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Gurgaon Style

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:18:57 +0000

Space In Between

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:15:00 +0000

Huda City Centre Gurgaon

Electric Bulb Gurgaon

Barber Shop Gurgaon

Microsoft Office Gurgaon

Road Construction

Dwarka Metro

Airport Highway to Gurgaon

Boom Boom Boom Town

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:59:00 +0000

GONE ARE THE DAYS WHEN THE ROSTER OF INTERNATIONAL ACTS VISITING INDIA WOULD BE LIMITED TO BRYAN ADAMS AND RICKY MARTIN. THE LAST FEW YEARS HAVE BROUGHT BIG-NAME FIRST-TIMERS LIKE THE PRODIGY, KORN, AKON, FATBOY SLIM AND GUNS ’N ROSES TO THE NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION, AND THEY’VE ALL PLAYED GURGAON, NOT DELHI. GURGAON HAS ALSO BECOME THE PREFERRED STOP IN NORTH INDIA FOR MULTIDAY FESTIVALS LIKE THE ERISTOFF INVASION, PORTRAYED ABOVE DURING A 2012 SET BY DJ NUCLEYA.

CONCERT ORGANISERS AND PROMOTERS TURN TO VENUES IN GURGAON, WHERE ENTERTAINMENT TAX IS HALF OF WHAT IT IS IN DELHI, AND THERE’S FAR LESS RED TAPE TO CUT THROUGH. ABOVE, RANDEEP SINGH OF MENWHOPAUSE PERFORMS AT THE ANSAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, AND BELOW, DJ NUCLEYA PLAYS AN OPENING SET AT THE ERISTOFF INVASION 2012.

ASIDE FROM THE STADIUMS, GURGAON IS ALSO HOME TO A GROWING NUMBER OF BARS AND RESTAURANTS THAT DOUBLE AS LIVE MUSIC VENUES. ABOVE, PENTAGRAM TEST THE CROWD’S REACTION AT ATTITUDE, AND BELOW, SURYAKANT SAWHNEY OF PETER CAT RECORDING CO. PERFORMS AT THE CHINESE AND THAI CAFE.

IT’S NOT ALL TESTOSTERONE ON THE STAGES OF GURGAON. ABOVE, BLUES SINGER TIPS FROM SOULMATE ON STAGE AT ATTITUDE, AND BELOW, SUMAN SRIDHAR FROM SRIDHAR/THAYIL AT THE PALMS TOWN AND COUNTRY CLUB.

ABOVE, LEGENDARY BAND INDIAN OCEAN ROCK HERITAGE CITY AS PART OF THEIR SERIES OF CONCERTS PERFORMED INSIDE RESIDENTIAL COLONIES. BELOW, AXL ROSE, LEGEND IN HIS OWN RIGHT, BRINGS THE LATEST INCARNATION OF GUNS N’ ROSES TO GURGAON’S LEISURE VALLEY GROUNDS.

The Keys to The Kingdom

pooja.harry@wk.com (Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan) — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:21:00 +0000

Back in 2010, none of us knew what to expect when Kingdom of Dreams opened to mass fanfare and media hype, boasting a brand ambassador no less than Shah Rukh Khan. What is this Kingdom of Dreams thing, my friends and I asked each other—is it a show,is it a theatre? The Times of India carried an early report calling it “India’s answer to Sydney’s Opera House, Paris’ Moulin Rouge,” as well as other world-class entertainment venues, which didn’t much help our attempts to define it.

What it is—in the words of its management company—is “India’s first live entertainment and leisure destination” which, upon a first look around the walled-in promenade a short walk from the IFFCO Chowk metro station, translates into a kind of Disneyworld without the rollercoasters, a Las Vegas without the casinos.

The first stop through the entry gates is a building straight out of an imagination obsessed with the Arabian Nights. It’s called the Culture Gully, and inside is 100,000 square feet filled with eateries serving over 250 regional dishes cooked by 140 chefs representing 14 Indian states.

It is an idea of India that doesn’t exist anywhere outside the movies, if even there: an India where a Lucknowi qawwali is performed across from Mumbai’s Rajabai Clock Tower; where the smells of a Hyderabadi biryani waft across a sandy children’s playground to a bar on the deck of a Kerala houseboat; where you can watch a Rajasthani puppet show from the glassed-in IIFA Buzz café, with portraits of Bollywood stars shining at you from behind the bar.

India has never seen anything like it, and it’s not in Delhi, it’s in Gurgaon.

Kingdom of Dreams director Viraf Sarkari says they cater to anyone from five to 70 years old, but “our target audience is really foreigners.”

Travel website tripadvisor.com rates the Kingdom of Dreams first among 13 main attractions in Gurgaon, but despite Sarkari’s claim and the early press about what a draw Kingdom of Dreams would be for foreign travellers on the Delhi-Jaipur-Agra circuit, the site’s reviews are mostly from Delhiites, and a foreign presence wasn’t very evident when I had the opportunity to visit, just a few white men in suits being shown around on what was obviously a corporate outing. Indian families carrying babies, dragging along grandmas, wives ignoring husbands, etc, all roamed the length of the indoor street with its painted-on sky overhead. Coos in various Indian dialects were directed at just-taken cellphone photographs, and young, decidedly desi love occupied many of the dining tables. It was all very lovely, all very manufactured—all very Indian. But still, I got into the kitschy spirit of it.

