Southern - The Urban Zine

southern southern southern southern southern 03.05.2019

stories

urban

issue 1

Presenting the first issue of Southern - The Urban Zine, hopefully, the first of many essays, photographs, poems, audio and stories of urban experiences. Here’s a collection of ruminations from the South.

If you enjoy this issue, do send in some of your own work to: arbunkumar.zine@gmail.com Photocopy and share!

Gauri Nagpal May 2019

IN THIS ISSUE

SOLOMON BENJAMIN AMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI PRANAV KUTTAIAH SHILPY MEHTA RIDDHI D’SOUZA SMRITI SINGH KRITIKA JAIN NAKSHA SATISH TEJASWI SUBRAMANIAN PREEDIP BALAJI ADHIP AMIN DIVYA CHAND MRIDULA GARG FELLOWS 2018-19

Money has Memory

Solomon Benjamin

Money is to have no memory. As it circulates it assumes life, value, exchange, interest, cost, and use too. The loss of such movement is toward death, a lifeless form, a soiled note, perhaps even demonotized and too illegal to move.

Money in it’s death looses memory and value and looses it’s own identity. But this idea and assumption of money may not be true. Money as memory may assume a different value, perhaps far beyond it’s exchange or it’s use too. This story, relatively true as much as my own memory and also those of my classmates in architecture school in our trip to Pondicherry in the late autumn of 1980, may recollect. Who knows, even now, in some home or a shop in that town now bustling with commerce, a hundred rupees note lies framed sharing the company of a 10 paisa post card and a 47 year old man.

When in 1980 our annual college trip took us to South India, for most of us, it was a new world away from Delhi. A new culture, new spaces. With only one ‘madrasi’ among us, Badrinarayan deeply embarassed by our rough and rowdy antics of a highly energised third

year class, untethered into individualised cell phone based spaces that now tame such spirits. Pondicherry seemed ideal to set ourselves even more free into it’s carefree sun filled and sleepy streets. There was hardly any traffic and we moved around with ease on hired bicycles setting out to explore the town wearing our very wide brimmed straw hats. Our assignment was a town study and we spent the day mostly sketching and making ‘measured drawings’: selecting buildings for group work where as a team of 4-6 would use a tape measure to climb parapets and physically string distances to call out to group members in the street or courtyard below to trace out both form and construction method. The town was diverse enough, the black town aimed at natives beyond the grand canal which today lies mostly covered up, and the French white town. The former had some commerce. The latter, more Bungalow form enclosed in high walls, were quieter with the strains of Piano played out on an otherwise sleepy afternoon. It also had as I remember a small Vietnamese restaurant run by a tired looking woman and her little girl.

Our days passed fast — drawing, drafting, music via our guitar and mouth organ, food, some romance, and lots and lots of cycling. Soon we were at the end of the trip, and packing to move on — to return to Chennai and then catching the Tamil Nadu expresses’ two and half day trip back to Delhi.

The last night before our bus early the next day morning was obviously special. A small group of us, after dinner in the usual cheap places, moved to the promenade along the sea. If I recollect there was Kasturi Mohanty, Madhu Pandit, Prataap Patrose,

________ and myself. I had my guitar and although by no means an expert, it was enough to get out some scratchy notes to accompany Kasturi’s Cotton Fields and my Blowing in the Wind. I remember it was a full moon night (or almost) that was shown across the sea as we sat there till late and carefree.

In those times street lights were dim, and inner lights were even more so, leaving the moon and stars to light up the dark shadows. It was a magical night. As we sat on the promenade’s sea wall with the rocks and waves beyond, our music attracted a very old man, of bones and a wide grin; and a very young looking boy also of very dark skin and sparkling eyes. None of us knew any Tamil, and the little boy with sparkling eyes knew some English, more French, and Tamil. So we had an enjoyable conversation and I remember, in French accented Tamil and the reverse too, Tamil accented French.

They listened intently, and then soon joined in any way they could. The old man soon started a small dance, singing and swaying moonlit while the young boy joining in. They moved on into a song they knew while I struggled to keep up with my guitar to accompany them and found it better to drum on the guitar’s sound board.

Those fun times were forgiving of any musical mistakes and the night moved on till past midnight.

It became clear that the boy and old man were not related to each other, and I asked the little boy about his home and his parents, and would they not miss him when he was here with us so late into the night. He said that his home was a 2 (or was it 4?) hrs bus ride and he worked in a

restaurant as a cleaner. I asked him about his mother and father, brother and sister.

While his face fell, it turned out he had not seen them in two years as he did not have enough money for the return bus ride home. He was also not sure if he had any brother or sister. This was very shocking, and I felt really stunned. Before we could talk any more we were to return back to our hotel where we all shared rooms. The boy who had now become a close friend over the past few hours, said he would come to see us off early morning as we took our hired bus back to Chennai.

