Varanasi. Polaroid on canvas (2011) by Lionel Muñoz
Varanasi. Polaroid with 669 film (2011) by Lionel Muñoz
Kerala. Polaroid with expired 669 film (2011) by Lionel Muñoz
16h45. L’aiguille marque la minute d’un tac dramatique. Sonorité agaçante et répétitive. Je suis assis à la terrasse du Club Social, Mile End, tantôt le nez plongé dans ce bouquin d’importation, déniché à prix fort dans cette librairie opulente de l’Avenue du Parc. Tantôt le regard scrutateur, balayant la masse vivante qui se tortille autour de moi.
Un poilu gratte sa guitare, la barbe qui lui dessine une tête de chèvre.
C’est le titre du livre qui m’a attiré et sitôt convaincu de lui faire voir le soleil : Le gout du voyage. Quatre mots qui raisonnent et déraisonnent dans ma lourde cavité cervicale. D’ailleurs, dès le moment que j’eusse trouvé une chaise libre, j’y plongea tête première. Une, deux, dix pages. Un chapitre.
Nothing embodies the way India is modernising like the Delhi Metro. Opened in 2002, the system’s clean, marble floored stations and smooth, linked-carriage trains rival those of the most developed cities across the road.
The network has changed city life. Destinations that once took hours to get to on the traffic clogged roads can now be reached in just a few minutes. Parts of the sprawling city that you’d once never consider visiting are suddenly easy to discover.
For some the metro has offered even more radical changes. A lady in a bright sari stands at the base of the metro escalator. She peers forwards at the moving steps with a look of terror on her face, shuffling slowly towards them then backing away. She is confronting the modern world perhaps for the first time. She reaches out with her foot towards the step, but then changes her mind and backs away to the stairs. She will remain traditional a little while longer.
While Hong Kong’s rush into the future means sweeping away much of the past, in Delhi something different is happening. The city is becoming stretched between the very modern and the still thriving traditional cultures.
If only the bus were a little more red and a little less boxy, I could have sworn I was in South Kensington or Knightsbridge in London rather than in Mumbai. The double decker bus, the Victorian Gothic architecture — a common inheritance of the British empire that is at once familiar and strange. I did not spend long enough in Mumbai to explore further the lingering British influence and how it had been adapted to local circumstances.
I wonder if people on their first visit from Mumbai to London have that same mix of feelings of déjà vu and novelty.
Tooti Chowk, Paharganj, Delhi
Paharganj is a mix of crowded makeshift homes, budget traveler hangouts, and the odd chunk of decaying heritage. It’s also an example of what happens when a section of town is left to its own devices with little consideration for urban planning.
A few centuries back, Paharganj was a grain bazaar populated almost exclusively by Muslims, a short walk outside the walls of Mughal Delhi. Today, most of the Muslims have gone, but here and there are the domes of an old mosque, fronted by an ugly concrete structure, squatted by several families, or converted to a budget hotel. Most hotels in the neighbourhood are unauthorized windowless dives who steal water and electricity from lesser mortals. Wires and plugs dangle all over, and the shoddy structures look as if they’re about to collapse onto themselves.
The noisy main bazaar is congested with kerosene-powered motorcycles spouting black fumes, three-wheelers, cycle rickshaws, cows, carts, and the occasional car squeezing through. I even saw an elephant rambling through at 11PM, its driver asleep for the night on his back. Wide-eyed shellshocked travelers, fresh off the plane, can’t see beyond the noise, cows, and raw sewage. Then there’s the old India veterans, dreadlocks down their back, also shellshocked, but in a different way — they took a wrong turn on their long strange trip and ended up in Delhi. Both of these groups feel like they’re in transit — Paharganj is an unfortunate stop on their journey to somewhere a little more scenic or relaxing.
Street scene in Dharavi. Photo from the Economist
“Around 6am, the squealing of copulating rats—signalling a night-long verminous orgy on the rooftops of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai—gives way to the more cheerful sound of chirruping sparrows. Through a small window in Shashikant (“Shashi”) Kawale’s rickety shack, daylight seeps. It reveals a curly black head outside. Further inspection shows that this is attached to a man’s sleeping body, on a slim metal ledge, 12 feet above the ground.”
It’s not the most flattering description, but the Economist’s December 19th story on Dharavi is actually a remarkably sensitive portrait of Asia’s largest slum, revealing a particularly complex social and economic space that is now threatened by redevelopment.
One million people live in Dharavi, which is somewhat incredible when you realize that it covers just one square mile. Although conditions are rough, life in the slum has improved remarkably over the past several decades. Part of the reason for that is that it has become an important economic centre, containing an estimated 15,000 single-room factories and functioning as the centre of Mumbai’s jewellery, textile and recycling industries. All of the trash thrown away in Mumbai passes through the workshops of Dhavari, where it is sorted and sold. For the slum’s residents, the line between home and work is blurred, since many living spaces also double as workshops; every inch of Dharavi is put to great use.
Government planners don’t approve of slums like this; they never have. For at least a decade, Mumbai’s officials have been trying to get rid of Dharavi. What they overlook, however, is the innovation and entrepreneurialism it produces. Dharavi is packed with an almost unimaginable number of people, but it’s also full of small businesses that were built by the most marginalized members of Indian society. Most are poor migrants from the countryside. For them, living in a slum, where living conditions are squalid but opportunities are immense, is the best way to improve their lot.