I helped myself to a plate of biryani, browsed a shop selling Cottage Emporium style knickknacks, and across the way, up the stairs, there’s a second level where I came across the more adult-specific sections. First, the Mystic Centre, where a palmist and a tarot card reader sat chatting, waiting for customers. I paid for my fortune to be told, and had my face read. (I was meant to be getting married by now. I want my money back.)

Past the psychic fair there’s a section full of massage tables and chairs, and at the other end of the hall, a mini-bazaar selling jewelry that leads into a bar covered in more shiny reflective things than the Shish Mahal in Agra. It might have even been called the Shish Mahal, but I was too blinded by bling to ask. Still, not a bad idea to get people loaded, impulsive, and have them walk out through a jewelry store.

Back outside on the walled-in boardwalk keeping the realities of Gurgaon away, more tourists took more photos of each other in front of the turbaned greeters, a child threw a tantrum, but my eyes were immediately drawn to the multi-storey ersatz palace further down on the left. Inside is the Nautanki Mahal, the 400-plus-seat theatre, tricked out with a sound system by India’s arm of audio giant Harman, so far the only one of its standard in the country. AR Rehman is a brand ambassador for Harmon’s JBL brand, and when Delhi hosted the Commonwealth Games, the composer’s song written for the Games was launched here.

The theatre’s lobby is something out of a Masterpiece Theatre set on Mars—all kingly chairs, chandeliers, near-mirror marble floors, and while you wait in line to get in, there’s a bar with liveried waiters to take your order, and another first for India: you can take your drinks into the theatre with you.

The main attraction is an ongoing musical, Zangoora, the Gypsy Prince, featuring a rotating cast of Bollywood actors, music by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and a screenplay by Javed Akhtar, meant to be the live show to end all live shows. The reviews have been mostly positive, online as well as off. The one place that seems to stick with friends who’ve been is the cost of a decent seat, but maybe tickets are priced more for those tourists toting currencies of higher exchange rates than the rupee?

Observed from my medium-priced seat, behind the premium rows of leather armchairs that provide a perfect line of sight to the stage, the production certainly spared no expense in its bid to be over-the-top, and nothing looked at all cheap. The actors and dancers’ moves were in sync, and while it might be a somewhat simplistic story—a kidnapped prince for a hero, a beautiful gypsy girl as a token of redemption and so on—my Indian friends who’ve seen it think the show hits its mark. But when I asked Margherita Stancati, an Italian journalist who lives in Delhi her thoughts, she became visibly annoyed while describing Zangoora: “It was like a badly made children’s production! I thought it was going to be a Bollywood musical but it wasn’t at all. I don’t think they know who their audience is.”

The Kingdom of Dreams Facebook page is inundated with people asking to audition for the next show, so that, at least, is one bit of the Bollywood process the place has managed to bring to Delhi. Viraf Sarkari doesn’t exactly clear up the confusion over target markets though, saying that when they bring in “out-of-town shows [like a circus or a magic show], we first make sure they suit Indian sensibilities.”

So who then, is Kingdom of Dreams for?

Last October, before I visited and began to ponder the simple question, a quiet story in The Times of India reported that it may not matter for very long. The administrator of the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) was quoted as saying, “Kingdom of Dreams has already been given notices regarding the pending payment dues and the agreement will be cancelled if it is not paid.” The outstanding debt was said to be Rs 12 crore. An article on the Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time blog estimated the cost to produce Zangoora at Rs 250 crore. When the Hindustan Times reported on non-payment of rent in January 2012, Kingdom of Dreams’ managing director Anumod Gagan Sharma claimed to be running into severe financial losses. “Many people consider Kingdom of Dreams to be another multiplex where they could buy tickets at Rs 200,” he said, but “actually, we are a cultural hub with a lot to offer. They find our entry ticket rate of Rs 750 very costly.”

Sharma declined to comment for this story, on the grounds that the rent dispute is in a delicate negotiation stage, but it’s clear that Kingdom of Dreams is currently in PR mode. Bombarding my inbox for weeks have been press releases about the latest show, The Legend Of Kung Fu, featuring a Chinese troupe that has performed all over the world, as had announcements for a harvest festival featuring three different regional celebrations—Lohri, Makar Sakranti and Pongal—and there was the New Year’s Eve party with special puppet shows for the kids.

Is all this is a sign that Kingdom of Dreams is shifting its focus? The foreign tourists who wouldn’t think twice about paying a 750-rupee entry fee plus tickets for a show aren’t coming in their expected droves. Maybe the language in future press kits will be a little more India-oriented?

Money troubles or not, Kingdom of Dreams’ India-orientation is expansion. “Of course Mumbai and Bangalore are next,” says Sarkari, but “it’s such a flexible model that we can change as much as we like.” And then, Sarkar comes out with something surprising: “Our dream,” he says, “is to eventually have a Kingdom of Dreams in Las Vegas.”

Or maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising.

Rethinking The Peripheral

pooja.harry@wk.com (Jyoti Dhar) — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:38:00 +0000

There is a popular saying within the National Capital Region’s artist community: You start out in Ghaziabad, then, if all goes well, you move to Delhi, and then, if you do really well, you move to Gurgaon.