On packing my clothes into our canvas bags, the idea of the little boy not seeing his parents for so long in his young life was deeply unsettling. I had been wearing my favourite — an indigo blue cotton shirt with dark blue prints. I really wanted to give him something so decided to give the shirt to the boy, and also slipped into the pocket of the shirt, an envelop with a hundred rupees note. In Delhi in 1980, this was a lot of money where a meal in a dhaba would cost about 12 rupees and in Pondicherry the rupee then was far more. I vaguely remember doing a quick calculation that this would cover at least one perhaps two round trips and a little more. I wrapped the money into a short letter, mentioning how much we enjoyed our night, and music and his company; and that with the money he could finally visit his parents.

I was quite sure he would turn up to meet us. Pondicherry is a small place, he knew the hotel we stayed in, and in any case, our large noisy group of almost 40 students had become notorious in the sleepy town’s street life. As we boarded the bus, I waited hoping the boy would come, as he had left

us with no other way to contact him. And it seems now in my hazy memory that just before the bus moved, the boy came and I could hand him the folded shirt (the money tucked away hidden into the pocket). And we moved on, returning to Delhi days later.

On our return the hustle and bustle of our project work on Pondicherry as an urban place and submission to a jury overtook our lives. The memory of the boy and that evening remained but very hazy as we fell into the rhythm of student life and particularly mid term architecture studio work. Pondicherry was reduced to a set of cartographic representations laid out according to urban design norms, judged according to it’s urban character and set into a rectilinear frame of quiet streets and French nostalgia.

Some weeks later I got called by our architecture school’s office that there was post card for me. I was really puzzled. It was from that little boy. He had got written for him a message. He thanked me very much for the blue shirt which he said he now wore often and then he mentioned that he had kept the hundred rupees note in the frame along with his mother and God’s picture — as a memory of our visit and time together on the beach. He was hoping that we would visit Pondicherry again and we would meet. Stunned I took this post card home to my own mother and we tried to see any trace of an address but there was none.

It was only many many years later, in 2011 or so, that I visited Pondicherry more frequently working off projects with friends and colleagues at the French Institute — a building set along the

promenade and not far from where we met the boy and the old man that night 31 years earlier. The institute’s terrace opens up to the sea in a stunning view especially on a moonlit night. It is also a place to escape the stale air of concrete and glass enclosed archives that deaden both humans and material. Looking down at the horizon and the promenade below, I often wondered about the boy, desperately working the remains of my memory of what he looked like, any trace of identity as to where he may be today, if alive, and what would he be doing. And still stunned at the money carefully framed in its value as memory.

You cannot Hold hands in public Everyone knows you The small town is one Big family.

The mango tree watches you The street dog too. You cannot leave your Past behind In a small town.

In a small town Happiness is measured in nine o clock serials Watched with dinner The lights go out and everyone comes out As if it is a holiday tomorrow

Years on You turn up in a photograph No one told him You are no longer the one He knew you are no longer The one you knew Even though that little house on the hill Stays the way it is And the road to those parts Has not changed one bit.

Amlanjyoti Goswami

But small town marriage feasts are the Things to be.

Food in buckets, in many helpings That last the summer.

You can stay as long as you like And no one will tell you when To go.

Small Town Love

But neighbors too whisper In circles, in a small town.

There are iron window bars And heavy lines that do not budge Even if you pour your heart out You do not want to marry That guy you do not want to Go home so early.

The Sikhs of Bobigny: Towards a Different Europe

Pranav Kuttaiah

“Parshaada, Waheguru”, a turban-clad seven year-old says to me, with a roti in his outstretched hand. “Ji”, I reply, cupping my hands in humility and hunger as I eye my left over sabji. For Indian students in Paris like myself, the Gurdwara Singh Sabha was a divine intervention in every sense of the word – sparing us from the €3.25 (Rs. 360) subsidized student meal that usually consists of mashed potatoes and boiled broccoli with rather stale meat.

Part of the thrill of the meal is in the chase. Bobigny, the suburb that is home to the Gurdwara, is one of France’s most interesting neighbourhoods. Despite being the capital of St. Denis, the historic resting place of many French kings, one encounters a grey and desolate dystopian world that is starkly different from the postcard Paris on the other side of the Peripherique. Once home to a large Jewish population, 15000 of whom were deported to Nazi concentration camps after the fall of Paris, Bobigny came to be classified as a ‘banlieue rouge’ or communist neighbourhood in the 20th century. In the short walk from the metro station to the Gurdwara, one passes by walls lined with

posters for the Front de Gauche (French Left Party) as well as roads named after Karl Marx and Lenin.

There are estimated to be around 30,000 Sikhs in France, most of whom live in isolated suburbs to the north of Paris.

