After weeks of procrastination and in the middle of two
unfinished not-yet-started term papers, I visited DAG, Taj for the
Bombay Framed art exhibit!
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| Map of Bombay (1922-1923) badly clicked by me. |
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| They have written "congested area". In that case, today's map of Mumbai must have "congested area" written all over it! |
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| The font!! The way "Eastern Avenue" is written gives me goosebumps! And lo, they had decided that it was going to be Albizia trees. |
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| The Mumbai-Pune Expressway via the Western Ghats nearly two centuries ago. No cars, only elephants and horses. |
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At the Elephanta Caves.
Damn I too want a walking stick if it can help me pose like that man with the green turban is. |
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| The sarees drying on the stairs look so perfect, so real! |
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When in Bombay
Mumbaikars were always fashionable I suppose. |
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| I could look at this particular photograph (1950s) for hours. The men's piercing stares, the advertisement in English, and the skulls in the background. |
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| Women (behind and) in front of the atomic energy centre in Trombay. |
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| Nah not the Parsi guy: I clicked myself. |
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| This looked like Kunnarampatti to me. |
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| Badasssssss |
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| Bombay traffic a century ago |
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| Taj |
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| Rich dudes in crisp clothes, smiling at the camera. |
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| BomBAY |
I spent some time reading the book too. Here's an excerpt from the essay
Bombay and its Environment by Devaki Shankar:
While land reclamation projects were executed in port cities across the British Empire, in Bombay the story of reclamation has seeped into the city's mythology. From the very beginning, therefore, the story of Bombay's growth and development has been inextricably tied to the making and remaking of its environment. This process of environmental transformation has been so sweeping and its scale so dramatic that it is virtually impossible to draw a clear line between the city's natural and built environment. If the city's harbour and its landforms themselves are a product of human intervention, its grandest infrastructures continue to depend on and be overwhelmed by natural forced.
At the time of British conquest, Bombay was a sparsely populated island notorious for its disease ridden marshes and lack of potable water.
Each attempt to conjure land in Bombay has only further blurred the line between the human and the non-human world in the city.
