[Urbanstudy] me n my delhi

[amit ranjan]

  Thanks a lot Sadan for your feedback
This article on Nangla Machi was written in 40 min flat, and with a readership in mind. The readership of Today is 'very South Delhi', and despite that, at a time when the entire English print media had ignored this issue, I pushed it. Words are always a tough game.
However, the suggestions are very useful. and that is precisely why I have chosen the tool of non fiction to let the thoughts flow in a very transitive manner, where the gazer should be gazed at as well.
I shall keep your suggestions in mind while writing the final chapter
Thanks


On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 sadan at sarai.net wrote :
>dear amit,
>I have just read your posting on Nangla Machi, a locality in Delhi. Recently, we are having quite an engaged discussion on nangla on reader-list at sarai.net. As you intend to use your write up also for the final version of your research, i would suggest you to have a look at these postings.
>I liked the narrative style that you have used in your piece. At least, you have not tried to hide the fact that you are an outsider. I would suggest you to further fracture it and also question your own gaze, your own movement in that space and your own impressions. I do not mean it in negative sense but in the ways in which you can add depth to your impressions. There are various ways in which you can do so. You have used various metaphors i.e. ruins, glass palace, innocent laughing children etc. Is there a way to further play with/ around these metaphors? You can also do it by spending some more time at the space and with people you are writing on.
>Another way would be by engaging with the temporal moment in which these demolition drive is taking place and placing them along with the longer structures of time which frames reflections on 'illegal settlements', 'wasti', 'slum' in urban writings or in the developmental discourses. To begin with how do certain spaces are categorized in this category of 'slum'. On the one hand, it is very much rooted in one kind of urban discourse on the other hand the category has a very fascinating history of resistance to the use of this term. It is a dehumanizing concept... and so the argument goes on... The politics of a 'dream city'...the politics of 2010 games... The question is how to navigate through all these dominant categories and images without actually negating the fact that they are very much in use.
>On the other hand, we know very little about what police personals think when they are in the action of demolishing houses and dis-locating lives. The perpetrators/ the system are they only doing a job in a machine like fashion?They are also human beings after all. In newspaper reports, we hardly get to know what they feel except as passive agents carrying out monstrous orders. Here, we may ask a question to us, why laughing children figure so much in these reflections.Are they living testimonies of the resistence to husge power structures like the state or do we very quickly identify ourselves on these innocent faces? By doing this, do not we transfer our own victimhood on to children faces? By recovering these faces, do we try to map the violence or its resistence? In most of the cases, we find these children faces as saviours. They save us from thinking that we are culprits of these demolitions... a kind of guilt... guilt coming from the fact that we can not do any thing for victims. Those who are mere witness to any violent event quite often own this guilt. They want to stand with the victim and they also want to rescue the victims at the same time. The guilt comes from their inability to do these desired functions.
>I think, this is also a reason why we have so little on perpetrators, so little dialogue with the police personals... We very convineintly assume that state is the perpetraors. This helps us to bracket the violence and we can move in the spaces with our own narratives.
>
>Well, we both know that there can be hundred other ways. These are some immediate remarks which I thought to share with you,
>wishes,
>sadan.
>
>
>
>amit ranjan wrote:
>
>>
>>Hello all
>>My project, if that hackneyed word suggests anything, is a little offbeat. Have been a student of literature for 7 years formally, and got a little disillusioned with academic papers. So, I intend to write a non-fictional piece on my negotiations and tryst with the city.
>>Recently i read stuff on Nangla Machi, and ventured there myself. This is what I saw (it's in a newspaper format, for I work for one), and this will definitely have space in my final work
>>Pl do respond
>>Thanks
>>
>>Nangla Maachi
>>
>>I walked in the ruins