French-Sikh engagement can be traced as far back as General Jean-François Allard, a French military man who raised a corps of dragoons for the Punjabi king Ranjit Singh. The first migration patterns of Sikhs towards France naturally began with the soldiers who served the allies in both World Wars. The first ships carrying the Indian Corps, including the Lahore Division, arrived in Marseille on the southern French coast on the 26th of September 1914. Over the course of the two wars an estimated 80,000 Sikhs fought for the allies, many of who lie buried in over 151 cemeteries across the country.

Although there exists a celebrated history of the Sikh military contribution to France, the real story of the French Sikhs of Bobigny today has more to do with a larger pattern that began to emerge in the 1980s.

Accounts of families that arrived in the late ‘70s suggest that there were hardly any members around which to build a community life then. The turning point in Sikh immigration to France came as an unintended consequence of a larger immigration policy initiated in 1980-81 by the socialist government of François Mitterrand, which coincided with political unrest and violence over Khalistan in the Indian Punjab. Merely days after the socialists’ electoral victory, the government emphasized their desire to end the insecurities faced by migrants due to their legal status. In an attempt to undo the infamous ‘Bonnet Laws’, the

expulsion of all foreigners born in France was suspended, retrospective regularization of illegal migrants that had entered France before 1981 began and immigrants were given the right to organize interest groups.

Although primarily intended to address large immigration patterns from former French colonies in North and West Africa, the new laws saw a rise in Sikh migration with many attempting to enter the country through their networks as political refugees in the aftermath of the 1984 riots.

In the initial years, the community elders who lived on the northern periphery of the city consecrated the Guru Granth Sahib at an apartment and began to worship there. Eventually, the location was shifted to another house in Bagnolet (another suburb) and finally, through the collection of funds, a small pavilion was purchased in Bobigny. Eventually another one was bought on the same street and the property joined for the creation of the Gurdwara Singh Sabha. With the Gurdwara as a focal point, the Sikhs were able to adequately mobilize themselves into various community activities. The Gurdwara today takes classes for young Sikhs to learn the Gurmukhi script and there even exists a ‘Miri Piri Gatka Akhara France’ that practices and teaches the traditional Punjabi martial art, with showcases for the Nagarkeertans (processions) on special occasions like Vaisakhi.

The Sikhs today command relative numerical strength in the country. In 2013, some representatives of Le Conseil Représentatif des Sikhs de France (Sikh Council of France) met with the current Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls, to discuss key issues of the community.

Primary among these are the issues of racial profiling by police and issues regarding wearing the turban to schools that arose after French authorities attempted to ban religious symbols (primarily the Burqa), which had a fallout on the Sikhs. The community as a whole remains largely distant from politics, despite being mildly tilted towards the Parti Socialiste thanks to their track record on immigration and also as a bulwark against the gaining momentum of far-right elements in Europe and France like the Front Nationale. Despite large numbers of Sikhs being part of the French working class, their presence in ongoing labour protests like the Nuit Debout movement has been markedly less than other ethnically differentiated communities.

Today, the Sikhs of Bobigny and St. Denis form a much larger community that is able to sustain the activities of the Gurdwara and also host langar or community dining.

The healthy and delicious free food served brings together myriad groups of people including Bengalis, Eelam Tamils and Pakistanis who would likely be who would likely be divided along caste and religious lines back home to come together, fold their hands and accept rotis and dal with humility.

Whenever I think of Bobigny, I am forced to introspect on what the meaning and nature of ‘southern urbanism’ is. Often, when reading southern literature from contexts where I have never physically been myself, I almost instinctively picture the neighbourhood of Bobigny as a site that fits much of what is described. The negotiations between multiple communities of colour, the fight for access, acceptance and inclusivity, the

idea of community stepping in to help in the absence of decent infrastructure and services, all these evoke a picture in my mind of a neighbourhood that is located in arguably the most ‘northern’ city of all – Paris.

The nature of the community’s interaction with law, planning and the city is deeply southern. Its history of distress migration from India in the 1980s coupled with slow integration and settlement in the banlieues to try and work in low-end jobs in Paris much resembles the story of migrant labour in Indian metropolises. What words could one use to describe the process by which the Sikhs built their Gurdwara in Bobigny – the lynchpin of their cultural and social roots in France - if not incremental and auto-constructed (albeit within ‘legal’ property frameworks)? How could one characterize the strategic use of their numeric concentration within one neighbourhood (caused to an extent by ghettoization) to negotiate demands with mainstream political parties as anything but a profoundly ‘southern’ practice? In short, the site reminds us just to what extent the idea of the south is a relational project. If the role of the ‘south’ then becomes to contest hegemonic discourses that are seen as canonical, it would be an imperative to recognize the neighbourhood of Bobigny as a site of a larger comingtogether, a different model in the backdrop of an increasingly polarized Europe. Could we even suggest that “good” Parisian urban planning learn a lesson or two from this southern location and start to think of the city as its people and not its buildings?