For centuries and in cities the world over, it has made sense for artists of every kind to locate themselves at urban peripheries. With increasingly compressed, high-priced city workspaces, it’s certainly about cheaper rents—just look what happened to downtown New York in the 1960s, or East Berlin after communism. But since India’s economic liberalisation in the early 1990s, as Gurgaon has exploded from a humble Haryana village into a major centre of commerce, real estate value has increased by several hundred percent, pricing out all but a handful of India’s most established artists such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Jagannath Panda, and Arunkumar HG.

On the face of it, Gurgaon’s art scene does appear to be the exclusive domain of the rich, and while this helps explain the axiom above, it also defies the usual tenets of urban movement: impoverished artists are supposed to move into so-called dead zones and raise the land and cultural value, drawing in business and development over time. But Gurgaon has grown too fast for that.

For two of Delhi’s most successful art galleries, opening franchises in Gurgaon has given them more access to the corporate, international clientele that’s made the satellite city’s success. Art Alive Gallery, focused on “smart investment in art”, set up an outlet in a commercial office building, and Gallery Nature Morte opened a branch in one of the ‘jewel boxes’ in the retail arcade of the five-star Oberoi hotel.

Aside from the not-for-profit Devi Art Foundation in Sector 44, built here in 2008 and considered one of the country’s best contemporary art spaces, most artists in and around Delhi have found little reason to engage with Gurgaon. But there are people who disagree that Gurgaon’s moneyed reputation robs it of its potential as an artistic centre.

Jeebesh Bagchi, of the artist trio, the Raqs Media Collective, says, “Gurgaon should not be passed off as yet another ‘glitter’ landscape. There are larger questions of urban and postindustrial life that one can ask. Gurgaon can alert us to a different relationship with urban space and culture.”

Since August 2012, Raqs has been curating Sarai Reader 09, a nine-month-long project at the Devi Art Foundation that has seen more than 100 artists realise new, interdisciplinary projects. While not all of the artworks are direct responses to Gurgaon, those that are— Dr Parvez Imam’s collaborative video project made with the local participation, the Finnish Tapio Mäkelä’s sound artwork which requires participants to navigate their way through the city upon hearing instructions—indicate that there is material in Gurgaon from which genuine, productive artistic discourse can be generated, without conforming to corporate ideas of art.

Mapping Gurgaon’s fast-changing socio-architectural landscape is Prasad Shetty, who, along with Rupali Gupte and Prasad Khanolkar, two fellow urban sociologists from Mumbai’s Collective Research Initiatives Trust, has been busy compiling The Gurgaon Glossaries. The ongoing book project looks at new terminology that emerges as the city’s identity begins to form, and also outlines a series of walking routes through Gurgaon’s newer neighbourhoods, older villages, industrial areas and highways. Shetty says that their research into the city’s “shortcircuited development” surprised them: “All of our meta-narratives were being challenged, and newer micro-narratives were breaking and being reconfigured.” As they began to see Gurgaon as more than just a city in chaos with huge environmental and developmental problems, they slowly came to understand its nuances and the subtexts provided by its myriad variety of inhabitants, migrants and settlers alike, and the personal histories that they bring with them. Shetty is also one of the mentors of City as Studio 03, a three-week residency initiated by Raqs, to be held at the Devi Art Foundation later this year. Artists, architects, writers, filmmakers, photographers and performance artists have been chosen to engage with the idea of ‘the city’ through informal conversations and practice oriented presentations.

But an artistic response to Gurgaon need not come only from innovative curatorial programming. For the art-and-design duo of Jiten Thukral and Sumit Tagra (also known as T&T, whose pop-culture installations reside in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and in the home of Elton John) relocating to Gurgaon in 2005 changed their entire praxis—and at that time, they were able to rent an entire building in Sector 23 for what they had paid for a tiny barsati in Maharani Bagh in South Delhi. Not possible anymore, but they’ve managed to find success and stay on, and Gurgaon’s commercial explosion has informed and inspired the work that has made their name.

“Our works transformed from 2005 onwards,” says Thukral, who moved to Gurgaon with Tagra in search of studio space where they could produce large-scale works, in isolation from Delhi’s crowded art scene. Back then, “there were no museums, parks or culture, but we counted 26 malls at one time, so we had to respond to that.”

T&T’s works have since become known for their witty commentary on the city’s urban and cultural development. “One of our projects,” says Thukral, “was a store filled with fake products and another was a massive dinosaur sculpture we made for a shopping mall.” Everyday Bosedk (Nature Morte, 2007) was an installation of everyday grocery items in a simulated supermarket, commenting on the commodification of art. The dinosaur sculpture, constructed of ‘Bosedk’-branded bottles, titled Now in your Neighbourhood (2008), was also a critique on consumerism and went on to be exhibited in New York, São Paulo and London. In a bid to take their cultural practice one step further, T&T have recently designed a multi-purpose arts facility, a model of which was on display at the India Art Fair 2013. The pair hopes the building will be completed over the next couple of years with the help of both private and public sponsorship, and will help bring art to an audience apart from the usual enthusiasts, collectors, curators and critics. Beyond that, Jeebesh Bagchi of Raqs also sees Gurgaon as having potential for the development of a variety of cultural industries: “In a few years, Gurgaon will have its own festivals that will come up—international film festivals, literary festivals—and that will have an effect on the landscape.”