>>
>>Nangla Maachhi is on the banks of Yamuna, just before the Nizamuddin bridge. Nangla has been swept away. Not by Yamuna
but by the tide of judicial activism, which generally is as active as a dormant volcano. A division Bench of the Delhi High Court, comprising Justices Vijender Jain and Rekha Sharma, set up a Yamuna Removal of Encroachment Monitoring Committee in January this year. And thunder struck on March 29, without warning, like a flash floodth
bulldozers, chisels, men in uniforms ensured that the residents of Nangla and the stars would stare at each other directly. Former Prime Minister V.P.Singh organised a rally on the 27th, but even his efforts haven’t borne much fruit. In a few days time, Nangla, the shelter for the poor for the last 30 years, will be a heap of rubble. 1500 houses are gone, 3000 remain. Vague figures. No one knows. It’s surprising that the fastest news channels are aren’t asking people, “Aapko kaisa lag raha hai”. It seems Nangla has already been erased from the memory maps.
>>
>>We walked through the old clustered village. We walked through the ruins. It felt like our own ruins
A bevy of children following us in a trail, flies, mosquitoes, bricks, corrugated sheets, anger and despair

>>
>>Thirst
>>We’ve been roaming the maze of Nangla for two hours in the heap of fallen bricks. We are afraid to have the water that’s being offered, especially after speculation of water borne diseases. We hit a shop with a fridge. “Cold drink hai kya,” we ask through our parched throats. The shopkeeper laughs, “Saab, bijli to kab ki gayee. Baaki bhi chala jayega.” His little child is ecstatic, as if it’s a game, “Sab toot jayega, sab toot jayega.”
>>
>>We’ll become terrorists
>>“Delhi has to be beautified, you see,” says Mukesh Kumar, the Pradhan of the village, “and the easy way to do it by eliminating the gareeb instead of gareebee.” Flour is selling at Rs 18, sugar at Rs 40. “We had heard Sonia ji is kind. Will the games (the 2010 games) be played only in Nangla. Why not Akshardham? That’s also on the bank of Yamuna,” says another young man who works as a sweeper. The discussion heats up. A woman in a green saree and a face red with heat and rage says, “We’ll become terrorists, and throw bombs at the establishment.” Three others cheer her, “Yes we have no option but to become terrorists.”
>>
>>Glass palace
>>Gujratis of the basti make showpieces out of glass, and sell it in various markets. Ajay’s masterpiece, a glass palace adorns the crest of a brick heap that was a home three days back. The palace also has a dish antenna to log on to dreams. He used to make a fortune of three thousand a month through this business. Now what? “Terrorist banoonga,” the same refrain. It’s a difficult lane. There’s cement and sheets strewn all along, in dirty water. A little girl is defecaeting in the drain, another one is taking a bath, stark nude and some others semi-nude, with rats creeping and crawling up the drains. They are oblivious of the world. Shame is also a luxury.
>>
>>Yeh Shaadi Nahi Ho Sakti
>>Bollywood villains slip into real life more often than not. There is a marriage scheduled for the 4th of April. An old man is busy making a fancy gift with thin bamboo sticks and colourful streamers which the bride’s mother will gift the groom. The only little hitch is that the basti might not last that long. “On the 29th, the army men outnumbered the bastiwallahs six to one. We broke our own houses, so that the children don’t get hurt,” says Updesh Kumar, a tailor with an ailing eyesight. “It’s our duty. We are mere actors,” says an RAF jawan who contends nothing will remain by the 4th or 5th.
>>
>>Burnt, and steaming
>>Babita is three years old. Food was being cooked in her house, when the demolitions were happening. The mother, Munni, ran out to protest. Protest often provokes. The machines raged in, the poor girl was caged in. The pot of boiling water fell on her, and she got burnt very badly. There’s a little boy in the hands of Munni, and the sight of him shakes you up from within—he is so malnourished. He is the ninth child of the 35 year old Munni, and has nine flies hovering around his eyes. Shabnam is the 3rd of the 9 children, and used to run a phone booth to help her family. She poses with a big smile sitting on her bricks. “Why the hell are you smiling,” curses an old woman from behind, and stares into my eye, “You have got your news. And it will be supressed. If you help us, Gods will bless you. If you supress it, all our curses will land on your head.” A whole crowd joins. Men with teeth as yellow as the sun, women with voices fighting a lost battle. More images, more sounds

>>
>>The bevy of children is trailing us as we leave Nangla. Children, children everywhere, not one man to think
about their future. But they are all smiles. Laughing, posing for pictures, running, playing with cycle tyres. Tomorrow is another day.
>>
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>>hunt for love is haughty falconry
>>
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hunt for love is haughty falconry
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