Shilpy Mehta

Riddhi D’Souza

The Alchemy of Memories

Smriti Singh

An ode to the old city of Roorkee and my memories associated with the intangible, organic and integrated fabric of the place I resided in.

My childhood memories have always been associated with connected terraces, common courtyards, narrow streets and chabutras as spaces of everyday gathering. These made me believe in the possibilities of co-existence.

Us vs. Them

I explore spaces as interacting entities, creating a diverse, interlinked, integrated and inclusive community fabric. Segregated spatial planning and private walled housing initially adopted for safety has disasterously affected society in terms of socially disintegrated exclusive neighborhoods and over time transcended them into a devised notion of power, an Us vs. Them.

Kritika Jain

A Day in the Life of Gulabi A series of sketches depicting the journey of a rose -- from the farm, to the market and into our homes through interactions at KR Market, Bangalore.

Naksha Satish No Order can Capture this Disorder

Imainging Indian Cities De-Colonialised

Tejaswi Subramanian

Back in high school, I read a sci-fi short in the English textbook. The story imagined an alternate reality for India. What if the arrow had missed one particular king by a whisker in a 19th century battle? In the story, he eventually leads his kingdom to victory, setting forth a domino effect, effectively blocking the rise of the British empire in India. The story envisages an Indian society that develops indigenous technology that rivals that of the West, and is likely better-suited to the people, climate, and culture of the land. What if we could re-imagine Indian cities this way too?

What would a city like Bengaluru consider core to its urban identity? Would it embrace its cosmopolitan nature and stay true to its ability to ‘retain talent’ that fuels its IT wave and startup ecosystem? Would it continue to cannibalise the economic traditions of its neighbouring areas? How would the LGBTQIA movement look, as the community claims and occupies space in a city that does not subscribe to the colonial sensibilities? How accessible would the city be to Adivasi cultures and traditions? How inclusive would the city be to the aspirations and traditions of

the Dalits? Would the city’s structure still relegate them and their histories to the informal economy? If so, would the informal economy constantly be critiqued in the larger development narrative, and be under the pressure to transform?

What if our planning traditions were to de-colonialise?

What would urban planning look like in a country that is constantly trying to decolonialise? What identity would it assume on this journey of self-discovery?

What would Mumbai be without the formidable-looking Gateway of India attracting throngs of people? What if the heritage of Mumbai were to be its salt pans, its mangroves, and its tribal population, that till date lives in and around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park?

And the leopards? What if these aspirations and traditions were the primary priority of the planners?

Would the art galleries have the same structure and form? Who would curate the events, shows, and culture in these spaces?

What would transportation look like? If the technology were indigenous, would we still be as reliant on fossil fuel? Do we need yet another steel flyover? Would the city head to a Brigade Gateway for leisure or a celebration? What would leisure look like?

Would carpeting Cubbon Park with a lawn be an idea that is entertained when the city anticipates a drought every summer?

Would droughts be as commonplace in a city that was built on the foundation of lakes?

What roles would lakes play in the city?

Would they be exclusive walkers’ parks, and recipients of construction debris? What if farmers’ livelihoods had allowed to continue around these lakes?

What if Bengaluru was never the IT city that caters to the outsourcing needs of the western economy?

What if Bengaluru were to never be referred to as a ‘dying city’?

How would Kolkata look like? Without Victoria Memorial stand at the centre of its glamour?

What if Chennai were to look beyond its Brahmin culture? Would North Chennai still be standing in its current form? How would housing be? What role would its expansive shoreline play? How would Chennai have withstood natural disasters?

How would the currents of Adyar river be?

Would the flamingos and dolphins return?

And Delhi? Would there be an inter-dependent NCR, with its complicated politics and even more complex infrastructure projects? Would the Yamuna be the toxic river it is today? Would its slums be grazed to the ground without prior notice or deliberation, even as its incumbent CM promises to build ‘10 Singapores’ if Delhi were to be granted statehood? Would that be a lucrative manifesto?

I wonder.

IN CONVERSATION

with PREEDIP BALAJI

ON ORGANIZING KNOWLEDGE

On libraries I have worked in a central institution before as a researcher, and in two other big private libraries: at Indian School of Business in Hyderabad -- a very wealthy library, and the other, at Life Science Research Park Library -- another extreme altogether, because it couldn’t sustain much as the institution didn’t see value in it. So I’ve seen both kinds of spaces, one that was very huge, open around 18-19 hrs a day, and the other where the organization didn’t want to invest much despite having a wealth of research because of lack of space.

So coming out of those two experiences, to me, this space at IIHS has been an eye-opener. As you grow and mature, you learn about your interactions with society through a certain set of commons. As much as the air and water that allows us to live and breathe, spaces like these [the library] are important for people who live in, or even visit the city -- as spaces to grow and thrive. They give a sort of intellectual shelter, and expose one to a certain neutrality of ideas.

