us to the nullah over which it is probably built. The clothes scattered all over the furniture create an uninviting environment. Any attempt by the viewer to know more about this mess is repelled/rejected? by the artist’s smirk and assertively shielded by his bare body. 

In How Are You, Who Are You?, the semi-naked artist, now wrapped in his lungi, is busy with the ritualistic preparation of puttu in the kitchen – with grated coconut kept on a table and the pressure-cooker on the counter alongside. As he fills up the puttu vessel with rice flour and coconut, he alerts himself, yet allows the pigeons who appear to be regular visitors to the kitchen, free play of the room. Showing his back, the artist seems too engrossed in his domestic chores to engage with the viewers. 

Kiss (Clear Pond) presents a daughter and father sharing an intimate moment at the edge of a lake. Filling up the background, the lake with floating flowers, reflecting skies and buildings frame and isolate the two from the rest of the world. In I See You, the protagonist is seen teaching his partner to fend off a boar that has possibly strayed into their backyard. His warm closeness to the woman in the dark, whose eyes he covers to mask fear and the torchbeam with which he stuns the beast, creates an aura of private trust around them. Being witness to this moment makes the viewer feel like an intruder. 

The artist’s rootedness in his village and community life and his autobiographical explorations allow us entry into his world while maintaining a measured distance. While on the one hand, these scenes from his daily life strongly assert his Malayali identity, the viewer is strategically othered through moments that might embarrass or induce disengagement. The characters in the paintings do not always lend themselves readily to the viewer. Ratheesh’s works thus often turn the anthropological gaze in and leave the viewer feeling estranged about his status as an observer. 

Two paintings lay out details of everyday public life. In one work, the viewer is led into an overlooked backyard with dense trees where we see a dilapidated toilet block, with a broken vent pipe, built away from the main house. Amidst discarded household junk, rotting coconut shells, bottles, banners and the national flag is the toilet wall scribbled with everyday gibberish and political opinions within which the life of the community unfolds. The life of this community is detailed in another painting where interdependencies and close knit relationships among its people become visible. In the foreground, you see three young men carrying a large cutout of the hammer and the sickle, cutting their way across an everyday scene within his village gently lamenting on the state of communism. 

Saami presents the artist as a protagonist wearing a t-shirt and jeans to whom the villagers approach with wonder, mischief and merriment. The women washing themselves by the stream and the dark men cleaning their teeth with datoon laugh at what appears to be a new avatar of the artist. An old friend plays funny tricks with a cigarette lighter – he playfully threatens to set the artist’s beard on fire. The artist stands un-defiantly, lost in thought, a benign smile on his lips. The artist is now an outsider. 

Home during COVID

One of the many ways in which the understanding of the home may be approached is the fact that the home is able to offer us an environment where we may perform our most intimate acts. We feel we are at home when the apparent distinction between the inside and outside of the body resonates in a way that both mirror each other almost perfectly. The physical manifest of the home is then able to echo and reflect desires that are felt inside, and eventually be shared with a common world outside. In reality however, the walled units that we come to inhabit are hardly a representation of ourselves. We occupy conflicted territories with overlapping desires, varied ideologies, different practices and our own personal schedules. These several-ities are hardly recognized with the singular space of the physical shelter. The rooms we come to occupy as houses allow us to live merely a fragment of our own selves. Where do the other selves get lived then? How do they manifest otherwise? What is the locus of the home if lived in mere fragments? How do we assemble them and attempt a picture of the home?

The Covid 19 lockdown has impressed upon us the above questions more sharply, for it has taken up the privacies that were not necessarily lived within the outline of our apartments, rather scattered into the recycle bin of the city space. In lending anonymity, invisibility and blurring of the body, the city extended to us latent personalities that could thrive through alienation. It would contain a thousand alter-egos which could emerge and disappear, be constructed and forgotten, could be recreated and rejected, reinvented and re-lived. In doing so, unknown pockets of urban space become meaningful in the register of a provisional home. In constraining people within their apartment boundaries, Covid has partly taken up the agencies over our parallel selves – those that were hidden into the vast alternate world that vectored our home. The restraints of home boundedness have resulted in an implosion of these multitude of dimensions within our personalities that were indexed into a different geography. Where do these lives get lived in the imposed self-quarantine? What new personalities emerge within the clash of dissonant selves, and spaces within the sphere of the geometric home?

While for some, living outside the outline of the house may be a metaphorical idea of the home, for many in the city, it is the hard reality. This only becomes more apparent when we consider the population living in squatter settlements, or denser low income areas. Here, members of a family consciously choose to step out or remain outside the home to allow space for the other, or escape the limiting shell of their shelter. Intermingling with the community outside one’s physical domesticities offers security to the home-makers. For the old people, it would be a way to find their own breed, but more importantly unburdening their families off their distinct social lives. Staying outside the home is thus also a mechanism through which the tension of social space is released into the excess of the city. Covid has confiscated the tool of disappearance which sustained the home, for people living in dense, small settlements.

We no longer can be naked – in a way of performing a self that could afford for itself unfiltered pleasure. Within our geographies of quarantine, we must wear a social garment. On portals of virtual communication, we must screen bodies through the interfacing windows. And more literally, we may not touch, or be touched by people we encounter outside our zones of captivity. If nakedness also is indexed in our personalities, then the masks Covid has forcefully made us wear index the various layers of social, physical and personal insecurities that it has exposed us to. The multitude of homes that otherwise bubble and burst amidst the exchanges within these domains have flattened into thin air. As of today, we live in atmospheres of division – red, orange, green, regulated through several mediated machineries. These divisions are here to stay for long – as ghosts of the pandemic that will hallucinate and erupt during forthcoming times of crisis. How do we foresee the new differences that have already begun to surface (on) the human body? What will be the revised geography of shelter for these newly differentiated bodies – through caste, class, religion and contagion? How will these bodies be (re)covered? And how can they remain naked?

