Sunday, July 03, 2016
Wondering…... about Walls and what they Do...
Its a nice wet sunday, I am sitting in my studio, looking out over the Mehrauli Archeological park, all freshly painted green by rain, Lila and Frida and Yuuka loll about lazily after their mid day meals and on my table is the book - Mehrauli, A View from the Qutab, by Karoki Lewis and Charles Lewis.
With no particular aim, I am flipping through it. I have no memory of how the book got here or if it is mine at all, but that is besides the point. It is just interesting to look at a curated and "other" view of the places and streets i walk through ( sometimes even unknowingly) almost every day, some familiar and easily placed, others still enigmas even after four years of being drawn here.
On page 41 is a double spread, a wide angle, front-on shot of the Madhi Masjid, and in the bottom right of the picture is seen a winding tarmac surface, a road. For a while I tried to place the image, and then it did come to me. This is the disused mosque on the left of the road, as you wind your way up the hill and before you see the rear of the Jain Mandir (temple) complex.
For a while it looked unfamiliar, where was this place? where you could casually walk off the road, and stroll into a mosque? Yes i could place it and yet some how it did not belong to the Mehrauli of now, where everything is behind walls and fences, and everywhere there is gate, which you are un-invited to pass ( if anything, that is what you feel when you see the gate the guard, the shabby upkeep and the fences that the ASI has built around its dead empire).
Why do we need a fence? A wall? A gate? Who's mosques and tombs and temples are these anyway?
And what is the wall doing? is it keeping the mosque safe? is it Keeping the people safe? is the road safer because now a wall keeps it from the mosque? So that no kids can park their scooters, or cycles and sit on its steps and while away time in lovely weather like today ( and in doing so keep a watch on the road)? Is the security guard there really needed? Are people really stealing stones off the wall? and a fence will stop them? And what happens at night behind the locked gate? Or behind the high wall?
Or are these things here to tell us this is mine and that is yours? So i can throw my garbage over the divide into what is not mine. And keep secure what is inside my gate? And what is outside my gate is another man/ woman/child/governments/owners /aliens /gods/ devils/terrorists business?
What if there were no walls? And no gates? would we all be killed by marauding cattle? Or better neighbours?
What if there were no gates outside which you could drop your plastic bag of garbage with the wilful justification of this great knowledge that the land outside the gate was not yours?
If you look at it another way, walls have made us more violent,… and gates have made us care less...
Labels: architecture, ASI, Conservation, gate, Jain Mandir Dadabari, Lodi period Mosque, Madhi Masjid, mehruauli, mosque, walls
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Thoughts on Water - at the Shamsi Talaab
In many ways, I have come to
believe now, that the attitude to water defines civilizations. Water, wind, sun and rain, (in their many
forms and their many consequences) have through the ages governed how and where
we live.
They have directed choices
of place – for dwelling, for ablution, for cultivation, for congregation and
safekeeping, for control and for protection.
And the many great cities of
civilized cultures have built themselves around these ideas. And chiefly around
the idea of water – as sustenance, as waterway, as beauty and as defense.
I recall visiting villages,
still without bathrooms or toilets, where the places for bathing, and
biological function were carefully separated and placed along the same life
giving stream from which they drew water for cooking and drinking.
The spot for the daily
ablutions was always down stream, away from any point of the village's access to
the stream.
One looks at the City of
Delhi, and it becomes clear how over time the city, seems to have turned its back
on the waters it drew its initial reason of being from.
The Yamuna is a ghastly
sight and smell.
But that is not what got me
started on this line of thought. It is elsewhere, on the high point of Mehrauli
the oldest of the still living historic cities that make up Delhi as we know
it. I was standing on a balcony overlooking the Shamsi Talaab, a large water
tank, flanked by the majestic Jahaaz Mahal, looking out over a thousand years of
Delhi, the talab, broken mosques in ruin, new mosque in white and green, the
Mehrauli Gurgoan road and the Metro.
But right before me, the
Talaab, stood walled, a 5 ft high stone wall, and then a metal grill that keeps
only people – not plastic bags with rubbish, and waste and disposable bottles-
out. The bank of the Talaab is littered with plastic, and packaging, and other such
non-bio-degradeable waste of modern consumer culture. Thrown directly into, or
around the very waters that have for centuries made living on the highest point
of Delhi both safe and favoured.
The fence, the only
recognizable presence of the Archeological Society of India, only helps
reinforce and reinstate the idea that the tank is a rubbish dump. Everything
else is allowed access to the water but the people to whom it historically has
belonged.
This alienation – of
culture, of people, and possibly of humanity itself – from the sources of its
sustenance on a planet of meager means, this is slowly becoming the single most
definitive idea of Modern civilization.
And yet we cry ourselves
sore for “Green” buildings, sustainable design, and a better city. Yet we will
continue to litter our streets, we will throw plastic into every river and
pond.
Like all things, like everything, its all begins at home, right at your door step. I remember once while in Thimphu, visiting family friends, I went for walk in the forests above the Radio Tower, a good hour and half way up the hill to a small temple. On the way back, one of the two I was with took out a big bag, and then with sharpened stick picked off the forest floor proceeded to spike and collect every piece of plastic/ paper and waste we could spot. Once a week she did this, and that week I joined in too. We cleaned a small path in a forest that had stood and nurtured Thimphu as long as it had existed.