Here we have an open space for anyone to walk in and out, without any charges.

That’s why this is special to me, because often you don’t get to see libraries that are open to public. Although we have a legislation for the states that mandate publicly financed libraries which should run on taxpayers’ money, but one [however] always desires for more of such spaces, not just libraries, but galleries [as well], archives, museums, etc. All are important for communities, cities and individuals to grow and learn. Even the federal funded institutional libraries

running on taxpayers’ money don’t allow just anyone to enter, [kind of] like gated communities -- where you have to prove your purpose. Breaking that barrier is imperative, so I see it as a democratic space to thrive in, one of the few spaces where you are not discriminated against, and you break open any inequality -- no questions asked!

On organizing urban knowledge A librarian’s job is inherently an intellectual job; to acquire and manage this wealth of knowledge from different perspectives is very challenging -- and everyone has certain biases they acquire through years of practice. The ‘organization of knowledge’ is an area I’ve been exposed to through my work as a researcher. It’s basically using classification systems like the Dewey Decimal System, Subject Headings, Specialized Thesaurus, and nowadays, Ontologies -- to control the vocabulary of a domain. You try to understand the relationship between abstract ideas through different concepts, for instance, when you have an abstract idea in mind, there are many facets to it -they could be social, ecological, literary etc.

At IIHS, I’ve been trying to explore the meaning of this organization in an urban context. From data to films, literature to reports, and various kinds of maps; I’ve been trying to develop a system specifically for the urban -- because no such system exists. One thing I learnt along the way was the existing systems are generic -- there are systems that are very specific, for example, music or math, but the urban is also drawn from these

disciplines -- it doesn’t exist thus far as a discipline of its own -- and given that my current work also revolves around the same, I’m really interested in developing a classification system specific to the urban by analyzing its domain. It’s a very demanding job, you can’t arbitrarily arrange and do justice to it because when somebody conducts a search, they won’t get the right hints.

The Dewey system is a predominant classification system in the Englishspeaking world. It was started in the 19th century and we’re currently using the 23rd edition, but it is very biased towards North America. It doesn’t fit so well in our context. Basically, the entire universe of knowledge is divided into ten, then hundred, and then thousand topics. Ten broad categories, such as, religion, gender, arts, natural sciences, social sciences, history, geography, etc. One has to judge where to place a text so that it is found easily. There are so many new disciplines like sociobiology, systems biology -- very niche and new, hence it needs to be updated constantly.

The DDC is a four volume set, the main schedules are in the 2nd volume – 000 to 599, and the next volume goes up to 999.

In 300 – under ‘Social sciences’, there is the label of ‘Communities’ under which there is ‘City planning’. So basically, the DDC treats the urban as a community.

The other system is the UDC – Universal Decimal Classification System, that was started by two Europeans, based off of the DDC, but they used a different set of tools, signs and symbols. As mentioned, the DDC locates the urban under ‘Communities and Social sciences’,

whereas in UDC, planning comes under ‘Arts and Architecture’. These are two different schools of thought. The challenging thing with urban studies is how it is drawn from different subjects, so you can’t contain it in a few umbrella categories.

Human geography for instance, will go under ‘History and Geography’, and not under urban studies. Identifying such things becomes quite a task! You want to label and put something in categories, but it also needs to flow -- much like a map for a library. Sometimes it’s easy to do it and move on, or you refer to other libraries that have already catalogued it. But what we struggle with is Indian books, mainly language books which can really complicate things.

On organization from the South: So, we’re using these two systems [Dewey Decimal Classification System and the Universal Decimal Classification System]: but we don’t have something from the Global South. We have a system that was devised by the father of library sciences in India called the ‘Colon Classification System’, but that has not been revised since the 70s and 80s. The work he did for this system was phenomenal. He was a mathematician, and his system was actually used to organize information on the web. He used ‘faceted theory’ as a base, where you look at something from various facets not like something that is enumerated in DDC. The notations he used however were not popular because in the DDC you see a decimal point after 3 digits, so although

it becomes very long and you run in too many numbers, it’s easy for people to identify. But in Colon Classification, he used colons, commas, apostrophes -which are difficult to remember. The more you try to complicate it, the more difficult it is to find. Many Indian libraries are still using CC, but it isn’t revised so it is a huge disadvantage. The challenges we face in a developing country context are so different from what has been organized: so we need some of our own indigenous tools.

Keeping an ethical and neutral position on not just human subjects but others as well is also a challenge in itself. There might be some tools for us in different languages perhaps, but I haven’t come across any in my practice. We don’t have the global south in the DDC -- not to stereotype it, but knowledge production from here is what differentiates us from other countries, because we are constantly producing more knowledge.

