On Glamour

a transcribed excerpt of conversation between Gautam Bhan and Paromita Vohra from Urban Lens Film Festival 2016. Access full conversation here.



Gautam Bhan: You know Paro[mita] one thing I wanted to ask you about is that - what, you said earlier in the point was to emphasize also the point about glamour, right, because I think it's really so important…because somewhere what we're also struggling with: see we from feminism we inherit these two traits of women and minority identity communities right which is the caution that shame, honor, tradition are born on the backs of women, right? and you have the narrative of partition and sexual violence and this constant notion that women are made repositories of moral culture, because of the power of patriarchy in our societies. But here is this other, and I think this is so part of your larger presence in the world with ‘agents of ishq’, with the column on love in the newspaper which is to say that you know, here is an identity associated with the community a minority religious community that in many places could have been a cause of anxiety. but it's actually a marker for pleasure, is a marker for desire. And it's not glamour in the way that women are just objects of male gaze but also ones that are self-fashioning their presence in the cities. So can you talk a little bit more about that notion of pleasure, desire, young people and agents of ishq…

Paromita Vohra: So I think glamour is the most… a very political kind of thing because glamour is a way of saying, “I'm here!” Right, it's like [saying], “You can't decide what I am, I'm going to decide what I am!” at some level. So I do think that - like I like certain kinds of people; people who will be playing in my films are always of a certain kind and I use the word “glamorous” at the shorthand, for what they are, because they all have a way of speaking, a turn of phrase, a way of presenting themselves - which I find very attractive, because they just do not fall into any binaries, right, not political binaries not binaries of gender or social identity or whatever; but they fashion that identity themselves. I don't think that those are the people who actually change the world in some way slowly… Because they give us a suggestion of how we can be; as easily as looking at somebody's clothes and saying - ‘hey, I like how she dresses, I am also going to do that.’ That kind of infecting the world through what you're doing, I think that's a very political thing, and that how politics actually seeds the world every day.

GB: ...and it’s so distinct from glamour as the possession of brand or consumption

PV: Yeah, so the thing is that post Rekha or maybe Madhuri Dixit, glamour has gotten converted into something that is easily consumable. But it actually is not because what glamour means is ‘I know that I am a story, but only I know what that story is. I'm not going to tell you.’ Right? So that control over your own narrative [is different from the one] which people like Rekha and others, who have mystique… Mystique is just really about saying, ‘I'm controlling the narrative.’ Whether you're really controlling it or not is the whole other discussion, but communicating that in all kinds of nonverbal ways is what I think [it’s about] and that's why I think you find it in certain kinds of spaces - like bar dancers, like movie stars of course, and I find it very intriguing how the figure of the Catholic woman actually just by being almost like a lace edging in a film had transmitted all that glamour right? Because all the women the you’re seeing in this film they are just like they are the backup dancers. They are not the people who in the front of the film but they are what actually gave films their glamour in an earlier time. And that glamour has gotten kind of subsumed under a mainstream identity, and we struggle right now to find a new place for that glamour.

On Aesthetics and Criticism

 

Notes from a lecture by Chaitanya Karnik
Academy of Architecture, 2012

On Loneliness, Belonging and Home

a whatsapp conversation

Me: Have your feeling towards India deepened or loosened over the last 15 years? I am generally asking, to myself, why does it happen? This push and pull...is it the question of identity, or identification?

He: I don't know, but I think some of it has loosened and some of it has deepened. I can't put my finger on it. I think I will forever be in this "I don't belong here" mode both in India and the US

Me: Yes, the question of belonging. Or the question of finding home...

He: For an immigrant, it's a different experience

Me: Yes. But I am speaking of home in a more conceptual, philosophical way. Orientations of this question may be from different places

He: Well, home is a fluid concept. Depending on what phase of life you are in.

Me: Elaborate?

He: Right now my home is wherever my wife and kids are, because I am living with them every day and making memories. Once the kids grow up, maybe "home" will be a different feeling. Growing up, home was where my parents/siblings were. I think home depends on the people who you are most closely connected to in a given phase of life.

Me: Is home always in relation to an 'other'?

He: I think so. We are social beings. If there were no people, would you ever feel lonely? Loneliness comes because you feel excluded from "people" around you

Me: Ah I never thought of it that way. Do you think animals feel lonely?

He: Loneliness can never occur without people. I don't think animals are lonely.

Me: You mean the concept of loneliness exist in human species only. It's a human concept?

He: I think so. Words are human concepts. So, if you use a word to describe anything it is a human concept. Maybe animals have a language. And they do also feel lonely. But it may not be similar to human loneliness. We tend to project our concepts/emotions to other beings. Because we are limited in our expression

Me: But words are placeholders for meaning...and meaning exists in all species no?

He: I don't know. If I were bacteria, is my meaning to just multiply? Meaning/purpose are all human concepts.

Me: And why not?

He: Evolution doesn't care about it

Me: True.

He: Evolution only cares about propagating the species

He: The world is only as complicated as we think it is. It's a projection of our mind/brain. We create our own "hallucination" of the world. The way we think it is

Me: True. That's what philosophical inquiry is all about

He: I'm becoming a believer of the thought that it's all about what stories we tell ourselves. Meditation really helps me observe my thoughts. And I am realizing that there is no "meaning/purpose/reason" of life other than to live it :) There is no deep mystery that needs to be solved. There is not much value in over analyzing. But that is me speaking today, ask me in 5 years and may be I'll give you a completely different answer😀

Me: 🙂

He: I haven't changed my behavior, nor have my thoughts changed, but meditation really helps with observing how your mind works :) The concept of "awareness", I feel is quite powerful. There is no mysticism in any of this…Just awareness...And it's very hard to be "aware", being in the moment, because your mind is thinking a billion things. Not that thinking is bad. But you need moments of clear awareness, however brief to cut through all of that thinking

Me: Hmm. It sounds difficult in the way you put it. Also elusive...

