Expressing unwanted opinions...

i realised what people mean when they say they get 'intimidated' by other people's opinions. After attending a two-day conference on the emergence of a new urbanism with all kinds of anthropologists, historians, social scientists and deep-thinking architects, every opinion of mine gets checked and double-checked in my mind, for every possible mis-pronounced word and words with alternate meanings. While i construct the sentence, lunch/tea is called, and that's the end of that. And what makes it worse is the 'I'm drawing from the work of XYZ when I say....' and 'I think it was XYZ and I who discussed this a few days ago...' What makes academicians talk to just each other in a crowd of 150? Or what's the obsession with the metaphor and the romanticism rather than the actual comparison? And the almost complete submission to leftist politics?

But the point of this post is not to complain about feeling left out of what was obviously a gathering of smarter people, rather archive for myself some opinions. Maybe they'll change over the years or even weeks.

One is obviously regarding the changing morphology of the city. Although physically the city is undergoing a change in image, i would think the older networks have still remained largely intact, although some have been pushed underground or into the background. All the uproar of the mall being the temple of the modern city is probably unfounded. Now i know i'll be killed for this comparison, but i feel malls to a large extent are what the mills were to the 60's. Both are simply the signifiers of the prevalent economic system, not necessarily being the main contributers to it. Lots of data indicates that mills actually handled a small part of the whole textile process, a lot of it being outsourced to smaller towns and smaller set ups since the 1920s. Malls are following a similar (maybe even more insignificant) process, serving as merely marketing tools. Most shops (except the so called marquee ones) don't break even, but the exposure to a ravenously consumeristic middle class helps other outlets of the same 'brand' located in the traditional shopping areas to get some kind of brand recognition. Compare with M.G. Road in Bangalore with a similar trend of image-making outlets, while their factory outlets end up finishing the sale.

The next one is about new methods of entrepreneurship in the city. Now the problem with talking about this is sometimes we totally fall short of words. Traditional terminology, most of emerging out of a modernist urge to clean up and simplify, has simply not kept pace with development of these new forms of space. Take a simple land use classification. How do you define a space that is an industry from 7 to 7 and becomes residential for the remaining part of the day? Or the space under a staircase which has a tailoring establishment, with the workers living in it? Or for that matter a rickshaw, for whom two pictures of Kareena Kapoor on the side panels makes it home? We talk about emerging urbanisms and emerging typologies, but no emerging terminology. And this is not just about wanting to come up with a hep new word or two. Classifying or defining wrongly or incompletely totally restricts one's imagination of the space. Putting every space into one of 3 separate boxes is simply being slow to accept new trends. Maybe looser definitions might help?

And if someone wonders why i couldn't say all this 2 days ago, i have no one to blame except myself and maybe one person who's name begins with So and ends with jamin, who made it perfectly clear, even without knowing i exist, how unread and gawaar i was. May your brain's memory cells be transplanted into mine.