Urban knowledge is generally dominated by the global North. One needs to question how that fits in our own geographical context; how our histories define our practices. For example, a considerable amount of literature on the subject of ‘refuse collectors’, are referred to as ‘rag-pickers’ in the dominant classification systems -- ‘manual scavenging’ for that matter is totally absent; therefore, it becomes important to situate it, and deal with it in a more politically aware manner. When you are dealing with manual scavenging as a research topic, you need to give it a proper organizing principle; a politically sensitive one; it should be contextual. It’s tough! especially, because the urban is so interdisciplinary, one needs to think from the user’s

perspective too. Where will a user find the book?

The subject of climate change in cities -- do you label climate change as a natural phenomenon or a social phenomenon?

Where do you place it in a library? Will the user go to the city section, as in urban planning, or go [instead] to the natural sciences section? These larger debates in IPCC are also feeding into how one must organize a library space as they are not disconnected! The spatial location of these literatures in a library are often determined by such debates.

On OCD’ing: ‘what if pigeons carried anthrax?’

Adhip Amin

This is something I wrote a couple of years ago that I shared with a few friends to give them a glimpse of how I experienced mental illness, and why mental health is so crucial to our everyday flourishing. I hope you find what I’ve written insightful. I am still working on it, reshaping it as the days go, as I go everyday. I am coming to be dissatisfied with some of the writing, but haven’t edited it out yet. Thank you for listening though.

Being diagnosed with OCD of the ‘pure’, intrusive thoughts variety, I have terrible anxiety about whether I have wronged somebody; unpleasant and disturbing thoughts come to my mind against my will causing me considerable distress. I keep thinking whether my most basic action was creepy or not: am I creep? Am I bad person? My gaze, is too masculinized? If I take a pin and pierce it into the whites of my eyes, will my masculinized gaze ‘stop’?

I need to, at some point, write how people with OCD navigate the city, because sometimes it feels like swimming against the current; walking in the city as a way of knowing that echo: ‘listen boss, Adhip,

you’re a creep, a sexual harasser. Adhip, you’re such a creep man, look at you polluting the space for women, making them uncomfortable.’ I also have mental cop-outs of the nature of ‘oh if I wasn’t male, I wouldn’t have these thoughts’, but I know that’s wrong, that’s a very lazy thought, it’s also a problematic thought. Essentializing OCD to a gender; it goes with all those who think that gendering is a particularized way of being.

This is a bit too regulatory, a bit too ‘biological’ when we think of who we do not want to be. The causal link here between identity and the shape of one’s perceptions and cognition, is too clear, it’s too determinate. This is wrong. What do you think? What are you thinking?

‘Why think thoughts when you think you’re a sexual harasser? rather be dead’, my brain accuses me. What is the point of doing scholarly – intellectual, ‘thoughtful’, ‘reflective’ work when I am bad; why exercise rigorous thought anyway when my morals are, in the first place, so weak? Was my contact (whether emotional or physical) with another person ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Good and Bad. Evil and Virtuosity. Purity and Pollution. What matrix of power held these distinctions as self-evident, as common-sensical? I am not saying that there is no evil, but sometimes, in certain contexts, the will to evil often comes from the desire for purity, there is a certain violence in keeping these distinctions alive and self-contained.

After a break-down, sitting in the psychiatrist’s closed, disciplined, ‘predictable’ office, my mother asked him whether I needed any ‘talk’ therapy when he prescribed me only the chemical ‘fluoxetine’. He looked at us tersely and said ‘no’; just like my moralizing, rigid, judgemental mind had drawn a strict distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’, ‘order’ and ‘chaos’, the psychiatrist, too, drew a distinction between obsessive (the ‘O’ in OCD) intrusive thoughts, and, compulsions (the ‘C’ in OCD) where acts, rituals, procedures, are ‘performed’ so as to achieve purity – concluding that: chemicals for obsessions talking for compulsions So his solution (pun intended).

He started me off on 20mg of fluoxetine, a month later after I still wasn’t getting much better, and continuing to have debilitating and disruptive anxiety and guilt about being a bad person, I was put on 40mg, then 60mg, soon 80. To put things in perspective, the maximum dosage of a single tablet that is currently manufactured is 60mg. One of the most therapeutic (no, I do not count pharmacologically induced brain numbing as therapy) moments of those difficult months were when I spent three days with my mother in the coastal town of Vishakapatnam, with its low-hills engulfed by sea breeze.

We would walk on the beach in evenings, awash with lights from small shops. I remember the dark blue sky. When my mother sat on a rock in the margins of the water’s ever shifting edge.

