Word Cloud

Patronizing

adjective

(used of behavior or attitude) characteristic of those who treat others with condescension
Synonyms: arch, condescending, patronising

Sentence:

No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak.

adjective 

कृपा करते हुए विनीत

Patriarchal

adjective
characteristic of a form of social organization in which the male is the family head and title is traced through the male line
relating to or characteristic of a man who is older or higher in rank

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage.

adjective

पितृसत्तात्मक
पुरुष-प्रधान
कुलपति का
आदरणीय वृद्ध पुरुष का

Feudal

adjective 

Feudalism was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs that flourished in Medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Although it is derived from the Latin word feodum or feudum (fief), which was used during the Medieval period, the term feudalism and the system which it describes were not conceived of as a formal political system by the people who lived during the Middle Ages. The classic definition, by François-Louis Ganshof (1944), describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations which existed among the warrior nobility and revolved around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.

adjective
सामंती
सामन्तवादी
सामन्ती
जागीर संबंधी

SOURCE:

https://www.shabdkosh.com/

The Dancing Spider

This morning as I chose to listen Shivranjani over Bhoop,
I saw a tiny spider dancing in front of my eyes
First I thought it was flying
But as I transfixed my gaze upon the floating creature
I realized it was holding on to a strand of invisible web
perhaps one that he himself spit
under the fan, as I looked up to him
his body appeared and disappeared to the blades in the background
only as I got closer to being anxious if he would fall 

on me
I decided to trust him

that he will reach where he wants to

Thus redirecting my gaze

Into the screen
I began to write
this poem, 

which I meant to be prose
changed tone just like with the shift of a single key

the sharp 'ga' of milan into the flat 'ga of virah

bhoop transformed into shivranjani

and that was the music I decided to play.

Times, Lines, 1989s

Exhibition at Khoj International Artists Association. Delhi
February 2020

IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

Madan Mahatta Archives, Randhir Singh
IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

exhibited at Photoink, Delhi

Jan-Feb 2020

This photographic exhibition brings together a contemporary study of the campus of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - designed by architect J K Chowdhary and engineer Gulzar Singh. IITs were the key spaces to produce engineers for building modern India. These were state education campuses of science that got built during the period of Nehru government during the 1960s when the spirit of scientific temper was fresh and the mood for a modernizing nation. The exhibition "IIT Delhi - A Modernist Case Study" brings together photographs by Madan Mahatta and Randhir Singh in a dialogue with each other. 

Mahatta's photographs are mostly black and white, taken during the time the campus was freshly inaugurated. The photographs take us back to a time period when it was till not fully inhabited, the trees wait to grow, and signs of life wait to adapt to a modern institutional space. Randhir Singh's photographs, mostly in colour bring to us the life of the campus in its humanised reality today. In Mahatta's photographic documentation, the campus emerges as an edifice of scientific ambition and achievement - architectonically as well as spatially. Here we see the emphasis on its stark forms, empty corridors with sharp shadows or the craft of be-jeweling the architectural object. Singh's photographs bring to us a softened landscape of the campus, in its diffusions produced by humans, greenery or even light forms. 

Looking at the photographers who document the same space through eyes distanced by more than 60 years, one is constantly caught up in the then & now of both, the life of the campus, as well as the way in which one would like to make sense of its historical projection. What does one make of an institution today? How secular does the space remain? What political forces lie embedded in the disposition of this space? These are question, I am certain, the contemporary artist grapples with while framing the building for the present generation. Where does one place the values through which the campus was once conceived, and how does it become a photographic inquiry? Randhir Singh's photographs balance the dilemmas of modernism today quite artfully. 

The strategic display of photographs within the gallery space work with the sharp sightlines that the campus's modern vocabulary embues. Viewers are forced to readjust perspectives while aligning their sights within the gallery space. The curation constantly creates different levels of intimacy through the sizing and placement of the photographs on the wall. The couplings of photographs are not literal (before after), rather, each try to extend their time into one another, producing an intermediate haze / blur within which the question of then and now doesnot resolve into a moral position, rather offers a considered empathy. Thus, changes, adaptations or appropriations of the campus as sometimes seen in Singh's photographs donot necessarily put us in comparison, rather, bring us in a continuum.

It is this aspect, that was finely achieved in the photographic case study of the IIT Delhi.

Dreaming