2.2 Operational Concepts:

To look at these specifities, a few operational concepts become important to understand the afterlife of this camp space.

• Event and the everyday: It becomes important to understand what is an event and what are its imperatives in everyday life that occurs in space. The event produces an experience for one, which breaks the everyday life. Here everyday life is one of the routines that is followed. The daily negotiations, transactions, experiences are of everyday life. As Henri Lefebrve, in his book The critique of everyday life, defines the everyday life as something that is related to all activities and takes into account all the differences and conflicts. It is a synthesis of these relationships which create the everyday experience for a human. Then defines the event as a social phenomenon of everyday life having two sides, “a little, individual, chance eventand at the same time an infinitely complex social event, richer than the many essences it contains within itself.”

In the case of the Kumbh Mela, the everyday and the event constantly build on each other, where there are overlaps and erasure. The event of Kumbh Mela, requires space that can host and expand for the span of 3 months in 12 years. The everyday space is the one that affords for this expansion to happen, and the event is the one that constructs a system to do so.

• Afterlife of event space:

In the ordinary, the event becomes the show stopper, where everyone talks about it and starts to romanticize it, but what about the post event? The metaphors of afterlife, help me establish that there is an everyday that exists beyond the majorly discussed period of the event. The afterlife of the event space is usually introduced through sayings of “abandoned” and “vacant”, here I would like to explore beyond these parentheses, as the space holds this land politics even after the event. The afterlife of this particular event spans for twelve years. Within these years, an everyday life exists for the land owners, which is where it’s important to study the afterlife of the event.

• Spatiotemporal opportunities:

The afterlife of the event and the land politics would overlap to produce a spatial opportunity for landowners and people living in the reserved area. As the land becomes a burden for the owners, one would start to engage with them in practices which would have a timeline to it because of the Kumbh Mela. As the event would reoccur every twelve years, the everyday practices would be shaped around this criteria. Hence, the architecture of these practices would have an impact on the larger landscape of the reserved land.