A few months later, I started my masters in London in September 2016, and saw a GP as soon as I could. She suggested I undertake Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT),

while also reducing my dosage of fluoxetine from 80mg to 20. I nodded. Wait. Didn’t my psychiatrist say talk therapy was for people with compulsions? I had obsessional intrusive thoughts, primarily about the nature of my everyday, everymoment conduct — so a pharmacological intervention was all I needed, right? In retrospect, I presumed that I would be “cured” with tablets; thinking of mental illness in ‘antibiotic’ terms. A tablet for purity! Just as objective morality as a tablet; planning universalisms of sorts! Planning as a tablet. Planning in antibiotic terms! (Take whatever ‘urban’ lessons as you will). Well, I didn’t actually sign up for CBT until I suffered a pretty horrible breakdown a day before my final exams. It had nothing to do with the exams though. I was however invaded by a series of irrational and intrusive thoughts. Sobbed, washed, I walked to my books and began reading Rawls on justice. I didn’t start therapy until a few months later, however.

Here’s the thing: compulsions needn’t be Hollywood style – “As Good as it Gets” – constantly washing of hands, cleaning, and so on. Often, I would suppose that the ‘logical’ step to my bad thoughts was to always maintain absolute control of myself. I shouldn’t go out; shouldn’t talk to anybody; if I stay in my room alone, shutting off my phone, I cannot have harmed anybody or made anybody uncomfortable. These are compulsions. A habit of the mind. The rituals that the mind performs to capture thoughts -- are compulsions too.

Descartes is often invoked in the social sciences and humanities when you need a convenient trope to attack dualisms. So I am going to use him here in a similar way. The Descartesian dualism between mind and body can be roughly mapped onto the binary between obsessions as the stuff of thoughts, on the one hand -- and -- compulsions as purely (pun intended) physical acts, on the other. This determined my treatment by the psychiatrist. This cartographic way of fixing things in their place began to seep into how I conceived of my everyday self too. I have a disease in my mind so let me attack it with chemicals. This thought is pretty reassuring sometimes because the dualism gives you a distance from which you can (try to) assemble yourself as distinct from the illness. This is sometimes comforting. But it comes with a cost: the taste of anxiety (or of the residue of the medication?) lingers in the mouth. The thoughts don’t go away, what you think about yourself – and of the nature of the world -- remains more or less the same; unchanged, still rigid and repetitive – purity and pollution-wise, only the intensity is reduced, as is the energy of every other thought. You begin to grind your teeth, you shake, your hands are unsteady. The grinding, the enamel grating reminds you of your brittleness, of your creepiness. Shit you just made that person feel uncomfortable: better to sanitize the space by removing myself. Grating of the teeth, bad thoughts, unsteady hands, the rhythmic bouncing of my feet to release anxious and immoral energy.

But here’s the thing. Practices can be ‘southern’ too. In one of the first few meetings with my therapist, he pointed at my abstinence of alcohol – which, by the way, the psychiatrist thought was a ‘good’ thing (oh the moralising!), -- but the therapist said to me, instead: ‘well, that’s actually controlling behaviour’. Wait, wasn’t controlling behaviour a ‘good’ thing? He asked me then what it means when you indulge in controlling behaviour? I

thought for a moment and said that it keeps alive the belief that I am bad. Controlling – excessive planning, gives credence to anxiety; to make order by keeping a certain mistrustfulness alive; by lending truth value to destructive chaos and radical randomness.

The intrusive thoughts have a greater impact on me if I vehemently fought them, employing “controlling behaviour”, these strategies have had a pernicious effect on my sense of myself, my sense of being male. To fight. To fight. Battle. To constrain. To tame; to impel. To deal with aggressively – reproducing, in turn, aggressiveness. Like quick sand, if I struggled with my mind, the faster I was swallowed by a web of anxiety and guilt. ‘Does my anxiety make me a coward? Less manly’. These and other toxic masculinity thoughts shadow me. Listen. Boss. We are all problematic, particularly us heterosexual cis males, you listening? That doesn’t mean we beat ourselves up (the masculinity!) as a way to bind our anxiety, but it’s important we dwell in it. Dwell in your anxiety, let it consume you sometimes, the distress lets you do some repair rather than to engage in revolutionary overhaul, or some impulsive act to numb yourself. Is planning a way to numb a city, I just wonder? Just so: living life transversally to official logics shouldn’t be ridden with impulsiveness – a knee jerk is maybe as egregious as a tight grid.

He was quite a therapist. The ‘irony’ of his being part of the NHS – as an employee of the state is not lost on me. The fact that I have to put irony in ‘scare’ quotes is suggestive. Our sessions seldom took place in the confines of his office, instead he transformed King’s Cross Station, where Harry took the train to Hogwarts — slowly into a nurturing psychogeography. He used the aspects of the city, the bustle, the ‘indiscipline’; the bus stop, the ‘chaos’ of the tube at peak hour, market places - as therapeutic instruments. Just to kill the romanticism here, this area, Camden, has been a major site for redevelopment over the past few decades, leading to exclusion. One cringes just listening to the announcements against homeless people in the station.