But this still belies the fact that Gurgaon is too expensive for most artists to come, live, and be part of any on-the-ground creative movement. Cheaper by far are Delhi’s urban villages such as Shahpur Jat and Lado Sarai, where over a dozen art galleries run along the old Mehrauli-Badarpur Road. In these residential villages, artists and gallerists can open their own spaces because even though they’ve been absorbed by the capital’s conurbation, they are technically independent of Delhi’s municipal zoning bylaws. Jose Abadi, owner of the quirky gallery Abadi Art Space in Lado Sarai, exhibits emerging, unconventional artists. “Before Lado Sarai it was difficult to place the art scene,” he says, speaking philosophically as much as geographically. “Now, it makes sense to be here.” Eastwards, across the Yamuna River in Delhi’s other satellite city, the Greater NOIDA Authority has marked out land for artists’ studios in its Kaladham Knowledge Park. Art historian/ critic-turned-artist Anita Dube, painter and installation artist Ranbir Kaleka, and sound installation-artist Rashmi Kaleka will be among the first to move to Kaladham.

So, while the Uttar Pradesh government has been proactive in planning and reserving space for artists—and, indeed, inviting artists to live and work there—Gurgaon hasn’t been able to capitalise on its potential because of little community integration and public involvement. Not that Gurgaon’s foot-dragging is uncommon. As Anita Dube puts it, “With the rare exceptions of Cybermohalla [part of the Sarai- CSDS] and Khirki Village projects [part of Khoj International Artists’ Association], that has not really happened in Delhi either.”

In a Gurgaon that Prasad Shetty describes as still “in the process of shifting and settling”, projects such as Sarai Reader 09 and City as Studio 03 have, at the very least, demonstrated the city’s potential to showcase, even absorb, the arts. As demonstrated by projects at Devi and elsewhere, Gurgaon is slowly opening up as a place for artists to gather, reflect and create; just not in the ways one would expect.

And so, as the city’s art scene continues to develop, Jitin Thukral would encourage us to think of Gurgaon not as a place only for India’s most successful artists, but as “a raw place in which you can come and play.” And that’s more than you can say for the vast majority of India’s cities.

The Mangar Games

pooja.harry@wk.com (Gayathri Sreedharan) — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:23:00 +0000

Once upon time, centuries ago, there lived a holy man named Gudariya Baba. Outside a little village called Mangar, near a dense, 500-acre forest in one of the world’s oldest mountain ranges, the saint made his home in a cave, and became the forest’s protector and defender, roaming the hills at night to frighten away trespassers, even, it is said, long after his death.

Located 15 kilometres from Gurgaon’s Sohna Road, Mangar village is still a sleepy little place. On any given day, there is a handful of people working the nearby fields, a few men laid out on charpoys, playing cards and smoking beedis, all of them outnumbered by roaming peacocks and peahens. The children of Mangar still gather on Sunday afternoons to listen to the elders’ tales about Gudariya Baba’s powers, and recently, I was there to listen to a few of them myself.

In what one storyteller described as a “reallife incident” from centuries ago, a caravan stopped to spend the night at Mangar. The villagers warned the travellers not to let their camels feed on the leaves from the forest’s dhau trees, or else the spirit of Gudariya Baba would punish them. The warning went unheeded, and in the morning, the camels were dead.

Being allowed to listen in on local folklore was interesting, but it wasn’t much of a scoop; it’s not like I was being let in on any secret local customs. I’d soon discover the legend of Gudariya Baba is repeated to anyone who cares to listen, and in the past months, there has been an increasing number of visitors to regale.

What’s got everyone from naturalists, state officials, prospective landowners and reporters rolling into town has nothing to do with the spiritual protector of the forest, but the Manger Draft Development Plan of 2031. Prepared by the Town Planning Department of the Haryana government and floated in early 2012, the plan authorises real-estate activities across 25,763 acres and 23 villages, redesignating forest land from agricultural to commercial and residential. All buyers will need to do is mark out a desired acreage and apply for a Change in Land Use (CLU) certification from the Haryana government.

PAINTED ACROSS A SMALL WATER TANK on the road to the bani, signs like this
(Hail Gudariya Das Baba) can be found all over Mangar.

Unspoiled, thinly populated and with its beautiful views of the Aravallis, Mangar seems the ideal target for the next posh suburb to spill out of Gurgaon, complete with entertainment parks and apartment complexes.

One such proposal is the 50-room LaLit Traveller Mangar Faridabad, to be built by the Kalakar Trust, run by artist Sterre Sharma, wife of the financially controversial Captain Satish Sharma, a former Union minister. At the office of the local patwari—the government appointed village accountant—43 kilometres from Gurgaon in Ballabgarh, records have it that some corporate entities have bought land in Mangar village, and even inside the bani, the forest. The clerk there said that two of the buyers are Gurgaon’s residential property giants, M3M India and Ireo.

