Tag: City

Facsimile of published article A new exhibition on the visual history of Calcutta opens a large window to the heterotopia of itsglorious past and forces us to stand by it in awe, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury One only has to open one’s eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening…

Just as when you thought that Vikram Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Gregory Roberts’ Shantaram had, between the covers of their voluminous homage to the megapolis, had cracked open the city, comes Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables, one more splendid and unputdownable ode to the city. But does this quartet close Mumbai to the hack-and-the-schlock writer forever? Hope not. Because Mumbai will always be open to multiple interpretations; because in the post-industrial, post-urban, post-Cold War and post-factum modernity of the 21st…

Idols coming into form. Kumortuli, 2009. Photo by author. The journey to the confluence of Ganga and Durga was a throwback to the collective past, finds Sayandeb Chowdhury and Joyjit Ghosh Chhalat chhal chhalat chhal chhalat chhal Ghater sathe golpo kore nadir jal (Splish‘n’ splash splish‘n’ splash splish ‘n’ splash The ghat hears the river’s tale go back‘n’ flash) The best person to ask about the ancestry of the ghat-river rendezvous would be the visiting goddess because the ancestry…

A Durga idol. Autumn, 2014. Photo by author. If there is one word to describe the explosion of gaiety amidst a wrecked urban landscape, it would probably be ‘flourish’, as Shakespeare used it. Writes Sayandeb Chowdhury. Shakespeare, otherwise so abundant with words and the magical incantations of poetry was, in keeping with the norms of Elizabethan playwriting and Globe Theatre conventions, severely frugal in matters of stage direction. Hence in many a Shakespearean play, after the entry of the principal…

A lane in North Kolkata. Photo by author Kolkata must bear the cross of being the centre of gravity of a political culture that only knows how to traumatise millions Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe/ through me is the way among the lost people. …Before me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter! The dismal Situation waste and wilde/…

Reading Orhan Pamuk is no more a literary activity. Given the range of controversies that he’s surrounded by, Pamuk is almost a political figurehead, perhaps much to his dislike. He has found mention in the long list of the world’s foremost public intellectuals; his name allegedly caused the delay in the announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature; and most importantly, he has been booked under a controversial Turkish law for ‘revealing’ that his country was responsible for…

Photo by Habib Dadkhah/Unsplash We have heard about Fleet Street in London, the media hub that spawned so many stories. But meat street? Across much of urban Arabia, there are food streets where pieces and pieces upon meat of various shapes and sizes are piled, in various hues, smelling of the ‘mystic’ East’s typical flavours, hung on iron hooks dangling from intertwined ropes in dusty bazaars. For a month in autumn, Mumbai’s otherwise nondescript Mohammed Ali Road swipes…