He: Hmm...you won't know until you try :)

Me: Hehehe. Yes. I know!

He: An analogy I liked is - imagine you are looking at the water, trying to find something deep within, whereas all you have to do is to change your plane of focus so that you can see your own reflection. Once that shift in perception happens, it seems very obvious. But until then, you will keep looking at the wrong plane of focus. It really is at the surface of your mind, not something deep within

Anyways enough of all this :)

New Year 2021

The Trees Project / Vikhroli, Mumbai

All photos from 2016. 

keywords: repurposing industrial waste, use of industrial silos, retrofitting, industrial architecture, silos, creative landscaping

 

Evaluating Automatic Thoughts

Notes from here and there

 "The structural transformation of the Public Sphere" by Habermas argues that from 19th to the 20th century, the change in public sphere involves a move "from a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that merely consumes it." In this process, the strictest separation of the public from the private realm gives way to a public sphere dominated by the mass media, in which public life is effectively depoliticized.

From Introduction, Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World by Carol Breckenridge & Arjun Appadurai

The body is an accumulation of the planet by means of the fruit and stuff you consume. You gather your body by consuming the planet. Thus you can never call it "yours"

(dont know the source)

The desire to have knowledge of anything necessarily has the desire to control it too.

Ranciere says that the language of speaking about something comes from its politics. The politics is what pushes artistic practices challenging through  / by deviating into a new language. Hence new aesthetic. Hence, the politics of aesthetics. Hence aesthetic is political. 

All language is signification of thought and, on the other hand, the supreme way of signifying thoughts is through language, the greatest means of understanding ourselves and others." then most remarkably, he (Kant) outlines a circulation of speech in and which thinking comes to pass: "Thinking is speaking with ourselves"

On Translation, John Sallis

The Practice of Organizing Ideas

I guess organizing things and ideas is my favourite pass time. In order to organize first, you have to collect a lot of data. I collect data around the random questions that occur in my head. There are various kinds of things that one is confronted with in such a broad first instance - just like how the fishing net would gather, along with the fish, all the other junk from the sea. Ofcourse, I filter, and in the process of browsing through these items, new ideas open up, and inevitably deflect me. I keep collecting them, and often, in the course of time, also forget them. These items, still stay somewhere. Then, when I have nothing else to do, I come back to this random collection and a new world appears. A sudden urge to make something out of the seemingly undisposed things begins to emerge. Thus, these knowledge objects are not necessarily approached with an intent of a particular argument, rather argument emerges from these objects that are dumped together into lumps. Sometimes, these lumps emerge in tandem with collection, and feel more and more relevant. But often, they are just lying as dump. Then, with these items, things like writings, presentations, images and other knowledge-collages begin to happen. I have so many presentations, books, and such stuff that are just lying like that. I tell to myself that these will keep growing, just like cabinets of curiosities. But I keep forgetting them, and they only reappear when I am shifting computers, harddrives, or searching for something else. My stream and surety-filled intent is often deflected by the unexpected encounters with these knowledge-collages! At times, it feels like I have started a hundred projects, each which hold a potential, but cannot be shared because they are all incomplete. 

Everyone likes to call these things archives. But for me, they are ideas that are yet to find the rest of their body parts. Most of the times, they lie unfinished because I have simply slipped into another zone of thought, or it is time to do something else. Mostly the latter. But also, the duration for which one can pursue a though in this capitally set time space produces a huge anxiety for ideas that almost seem orphan. These are not born to feed the world outside, rather to satiate and pleasure the world of inquiry within. Thus, they are personal. And in the capitalistic world, all things personal, that do not have any demand in the market (even if it is the intellectual market), are auto-low-priority. The way in which captialism works with history, to produce a "relevant" for the "contemporary" is annoying. It makes a universal that is unable to recognize the value of these personal endeavours. Marxists will argue that the inquires of the personal are never a-contemporary, for they are produced through the very forces of the society that one exists in. Yet, in this strand of thought, there is the notion of the centre and the periphery - where certain people have the power to shape the discourse!

But to move away from this anxiety of who benefits from the archive of the personal, I wanted to pen down how I have found my own "system of collecting" or collating rather deceiving. The more one curates into structures, the more difficult it becomes to find material. Once sectioned, it is always difficult to find a knowledge-item for another purpose. I believe that since I am always looking at each object to fit in numerous constellations, they often get lost when they are curated into certain specific knowledge collages. Management of knowledge not only limits the intellectual imagination of an object, but sometimes, also obfuscates it in the process and frame of a renewed search. I have found it perplexing. What I mean to say is that when the archivist begins to codify each item in his archive into some crypt, only so that he / she can retrieve it later, it may not readily be available! A lot of times, filenames, descriptions and locations of things switch places, and then they become invisible... But this is what produces the chance encounters, that once again trigger thoughts to be taken them into new directions! Such is the practice of collection - only provisionally directed, forever wandering.

Post Colonial Theory

 

The Middle Path

Buddha realizes that there ought to be a way of living between extremities of luxuries and mortality. One cannot submit life to the existential crises. To just live and accept yourself is important to be able to perceive others' thoughts and feelings. To be an ordinary human being is to be Buddha. Buddhism doesn't teach you to be special, but ordinary in a way that you are living with everyone else, not above or below. 

A string of sitar too tight will break while if too loose, will be incapable to produce any sound. In order to produce any music, the string has to be tightened just enough - that is the essence of the middle path. That one needs to know just enough to not hurt others, but unite with the rhythm of the universe in order to experience resonance and happiness.