Gudariya Baba has yet to intervene, but none of this has escaped the attention of citizens and environmental activists in Gurgaon and beyond. One of the people behind recent campaigns is Chetan Agarwal, an independent researcher who often consults with the Central and state governments on environmental matters, and now spearheads Mission Development Gurgaon, a coalition of concerned Gurgaon citizens. As a longtime resident of Sohna Road, Agarwal says he’s witnessed the degradation of Gurgaon’s vicinity for several years now. His mild manner, uncertain handshake and almost hesitant approach to any discussion belie the disciplined, dogged manner in which he has been working to save Mangar from a fate similar to Damdama Lake, an endangered water body 23 kilometres south of Gurgaon. A shallow, rainfed lake given over to adventure sports, Damdama faces almost certain depredation now that an adjoining hillock, the 5,750-acre Roj ka Gujjar, has been parcelled off to private buyers, whose buildings obstruct the flow of rainwater into the lake.

At a recent talk on the Mangar Development Plan, Agarwal explained, “As the rainwater flows down … the fractures and fissures in the surface of the Aravallis help the water permeate to ground level faster.” Mangar, nestled in a valley environmentalists as well as the Central Groundwater Board call an ‘essential water recharge zone’, not only serves the needs of water-guzzling Gurgaon, but of Faridabad and Delhi as well; if another water recharge zone were to disappear, the National Capital Region could face a severe water crisis. “The desertification [of Gurgaon and Haryana] is reaching closer and closer,” said Agarwal.

At the same talk, addressed by Agarwal and others including Pradip Krishen, documentary filmmaker and author of Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide [2006], was the secretary to the Mangar Village Development Committee, Sunil Kumar Harsana. Stick-thin, dressed unremarkably, and with a limp, Harsana spoke passionately about the significance of the Mangar Bani, Gudariya Baba’s legacy, and the religiocultural heritage that is endangered as much as the forest.

IN BABA DAYARAM (LEFT), ACTIVIST CHETAN AGARWAL has found an unlikely
supporter in his efforts to save Mangar.

Harsana’s meeting in March 2012 with then Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh came to nothing. But he is still campaigning to have all the lands around Mangar village acquired by the government, including the surrounding hills, atop which buyers like the Kalakar Trust have already grabbed. “We can see it… People are already starting to get their CLU permissions,” said Harsana, “and we’re worried that these other groups like M3M will get their CLUs and start building, too. We want the Central government to declare this zone a national park, so that nobody can misuse it.”

For what it’s worth, the Ministry of Environment and Forests did send a letter to the Haryana government, dated November 22, 2012, asking that the Mangar Development Plan 2031 be put on hold until the forests of Mangar are mapped, and be accordingly protected from commercial development. The government is yet to respond.

It’s unlikely that anyone could have seen this coming in 1970, when the Haryana government, formed only four years previous, permitted villagers to ‘privatise’ communal lands and sell their allotted plots at will. Harsana, who owns a few cars that are used as local taxis, was very young when his father decided to sell their his acreage to a businessman from Delhi. “He had some commitments to fulfil, money issues I think,” said Harsana, who came off as morose when he described the circumstances under which he grew up. “There was nothing here; no security, no hospital, no access or roads. Even Gurgaon was a barren space then.”

Although a businessman in his own right and a figure of note in Mangar village, Harsana lives in a small, three-room house, just like everyone else. The sight of high-ranking officials or wealthy businessmen rich enough to buy and sell plots of land that once belonged to the villagers, sitting comfortably in their SUVs as they cruise through town, rankles a little. “For months, I couldn’t get the permission to build a little school for the village,” Harsana told me. “Whereas people from outside the village, with their big cars and lots of money come here once, maybe twice, and they get whatever they need. There’s nothing for us who belong to Mangar.”

Back at the patwari’s office in Ballabgarh, the clerks say it’s not uncommon to register sizeable land sales in the Aravallis in the name of a relative, a driver, a poor cousin, etc, in order to escape the taxman. The general belief, something that is supported by the clerks at the patwari’s office, is that there are scores of these benami investors in Mangar and other villages, including judges, income tax officers and officials from both the Haryana and Delhi governments. “There are some very high-ranking officials invested here,” one of the clerks told me. “It’s the practice that they invest in a relative or a company’s name, but in time, locals get to see who the real buyers are.”

BABA DAYARAM AND MANGAR-BASED ACTIVIST SUNIL HARSANA (right) look
for what was once the Harsana family acreage on a map of Mangar.

In the village, those who have benefited most visibly are the property dealers, people like Baba Dayaram, a former farmer whose estate has tripled in the past six years he’s spent brokering. In the driveway to Dayaram’s house, where he meets visitors and prospective buyers and sellers, his name is engraved in a pillar of Italian marble, while his three cars—two of them respect-grabbing SUVs—have big decalletters that spell ‘Baba’ on the back windows.

He tempers his exhibitionism with a kind of humility, speaking of being thankful for his riches while he also talking about ordering a peacock for his lawns and horses for his stables. Dayaram claims he’s committed to never selling land located in the sacred grove, expresses concern about the damage big players like M3M could do to the local ecosystem, but he’s not exactly enthusiastic about the bani’s future, which he feels “can’t be saved now.”

For every plot of land he helps to sell or buy, Dayaram says his commission comes to a few lakhs of rupees; perhaps marginal compared to the crores spent on a few acres of prime land here, but a fantastical sum to the citizens of Mangar. “People keep coming and leaving this place,” said Dayaram. “They invest in a piece of land that’s been pointed out to them on a map. After a few years, when their money has doubled, they come to me saying, ‘Baba, have it sold.’ Then someone else buys the same land for a higher price.”

