A house is dead when all the sofas are draped with old bedsheets. The purpose is to create a protective layer which prevents the settling of dust, cockroach shit and such like.Time passes. The home is unattended and is disguised by its cloth armour. The walls contain nothing but silence, while memories like the sofas, are preserved. Memory of those who have passed. Swept away by the undercurrent of time tunneling by. We feel it too, sometimes it nibbles like curious fish, othertimes, it pulls impatient and childlike. Time twists itself around nana's legs and gently begins coaxing him to wander a little further. Until finally my nana slips away, shedding his life like an old skin. They wrap him in cloth.

I attended an intense and exciting discussion on Delhi where many fancy people spoke. By and large the following is a patchwork of their words. A total mishmash of voices,deas and arguments. hope it is some what coherent.

They talk repeatedly about Delhi and the loss of memory. The long, forgotten past which is erased from our collective memory. A pathological inability to recall the biographic journey that brought us to here. We advocate a sustained determined effort to unlock the gates of memory and end this distorting amnesia.

Indulge in guilty nostalgia. The Sarkari city of the 80s and the government bungalow, the open spaces and the fifty bird species in the garden. You become an easy intellectual target who is attacked for being a middle class romantic, longing for an invented past . But dont dismiss nostalgia you say, draw upon nostalgia as a technique of critiquing the present can be a useful exercise. However, while reconciling the experience of the endless centuries gone by with the chaotic present, one must also claim the future in a conscious way. The has been a lack of public debate when it comes imagining the future of Delhi. That is to say, debate about contemporary architecture, about housing, about alternative city plans are absent. We need to construct an imagination of the future in the most democratic and open way possible. City planning is not a technical process but is instead deeply political. We can not entrust the planning of the a city to 'experts' and 'technicians' whose objective is to mould cityscape as per the power of their will. We are trying to plan the poor out of existence-eliminating them from imaginings of the city, sweeping them off the map. Our city will never resemble a master plan. After all, how do you plan informality? Can you plan informality?

Delhi is a city of migrants. Regional identities dont really matter. There has been no aggressive assertion over the city by a regional group because there is no 'local' community, no archetypal Dilliwallah. However, its a misleading to construe Delhi as a an accommodating, benevolent cosmopolitan city centre. It doesn't give a damn where you come from but asks instead why you have come in the first place. It not pro-migrant but ruthlessly anti-poor. How else do you explain the repeated evictions and slum clearance drives, the determined attempt to make city space free of not poverty but the poor themselves. Delhi has a terrible record of its treatment of the urban poor.

snippets:

What has happened to the ecology of the city over the decades? The ridge and the river are the brackets which have enclosed the city for centuries. An assault on the ecological environment of the city.

The surrender to capital. A new shrillness to the city.

How does post reform capitalism not just close certain channels but also open new ones. The proliferation of technology and media. New forms of pleasure.

The strong exclusionary tendency when shaping city space. However, Sarkari Delhi was more 'open' not intentionally but by neglect. Now the system has ways of being selectively and brutally efficient when it so desires.

We must be aware of Delhi's historical intellectual privilege. These forums for reflexive debates on urbanity is unique to Delhi. The urgent need to create an alternative city archive.

The need to rewrite and restructure space in the most democratic and inclusive way possible. The republic of the streets must survive.

remembering the traumatic sites of Delhi history. 1857. 1947. 1975. 1984. Revisiting the dead and exploring this emotional landscape. How does the memory of trauma survive?

This may be a stupid question but there is something I dont understand about the dichotomous American political spectrum. Why are social and economic and political positions conflated into two positions: Conservative and Liberal. Republican and Democrat. Red and Blue. What I mean is, what do anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-family positions( issues broadly contested in the socio-cultural realm) have anything to do with the right wing neoliberal economics? why do these go hand in hand in the American political framework? what does you stance on abortion or homosexuality have anything to do with your stance on the workings of capitalism? I feel im missing something here.

And what about these moments when I feel beautifully stunningly unbearably vulnerable a thin transparent film of fine dust made of blowing light. I ask what of these moments when i am nothing but a vague outline traced over with a pencil, visible on a precariously tilting lilting paper page. I am the house of cards. I am the distant applause. I am the muted conversation. I am this jaipur night where the kids talk about Farmvile and read out smsed jokes. The older ones drink green glass bottled beer in the far corner. White skins and brown skins and all skins in between clap for Clapton in malkauns sung by Amit brown skin Choudhari.

Now I want these kids who are laughing silly about mispronouced words and fart sounds to stop annoying me and shut up.

I need to rediscover the rhythm and beat and flow of my words tap into wild mind and recover the images that exist only in dark shadowy corners one day I will be brave enough to venture in there and reclaim fearlessly those broken words and fit them into liquid sentences without faltering and feel them take form in the molten core of my imagination I will not pause and I will not shade my shy words with the curved shielding palm of punctuation the tyranny of the complete sentence I will allow myself to fall weightlessly into the spasm chasm of effortlessness where rhyming chiming words find each other where you are nothing but a spectator a limber limbed athlete and it may not make sense and simply sound good to a tabla beat beside a sexy guitarist in a red shirt and the disco lights will flash as paragraphs create themselves I will turn composer I will catch the poetry of city chaos in little toy cups and store them and label them and stack them in wooden chests which I will not bury finally I ask what to make of the pungent smell of alcohol and if you dont know the word pungent does it remain the nature of its smell?

Jaipur diary (Literature festival)

I love the chair wars. When there are 2000 people and 500 chairs us respectable middle class folks reveal our not so respectable side. Never do we raise our voice or create a public scene during the subtle scramble for seats. We instead deploy the Raised Eyebrow. We mutter spitefully under our breath. Biting remarks loud enough for the occupant to hear. disgusted head shakes. Nasty hisses in the ear. Underhand tactics.

I want to write about a six year old girl. She got into the metro at chandi chowk. The doors closed and her parents were left on the platform. she screamed and she wouldn't stop. she was shaking uncontrollably with terror. she continues screaming and doesn't even pause for breath for she is trapped in an alien land, dangerous, unfamiliar and terrifying. Her screams drown out very other sound and every other movement. all that exists in this silent vacuum are the convulsions of fear. All else is calm. You read a paper, I think about dinner and he texts a friend waiting at the coffee shop. But her screams continue. The girl is now clutching desperately ( for she is drowning) to the woman who asks her to get off at the next stop. But she cant hear the aunty who carries with her faint traces of mummy. The flowing salwar kameez or maybe the softness of skin. The intense life threatening danger she senses is alive to her, like a large lumbering monster that only she can see and feel I turned to see her on the chawri bazaar platform looking around wildly reaching out to the aunty. When I wake up in the morning tomorrow I know I'll remember the look in her eyes.
Pure, distilled terror.