The Covid lockdown has sensitised us to the overlapping time schedules, and programmatic conflicts that arise out of the different ways in which humans bundle up forms of work and leisure. The home is a place where ways in which its inhabitants carve or forge their protocols of work and leisure in the axis of time - those that may produce inherent conflicts. Cooking while listening to the radio is an essential everyday practice through which a mother may inhabit her home. The music and chatter on the radio is an essential ingredient for her work, through which she is able to access a world that she remains disconnected with due to her domestic moral obligations of feeding her family. However, the leakage of radio sound into the space of another person, now in the home, but used to the insulated and neutralised environment of an office may render him/her unproductive. Such an overlap may be addressed by occupying isolated spaces within a large house, but in smaller apartment setups, employing ways of personal isolation may indicate unanticipated social and moral signals. Timetables of domestic chores and individual official work get intrinsically entangled with each other within families living jointly. Spaces of the home are engendered across time in different ways. The resolution of these schedules may mean the bulldozing of one home over another. How do these work-live relationships, those that combine with different degrees come to cohabit within a singular space? Who is to compromise - and what inherent ideologies and power structures get exercised in such assertions? What are the protocols for allowing liberal environments to flourish within the home? The lockdown introduces us to ways in which people prepare unique programmes and design their everyday, as well as make it livable. However, negotiations within such a space may present us with solutions that look in very different directions.

Living through the pandemic has led to the discovery of new walls within the domestic space, and the dismantling of invisible divisions between the selves. Relationships and responsibilities rearticulate themselves within the ritual of the family. We all make a home in different time cycles - those that have coalesced into a new hybrid that standardizes in a way that produces micro displeasures. The accruement of such feelings result in unknown repressions that leak out in undesired situations. Such interactions hint at deviations in mental health that cause ruptures in social relationships. Although human beings contain these changes within their empathetic selves, the world perhaps will have to face the pent up rage in different irrational forms - a mediation over which may be necessary and crucial towards abating physical and psychological damage of the world. What infrastructures do we have for such mediation?

Covid regulations have restricted immediate and direct access to our “home” – that which we make in tracing the city at our own terms. It prevents the inhabitation of fragments that enliven our latent selves. The sheer immobility within our domestic spaces has compelled us to resign from our ability to think actively. In the new static floor, the mapping of change is limited. The pandemic has stunted our means to chart new material and intellectual geographies. Many have lost their intellectual stimulus to immobility. Some have realized the centrality of movement for escaping into one’s everyday. Although, this is an opportunity to defamiliarize oneself to one’s unembraced domesticity. Corona is the new Big Boss, and we are its (un)willing Trumans. It has brought so many strangers together within a small area. It has forced us to forge new equations to live together, find new solidarities and assemble a complete picture even in the evident fractures of existence. It is this reconciliation that perhaps indicates the terms at which we may re-enter one’s homes again as we step outside.

Obsession with Chinese Script

on Architectural Diagrams

COVID-19 Migration

These are the sights of the people waiting for the government-arranged provisions for migrating back to their hometowns from the city due to their overhauled work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The exercise is happening over a week now. Workers living in the informal settlements in Goregaon and Malad here queue up every morning to be taken by the BEST buses to the railway stations from where they will board the trains that take them to their homeland. The drill is pretty rehearsed. Government personnel call the registered names and allow them entry into buses by giving them basic food supplies and making a headcount. All seats in the buses are filled up, I dont know what they really make of social distancing! The queuing public is anxious and often waits for long hours in the hot summer sun. They are being fed by the authorities, after which, the space is often left littered. 

The sight has brought to me two things. I had always wondered of the mass migration of people during the partition. Only in documentaries I had seen and heard stories of people traveling miles of distances on foot carrying their children, belongings and homes all the way into faraway distances within the newly formed Indian mainland. I had never fathomed how a single human being could cover such long travels on foot. The current polycentered migration from cities back to the homelands seems like a rehearsal of 1947! We have all been reading reports since last month of the people who had already decided to walk back to their homes from the cities which had left them jobless and shelterless. To witness this sight first hand has also made me realize the sheer amount of people that the city externally depends on. They say that Mumbai has about three lakh migrants who oil it everyday. Across the country, there are about eight crore people who migrate from their base towns into cities to offer their labour. 

The crisis of the hour has also helped me understand the state and city machinery. The pandemic has exposed the structure of governmental apparatus, the need and design of protocols and how they are mobilised on ground. These have often remained blurred for me due to several reasons. However, at the same time, we have also come to realize, that there is just so much ground for our administration to  cover up simply for the smooth functioning of the system. And so much can be achieved so smoothly only in the wiser application of the mind and setting up of priorities. It's a pity after all, to see the number of deaths due to hunger and migratory pangs are unnecessarily adding up to the lives we are losing to the pandemic. The anxiety in the working class is real, for, they remain absolutely at the mercy of the state - a state that is trying to deliver double than its capacity. I wonder the fate of covid for India. Meanwhile, we wait and watch the dance of disaster from our windows, at a distance.

The Making of Laterite

The aesthetics of the Sublime