I met some of Mangar’s other property dealers one afternoon, as they played cards by the Gurgaon-Faridabad highway opposite the entrance to Mangar. I asked them what it would take to purchase land either along the highway, or inside Mangar village. Within seconds of my first question, I was surrounded by five men, all dressed in white shirts and trousers or dhotis, all with tobacco-stained teeth. They spoke over each other, pressing me for information, quizzing me about my origins and my requirements. They took down my mobile number, calling back immediately to check that they’d got it right, or perhaps to check that I hadn’t given them a fake one.

According to these dealers, the land here is pirced between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 4 crore an acre, depending on its proximity to the highway. Though if all goes ahead with the LaLit Traveller and similar developments, a paved road is to be constructed right up to Mangar bani, and “land prices adjacent to the new road will shoot up, too,” said one of the dealers. “You’d better buy it now, when it’s cheaper.”

SOME OF MANGAR’S VILLAGERS at the construction site of the local school, a project
that Harsana alleges was denied to him, and granted to outside investors.

For the crusaders out to save Mangar, sympathy can be found in civil servant Ashok Khemka, director of the Haryana Seeds Development Corporation, who, until recently, was Haryana’s Director General, Consolidation of Land Holdings.

Khemka’s last job as director general was to investigate Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, whose private limited company, Sky Light Hospitality, was alleged to have bought 3.5 acres of land near Manesar, Gurgaon, for Rs 7.5 crore in 2008, and sold it to Gurgaon’s first property giant, DLF, for Rs 58 crore barely four months later. On October 8, 2012, three days after Khemka ordered a probe into what he suspected was an undervalued land deal with under-the-table benefits, he was transferred; but not before he cancelled the handover of the Manesar property from Sky Light to DLF.

The Vadra-DLF scandal may have been of a much higher profile, but Khemka had also investigated the consolidation of land holdings in two other areas near Gurgaon: Kot and Anangpur, in Faridabad district, and Roj ka Gujjar, of Damdama Lake fame. Like the clerks at the patwari’s office in Ballabgarh, Khemka believes there are high-ranking officials of the Haryana government, as well as the Delhi and Central governments, who have invested in places like Mangar to profit from the construction of future tourism zones, residential areas and entertainment parks.

“Under the garb of consolidating land holdings, the government will partition them,” said Khemka. “All I would recommend is, do it in a court of law, let the partition be neatly done, let every stakeholder be known openly,” but, as long as decision-makers are themselves stakeholders, “that’s not going to happen.”

However bleak the outlook, however absent Gudariya Baba has been from the whole sordid thing, Mangar does have some tangible patrons in people like Harsana, Agarwal and the people at Mission Development Gurgaon. Perhaps their success or failure to protect the region will be judged, in generations to come, by inclusion or absence their names in the stories told to Mangar’s children.

Just Add Water

pooja.harry@wk.com (Nida Najar) — Wed, 01 May 2013 02:58:00 +0000

The auditorium at the Sehgal Foundation building. The vents provide both light and ventilation, saving electricity and keeping the space cool.

When Lalit Sharma passes through the lobby of his NGO’s building in a sprawling office park in Sector 44 of Gurgaon, he steps over floors partially constructed from wooden air conditioner boxes, finished with a resin-based hard coat. The air conditioners, installed throughout the building, are only powered in the summer months for four hours a day, in a building designed to provide enough insulation to keep itself cool for the remaining hours. When he goes to the bathroom, the toilets flush three fewer litres of water than an average toilet, and the urinals, designed with a drain that seals in odours, are water-free. Wastewater generated by the 100 employees in the building is scrubbed in a sewage treatment plant on the roof and recycled to green the lawns.

“This building is designed to be an example,” says Sharma, programme leader (water management) at the Institute of Rural Research and Development (IRRAD), which trains panchayats and the smaller Haryana NGOs in the building.

The IRRAD office, built by the SM Sehgal Foundation, is widely believed to be one of the best examples of sustainable design in Gurgaon. Sharma, who has been fascinated by hydrology since his days studying civil engineering at Jamia Milia Islamia University, joined a brain trust of about 10 people to come up with low environmental impact features, including solar panels on the roof and a rainwater collection system that recharges the groundwater.

The Sehgal Foundation seeks to counteract a seemingly insurmountable problem: in Gurgaon, water is becoming scarcer with the laying of each brick. A million and a half residents of Gurgaon city soak up 184 million litres a day, according to a recent study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in Delhi. The Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) supplies only half of this; the rest comes from groundwater, which is why the water table is sinking dangerously. To quench the thirst of luxury residential highrises and corporate headquarters, builders have taken to drilling borewells—unofficially, there are 30,000 borewells in Gurgaon—thereby depleting aquifers by 1.5 metres every year. If matters continue as they are, by 2021, with Gurgaon’s projected population of 3.7 million requiring more than 650 million litres a day, the water table will have sunk to an impractical drilling depth.

“Groundwater is pretty much done in Gurgaon,” says Nitya Jacob, programme director for water at the CSE. “We had a projection of 2020, but residents say it will be 2015 when the water runs out.”