He asked me to press my hands against his back once, while he stood at the edge of the platform. ‘Imagine pushing me when the train approaches’. ‘What the fuck!?’ I said. ‘Yes, HAVE that intrusive thought, feel that anxiety as you press my back imagining to push me.’ The underground wind thudded against us as the front of the train thundered past.

He was still standing there. Turning back, giggling sheepishly, he asked: ‘Well? Did you act on these thoughts?’. Walking back he asked me ‘how many pigeons did you see today?’

What an absurd…well, few, not many, I think. ‘What if I told you that all pigeons in London are now carrying anthrax’, he said, ‘now tell me, how many pigeons do you see?’.

‘A lot more, perhaps more than they are’, I answered. “Exactly”. Seeing the possibility of danger and pollution everywhere, fundamentally within myself, did so much to exacerbate my anxiety – the chief motivations for absolute control and a certain authoritarianism.

It was summer — sunny — summery. Light was setting only at 9pm. I can’t remember darkness except within my own head; a squishy, viscous sort of shadow. One summer afternoon, as I was getting better and working harder, the therapist and I walked out of the hospital towards the street, into a park (another instrument for gentrifying an area,

by the way). The light was soft and gently (no pun intended) falling on his brown eyes. I remember a dog running across in confused delight. Our attention turned outward.

(not so) Mundane

Divya Chand and Mridula Garg

I watched a woman being stopped from playing music, by three armed policemen, in Alexanderplatz. On another day in Alhambra, while breathing in the night’s depth, I heard a woman play guitar from across the hill.

Contradictions The public realm is coded with sets of contrary voices.

I walked to find that the city expresses and oppresses simultaneously.

A hopeful message here was but a hateful thought there.

Paris

Brussels

Stuttgart

Paris

Brussels

Stuttgart

Stuttgart

Brussels

On my first day, a pickup truck stopped mid-turn. As the driver made eye contact, I shuddered in panic, but slowly realised that he was making way for me to cross the street safely. Later, as I found a chair to rest my tired feet, I was bluntly asked to buy a drink or move on.

Conundrums Collectively we all polish and prune the city, but life creeps in through the cracks. Some days, I shrug and amble on. Sometimes, I smile through a dreary Monday.

“You, India?” took some getting used to. While the passerby strangers have often spotted my origins correctly, friends labelled me ‘‘not Indian (enough)’’. For me, nothing seemed to compare to Delhi, and then, I found myself in Madrid.

Nostalgia We experience places by reminiscing others that we’ve visited before. A close look can lead us to familiar markers, painted or sculpted. The cities, then, beyond their postcards, might not be all that different.

Madrid

Munich

Hamburg

Madrid

Bangalore

Brussels

Brussels

Mumbai

Each time I was frustrated at not understanding German, I missed the quadra-lingual road signages of Delhi. The city’s discomforts unfolded not through the news, but in its images and residues from the streets.

Biased and Conflicted You pick a spraycan to derail from the system here. Back home, it is a privilege of the rich. Here, you integrated into the society on their terms. Back home, the diversity of languages is taken for granted. The setting provoked me to re-evaluate my judgement of homes, old and new.

They asked me to list all of the gods I worshipped, and I told them of the French philosophers I’d read. I asked them of their favoured football clubs and they showed me their favourite yoga positions. We aren’t linear stories.

Belief and Being I groused about all the chaat I missed having, sounds I missed hearing and colours I missed seeing. They taught me how to sit in the sun, have a leisurely street-side coffee and smile at strangers. It’s different, but in all its glory, it’s a street.

Brussels

Delhi

Bangalore

Marseille

Kolkata

Delhi

Copenhagen

Brussels

I brought with me these feet that have learnt to walk by traversing through the dusty, uneven and sidewalkless paths of burly, heaving and animated cities.

I walked and peeled open the new cities, one street at a time. They are home to many anonymous realities. A patchwork of lives as producers of the mundane. I learnt to see how the cities also emerge instinctively. Now, I cannot ignore it.

When we Loiter We are an assemblage of everyday practices and a provocation to observe through your feet. We peek into the niches of cities that deny common logic and encourage you to wander a little longer and loiter a little more.

scan

with

phone camera

Swimming in slippery spaces Someone find me a sticky place Life used to be in the core Now not anymore What’s the status of my tenure Title was never the cure Anyway Transversality Relationality Informality Life is a southern city Official logics of production Can’t explain auto construction Incrementality is my jam Never read the masterplan Anyway Chorus They taught me the canon No thank you Saskia Sassen What brings me joy Is reading me some Ananya Roy Anyway Chorus Opening the closed system Spatial Stories are my wisdom My practice is grounded My theories, they travel Anyway Chorus - Temporality, fuck hierarchy, graded inequality

Urban Fellows 2018-19

life is a southern city

and listen to this song!

What is our point of entry?

Is this a provocation?

Or is it a song?

It is a song.

Arbun Press