Potters at work. Photo by Akshay Mahajan
Hammer-and-sickle in Kochi, the largest city of Kerala, a state that has elected several Marxist-Leninist governments
The view from the train window on the trip between Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of India’s Kerala State, and Kochi, its biggest city, is one of nearly continuous development. As I looked out the open windows I kept waiting for the countryside to begin. I shouldn’t have been surprised: what I didn’t properly appreciate was that Kerala, on the southwest coast of India, has a complex, centuries-old pattern of mixing rural and urban that may look like suburban sprawl but, until recently at least, hasn’t been.
Kochi, formerly called Cochin, is the largest city in Kerala state, with a population of about 2.5 million. The region had one of the most strictly-enforced versions of the caste system until end of the 19th century, but now it has made amazing strides toward equality and equity which is the reason I decided it to include Kochi among the cities explored in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006).
Kerala has the highest literacy rates in India — 94 per cent for men and 86 per cent for women, according to the 2001 Indian census — and the lowest infant mortality rates, 14 per 100,000 births in 2000. Other indicators suggest life is pretty good—without state coercion women have decided to have fewer babies than needed to maintain the population numbers, while life expectancy is right up there with that of developed countries.
Four times — most recently in 2006 — Keralites have elected a coalition government led by Marxist-Leninists, but the ambient political style is far from that seen in Communist bloc countries — or even in the authoritarian democracy of Singapore. In Kerala the emphasis is on community-based action: the great surge in literacy came in the 1980s when local groups worked on the grass roots level to teach people to read. Newspaper readership — a good measure of literacy in action — is now the highest in India. In fact, even though Kerala’s main language, Malayalam, is spoken by only about five percent of India’s population, a Malayalam newspaper has the largest circulation of any daily in any language in the country.
“My grandfather was a barber to the British,” says this umpteenth-generation barber in Dalhousie, India
In India, Victorian England is alive and well with all its stuffy floweriness and chastity belts. Picture yourself in a café painted in sombre greens. A Brahmin gentleman at the table next to yours takes Queen & Lion brand snuff out of an ancient-looking tin cylinder. A hand-painted sign on the wall reads “TIFFIN – 3:00.” Dusty black and white portraits of all the shop owners and their extended family clog the walls, hung at 45 degree angles. Underpaid Dickensian kids scurry about on all fours cleaning the floor with rags. Other higher-caste kids hurtle around refilling your glass with dysenteric water. If they’re not quick enough, their fat employers yell and slap them around.
The Brahmin gentleman remains indifferent to the bustle around him. He sits there, head raised, prattling on about the degeneracy of the irreligious and the filthiness of the lower-class plebes (who, ironically, do all the washing up around him). Because of his Christian education at private Anglo-Indian institutions in the Himalayas, he can recite Wordsworth couplets effortlessly and peppers his speech with distorted anachronistic clichés: “Actually, my darling sir, to perform such an action would be as inauspicious as carrying coal to Newcastle.”
To an outsider living in the 21st century, this aspect of India seems like some exotic Bollywood parody of Victorian England. To the actors it is not a joke. It is quite real. But then there are all the hippies…
Most people’s image of Goa involves a combination of beaches, drugs, all-night raves, and burnt out hippies. Few come here to take in the Portuguese heritage of Panaji, its capital city. This is the side of Goa that captured my attention.
Taxi drivers, it’s safe to say, have attained iconic status in the annals of urban folklore. They’re the embodiment of a city’s wiry energy and gritty determination to survive. They are strange, slightly crazy and defiantly individualistic. Surely, it takes a special character to drive strangers around for hours on end, competing with thousands of other drivers for customers and cash. (The debt faced by drivers is often staggering—in Montreal, where 9,500 taxis prowl the streets, taxi licences cost upwards of $200,000.) Maybe that’s why so many of them have such interesting things to say. Pierre-Léon, author of Un taxi la nuit, just landed a book deal; Lebanese-Canadian Rawi Hage wrote his first novel DeNiro’s Game while driving a taxi in Montreal. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and is now a national bestseller.
Most cabbies, however, are just trying to survive amidst the particular challenges of their own city. “Horn OK Please” is a day in the life of a Bombay taxi driver, Lucky, who struggles to earn enough rupees to buy a new air-conditioned cab. This short film, produced by a team of Indian and Irish animators at Belfast’s Flickerpix Animations, is made with a combination of stop-motion models and drawn backgrounds. The result is colourful, chaotic and charming. Take a look.
Most people are poor judges when it comes to architecture from one generation back. Take Montreal’s Place Bonaventure or the Concordia University Hall Building—some of you may appreciate these buildings, but most people don’t. I am considered a weirdo when I argue that Quebec City’s “le bunker” (also known as “le calorifère”) is an interesting post-war building that warrants preservation. The mainstream press look at these buildings and ask for their demolition, all the while lamenting the loss of the Victorian marvels that came before.
This is not a new phenomenon. People in the first half of the twentieth century felt the same way about late nineteenth-century architecture that we now feel about concrete. Let me illustrate this with an example: Bombay.