Like all things, like everything, its all begins at home, right at your door step. I remember once while in Thimphu, visiting family friends, I went for walk in the forests above the Radio Tower, a good hour and half way up the hill to a small temple. On the way back, one of the two I was with took out a big bag, and then with sharpened stick picked off the forest floor proceeded to spike and collect every piece of plastic/ paper and waste we could spot. Once a week she did this, and that week I joined in too. We cleaned a small path in a forest that had stood and nurtured Thimphu as long as it had existed.
Which brings me back to
where I began, the pond, and the waste on its bank, and a wall, and community
that lives around it that does nothing. Only adds to the waste, and watches in in-action as it is blown by the wind, and strewn across the park and infront of
their houses on the parking street.
How do we change that? How
do we, join all the dots that were once joined, but have been systematically
un-joined. Technologies are only a part of the answer, much of the answers lie
at home, inside and outside our doorways, in the way we choose to ignore and
accept, in the way we have chosen to live our insular, self-referenced and
inward looking lives.
If you walk past Samsi
Talaab, give it a look and think, or if you cross the Yamuna too. And then I
hope you will travel to Pilang or some far off place, miles away from any road,
and see how differently they treat water, and maybe I will not need to make any
more of this argument.
Labels: ASI, city, Delhi, Fences, Mehrauli, Shampsi Talaab, Water, Water and civilization, Water and human settlements, Water and settlements, Water source, Water tank, Yamuna
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Two Toilets and Two Cities
Two public toilets. In two cities, 175 kilometers apart.
One at UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the other at a Historic Palace, slowly crumbling from government apathy and public indifference.
What first struck me was the sheer disregard and almost un-thought(if there is such a word!) placing of the toilet complex at the Humayun’s Tomb, (a monument much in the news for its recently completed restoration by the ASI, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the National Culture Fund). The toilet complex stands left of the entrance gate to the Char Bagh at the centre of which is placed the tomb. The placement surprises me. After the 650,000 USD that were spent on the restoration, a toilet so callously placed seems to leave a jarring note. It’s not just the placement that irritates, but the almost everything about it seems to spell some sort of absolute architectural incapacity and blindness or administrative apathy, or worse oversight of the conservation exercise in the first instance ( thereby requiring of the administration of the ASI to add a toilet as retrofit).
Frankly I am not concerned with how it came about, but what really does annoy is that IT DID come about. The toilet seems to have been designed with the opinion that all structures in historic precincts must be built in rubble masonry, and all roofs, slabs etc. must be camouflaged with an over-pink plaster. Of course that the doors are of aluminium frame with cheap white PVC infill panels, with rudely scrawled “ GENTS” and “LADIES” in black paint is something we have come to accept of all municipal toilets strewn across the city. The huge vinyl poster on the side wall does little to apologise for the toilets presence.
It doesn’t really stop there, when you exit the toilet, you are greeted by the ghastly site of the water coolers. I could go on and describe that ugliness but I shall let the one picture suffice.
Frankly I am not concerned with how it came about, but what really does annoy is that IT DID come about. The toilet seems to have been designed with the opinion that all structures in historic precincts must be built in rubble masonry, and all roofs, slabs etc. must be camouflaged with an over-pink plaster. Of course that the doors are of aluminium frame with cheap white PVC infill panels, with rudely scrawled “ GENTS” and “LADIES” in black paint is something we have come to accept of all municipal toilets strewn across the city. The huge vinyl poster on the side wall does little to apologise for the toilets presence.
It doesn’t really stop there, when you exit the toilet, you are greeted by the ghastly site of the water coolers. I could go on and describe that ugliness but I shall let the one picture suffice.
If the experience at Humayun’s Tomb had been an isolated incident, I might not have been so bothered by it. But 175 Km south of Delhi, in a town still quite unpopular with tourists stands another public toilet of similar consequence.
This is the Sulabh Toilet Complex at the City Palace of Alwar, the earstwhile seat to Sawai Jai Singh, Maharaja of Alwar.
This is the Sulabh Toilet Complex at the City Palace of Alwar, the earstwhile seat to Sawai Jai Singh, Maharaja of Alwar.
When one enters the main gate of the palace compounds, this would arguably be the most prominent structure you see. Its stands before the main entrance ( marked by a blue sign board over a dark door way leading into a winding corridor) to the Alwar Museum and Law Courts and other district machinery . Ways and directions are hard to figure out in this complex, but the toilet, a red, ugly, edifice sits centre stage and calls the visitors attention with little other competition. One could argue this toilet as the centerpiece of the fore-court!
I could rave and rant, I am sure, and I would not be un-justified in doing so. But I fear the argument might be lost. So I will just let the pictures do the talking.
There isn’t much that separates the two toilets. Both ugly, both badly placed, and both impressive and unforgettable.
The placing of toilets, and their consequence on the public memory of the (public) place seems to be a worrisome reality in the realm of the historic landscape. A reality I have no idea how/ or by what process it is arrived at. And a reality I am quite certain we should want to alter.
The placing of toilets, and their consequence on the public memory of the (public) place seems to be a worrisome reality in the realm of the historic landscape. A reality I have no idea how/ or by what process it is arrived at. And a reality I am quite certain we should want to alter.
p.s. The derelict Alwar Museum houses a fascinating collection of artifacts, miniatures and weapons. A sliver Dining Table, a vast collection of Persian manuscripts, and Sawai Jai Singh’s all chrome bicycle are amongst a fascinating collection of exhibits.
Labels: Alwar, ASI, Bad design, Conservation, Heritage conservation, Heritage sites, Public toilet, Toilets, ugly