The only way out of this literal desertification, according to Jacob and other experts, is using something that Gurgaon has in abundance: wastewater. Since 85 percent of usable supplied water is finally disposed of as waste, many informed residents and activists are asking for more effective recycling.

“We’ll use 600 million litres daily,” says Atal Kapoor, a sustainable-design architect who has lived in Gurgaon for 17 years. “That means at least 500-odd million litres of sewage being generated per day, and our current wastewater treatment capacity is for only 150 million litres. That’s a shitload of sewage.”

At the most basic level, treated wastewater can be diverted for architectural purposes: to water cement that plasters bricks, to irrigate lawns and even crops. In an ideal world, treated wastewater could even be used to generate biofuels, methane being obtainable by the fermentation of wastewater sludge. But this would require anaerobic conditions for wastewater treatment. For now, wastewater in Gurgaon isn’t used for much more than filling wallowing holes for roving pigs.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the air at the smaller of the two Dhanwapur Sewage Treatment Plants (STP) is thick with mosquitoes and the stench from the 30 million daily litres of waste that the complex treats.

As I’m guided to the outdoor treatment site, the plant supervisor, Sher Singh, seems unfazed by both the smell and the insects.

“It’s three o’clock and you have this many mosquitoes?” I ask him. He shrugs: “They’re here all day.”

We climb a couple of rust-rotted steps to the first line of defence against Gurgaon’s sewage—an iron sieve that filters the sludge from a trickle of water exiting a rusting pipe. This is where the wastewater of that lucky one-third of Gurgaon’s residents, mostly from the part of the city that was built in the 1980s, ends up. Sewage from, for example, Unitech’s South City-1, one of Gurgaon’s earliest private colonies, travels along a 45-kilometre-long, 30-year-old pipeline, down the highway rather pointedly away from DLF’s eastern phases and office towers. It hits the single-storey row houses on tree-lined streets in the old Gurgaon, runs under the wheat fields of Khandsa village, five kilometres from Gurgaon city, and then ends up in Dhanwapur. It’s a long way for, as Atal Kapoor had so aptly put it, “a shitload of sewage” to travel.

When I arrive, the electricity happens to be off. The wastewater exits the pipe and into the plant in a trickle. Sher Singh explains that there’s been a power cut, a common enough occurrence. The back-up generator, it appears, is broken—for how long, he can’t say.

Once the electricity’s on, Singh cranks open two of the four channels that end in thick, black, bubbling pools of waste, which are treated by chemicals and then flow down a cement drain into two large reservoirs. The sludge, along with stormwater and untreated sewage, travels through the Najafgarh Canal. Farmers often divert this mess to their fields to feed their crops before it debouches into the Najafgarh drain in East Delhi, on its way into the Yamuna River.

The Yamuna is where the treated sludge mixes with the untreated waste from the city’s other two-thirds, those sprawling DLF acreages built when the developers’ hunger was bigger than the municipality’s food store.

A huge solar panel on the rooftop of the Sehgal Foundation building, widely believed to be one of the best examples of sustainable design in Gurgaon.

There are two major failures of the STPs, say experts: 1) adequate scrubbing; 2) the use of wastewater as anything other than waste. In March 2012, HUDA—having been issued a show-cause notice by the Haryana State Pollution Control Board for poor maintenance of the Berhampur and Dhanwapur STPs— tested random samples of treated wastewater at Dhanwapur and found aqueous pollutants at 182 milligrams per litre, where the average for municipal sewage after a three-stage treatment process is 20 mg/l or less.

In effect, in Gurgaon, the treated wastewater remains waste.

Atal Kapoor, as a founding member of I Am Gurgaon, an association that seeks to improve Gurgaonites’ quality of life, wants the city to deal with its shit once and for all. Educated in Gujarat, he helped devise urban renewal projects in Chicago and design luxury hotels in Russia before settling in Gurgaon in the 1990s, when India was decidedly underdeveloped and had only recently thrown open its doors to economic liberalisation.

“I thought I would change the face of the country,” he says.

Now, he splits his days between designing residential complexes and office buildings through his boutique design firm and helping I Am Gurgaon set up Public-Private Partnerships to fix the failing infrastructure of the city.

The projects run from rainwater harvesting to tree-planting drives, but today he’s working on a plan to install a series of small STPs along the Najafgarh Canal that would take the strain off big plants with creaking, decades-old technology such as Dhanwapur and Behrampur. Cities approve large, centralised plants, he argues, not because they’re the most efficient at dealing with waste, but because they’re cheaper to build. They have technology that functions properly for 20 years and then becomes obsolete as the cities grow.

But, says Kapoor, “I see waste as black coal. It has to be treated as a commodity, not a liability.”

The main use for wastewater treated under his micro-STP scheme would be groundwater recharge, to help raise the water table depleted by 30 years of unchecked siphoning. But it won’t be happening soon. The government at Chandigarh would have to sign off on his proposal, and Kapoor is still figuring out the details and costs of his plan.

If there is anyone raising a stink about the urban deplorability of Gurgaon, it is the whitecollar demographic. “With professionals, you have a very discerning population,” says Kapoor. “When their aspirations aren’t met, they’re going to create a big hullabaloo about it.”

