Imagining the wiki city

From PhalkeFactory

राह चलती सड़क एक ऊँचे आर्च से फिसल कर गायब हो जाती है, तो समझो शहर यहाँ पर ख़तम होता है. "या शुरू", और जैसे अपनी बात को सच बताने के लिए, तुम यह कहते कहते कहते तेज़ कदम पर उस गेट के पार, सड़क के आखरी टुकड़े पर जा खड़े होते हो, गेट को देखते हुए. मैं जब वहाँ पहुँचता हूँ, तुम्हें मौन पाता हूँ. तुम कुछ देर गेट ताकते रहते हो, और फिर मेरी तरफ मुड़ कर देखते हो, बच्चे की सी मुस्कान होंठों पर लिए हुए. फिर सर घुमा कर उस गेट को देखते हो, फिर मुझे.. चहरे पर लिखा है, तुम्हारा मन उन आँखों की चमकती नाव पर चढ़कर मछ्लीद्वार की उन बड़ी मछ्लियोन के बीच तैर रहा है, बुर्क़े की टोप से बाल लिए शेरो से आँख मिला रहा है, नाव से झुककर,पत्थर के गजों की पीठ सहला रहा है.


1: The gates are almost forgotten structures at the end of the inner city, waiting for some restoration drive to take fancy to them, drive away the many settlers that have made homes on these margins, around the gates, and re gild their forms. Lions in bonnets, fish like wet eyes, and a quiet line of elephants that will not easily be metaphorised.. we both love the animal gates we have seen in cities in this land. But this time we have made a work out of it.. i feel a bit shy to call myself a researcher, i have seen what those animals are like, they live in libraries with a scanner pen like a small sword and conquer old parchments, page by crumbling page. We, well we got a chance to be together through this work and this work will be both of us wandering through the city from its outer most posts- these gates... Verdant with design they look, full, overblown quite..and their detail of imagery fills your minds with associations you feel this city might have. Associating is all, Forster has said, or something to that effect. As i look at these plaster forms on every gate that leads into the city, i think that is what we must do when we walk these roads inside- see which living road leads to what.... which goldsmith takes us to the tannery, which ayurvedic doctor to church, which snake to homeopathy.

Our categorisation of material has seperated things.. so we must start at these seperations, then criss cross lines and lanes and walk from here to there, led by this or that person, and soon we will be in the middest of this city.

2: My companion is a more romantic man than I, more able to see beauty. I am a bit dry and see what is. Honestly- what lies before us where we stand at one of this city's gates? just outside the gate, a largely undifferentiated mass( es) of lives of the marginal, making a geography around these gates. shanties, labourer huts, mud, thatch, corrugated sheets, cement bricks, a lot of lurid paint from time to time, breaking the drearier silences. Inevitably, a large, choked drain across the geography. You can be at the gate of the puranas, or the gate of the lions, it comes to the same thing. Then the gate itself, sometimes lurid, sometimes beautiful, sometimes beautiful in its being lurid.. and by the gate, inside the city, a comparitive order- the long arm of the law suggests it reaches till here, in still protecting some ancient property rights. the small jewellery maker can keep his shop , as can the oil seller. Small self forgotten men they look like. Small faces, small builds and a severely limited range of expressions, even those mostly on the more severe side. I spent some time this afternoon imagining what the face of the shopkeeper might look like smiling, as we sat outside the shop... half an hour, making equiries, asking questions, waiting while his boy ran to fetch us some tea.. nary a smile. Yes, of course, he had heard of Phalke, there is a clock tower, a main road and various suchlikes named after him. A medical college, too, for some reason ( that he had embodied the body, on screen? ha! and so knew some of the body's secrets..

1: he had captured the body on glass plates and fixed it? watched it move, frame by frame, noted its reflexes and then, tried to create a symphony out of them that linked in with a story

Yes, there is a planned city in here somewhere, but like every planned city of yore, it is somewhere deep ahead, in the centre, a city arranged by a man's life, by all accounts a pioneer in this country's film industry

2: ( this being one of the most powerful industries in the world, that should count for a lot: of course the poor blighter died a pauper). I know that when we write out our descriptions, they should be honest, physical descriptions, because that is all the gates look like. No kite shops by the gate of flight and if there are, then they will be there at the gate of ageing also. Who knows who we might meet on the way to the centre of the city, where buildings are named for the cast of one man and his story. Saraswatibai, Babaraya, Mandakini, Lord Lytton, these are building names at the centre of the city. But we hear names somewhere within these outer reaches, already, that sound like they belong to that story. The man who took us around, finding us a house yesterday. Mr. Kashyap. Kashyap, the turtle, who was sent by the officer in the fancy Vimana Shastra building, to take us around the city. Bright eyed Mr. Kashyap, balding, shoulders bent. Kashyap, he told me, means turtle, after a great sage. I saw an ageing, but still graceful bird.


The gate of flight

The gate to the puranic story

The mechanised being, his gate

the gate of ages and ageing

The gate of alchemy

the gate to the botanical garden

the gate of those dreamers who trace, translate, repeat

footnote: a letter to italo

make it like the skanda purana, in tamil also called the scrap purana- written over hundreds of years, stories added and added and added to it, small ref to skanda purana here, for this http://www.nasikchitpavan.org/history-of-chitpavans.php