[Urbanstudy] me n my delhi

[sadan at sarai.net]

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.
>
>
>
>
>
> hunt for love is haughty falconry
>
> <http://adworks.rediff.com/cgi-bin/AdWorks/sigclick.cgi/www.rediff.com/signature-home.htm/1507191490@Middle5?PARTNER=3> 
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urbanstudygroup mailing list
>Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City
>
>To subscribe or browse the Urban Study Group archives, please visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/urbanstudygroup
>  
>