As recently as October 2012, the South City-I Residents’ Welfare Association, together with the Gurgaon Citizens’ Council, put up a massive protest against Unitech for ‘apathy towards maintenance’.

White collar revolutionaries or no, there are those who believe that no matter the manner or intensity of initiatives, nothing will happen without government intervention with a plan for sustainable use of water. There is some hope, in that the Haryana government seems to slowly be waking up to the idea that Gurgaon’s water problem won’t fix itself. In July last year, the Punjab and Haryana High Court banned colonies and builders from using groundwater. The same month, the district administration made it mandatory for houses larger than 100 square metres to have their own system of rainwater harvesting—essentially, terrace drains leading to collection tanks, preferably underground. In December, HUDA said it would supply to colonies and builders treated sewage or tertiary treated sewage water from Behrampur and Dhanwapur STPs at Rs 4 per kilolitre. This could be a decoy: water that has gone through tertiary and secondary treatment isn’t potable—the builders would be responsible for final treatment, so this generosity could be another way of enforcing HUDA’s much-flouted rule that all private developers build their own STPs.

But some say that these measures are merely stopgaps, or worse, unenforceable. “By making rainwater harvesting compulsory but not providing drainage to your site, the municipality has shrugged off [its] responsibility,” says Sanjay Prakash, who designed a green office complex in Manesar, a 15-minute drive from Gurgaon city and tagged by developers as ‘New Gurgaon’. “In a regime that can be so easily gamed by corrupt practices, it is difficult to implement anything.”

There’s also the issue of bringing everyone in a multitenant building on board during the decision to set up an STP: the builder, the complex manager—who might or might not also be the builder—the tenants, all of whose contributions would be necessary. When I suggest a visit to the building he had designed, the 40-million-dollar Agilent Technologies Inc, he asks me to give him a heads-up in case they weren’t, for some reason, using the STP.

Architect and activist Atal Kapoor in his office (left) and the Sehgal Foundation's rooftop treatment plant, widely believed to be one of the best examples of sustainable design in Gurgaon (right).

So we’re back to the single shining example that efficient and modern wastewater treatment is possible in Gurgaon: the IRRAD building.

The sewage treatment plant here comprises a complex of chambers and filters linked by pipes. It is housed on the terrace of one of the two buildings on the campus. The water from the specially-designed, low-volume toilet flush tanks travels up a network of pipes into a storage tank on the terrace, where it is starved of oxygen to kill the aerobic bacteria. It is then sent to an oxygenation chamber to break down the decomposed bacteria, then onwards to the chlorination tank, and finally treated with ultraviolet rays. Now it’s ready to water the lawns and recharge the groundwater.

Any post-filtration solid waste is kept in a sludge holding tank to be used as very potent manure. IRRAD’s is one of the most efficient STPs in Gurgaon, since 100 percent of the waste is recycled. Part of the reason it’s so efficient is that unlike the Dhanwapur STPs, it is entirely localised—the sewage does not have to travel 45 kilometres along an ageing pipeline in various stages of disrepair.

If there is a problem at all, it is that it treats the waste of only 100 people in a city of 1.5 million and growing. The second IRRAD building is more or less vacant; Sharma explains that the supply of office space has outstripped demand. At the time I visited, the plant had been operating for only six months. The solid waste it had generated was packed in a fivekilogram rice sack. It looked like ashen dust. It had yet to be used for anything. Sharma says that the strength of the building was never intended to be its size, but rather its ability to inspire others to follow its example, something he admits has not quite happened yet.

“It’s the best of its class,” agrees Prakash. “But if we were to ask a mainstream developer if these buildings have any serious impact, the answer is no.”

Haryana Jones and The Lost Treasure of Dronacharya

pooja.harry@wk.com (Aditya Bidikar) — Wed, 01 May 2013 02:27:00 +0000

The year was 2080, and I, that is Haryana Jones, adventurer, archaeologist, known on all five continents, had recently returned from my moderately legendary adventures in locales as exotic as the African Savannah, the Pacific Rim, and Pondicherry. I decided to take a little break from adventuring, and paid a visit to my colleagues at the Haryana University of History, where I am resident Professor of Archaeology.

I went straight to the office of the Dean of History, and I burst in with a kind word on the decor and a remark on his new haircut.

He joked about how I really should spend more time at the university teaching than running after … what was his term? … yes, ‘these ridiculous treasure larks’. He stood up and shouted that I shouldn’t be swanning off to the farthest corners of the world when I could be tramping about in …

And then he paused. My interest was piqued. I made a keen deduction that the dean had been about to refer to an adventure I could be having in my own veritable backyard. Over the next hour, I cajoled him with tea and savouries and finally, thoroughly charmed by my personable demeanour, he blurted out five words …

The Lost Treasure of Dronacharya

… after which he refused to say more. I excused myself and sauntered off to the University Archives, where I spent the next two days looking for anything related to this mysterious treasure.

Legend had it that the land of Gurgaon was bestowed upon Guru Dronacharya by the blind king Dhritarashtra for services rendered. But another, secret, legend said that along with the land, Dhritarashtra also gave Dronacharya a gift. No one knew what this was supposed to be, but it was said that Dronacharya kept it somewhere safe, and then forgot where he put it.

The dean and some of his antecedents had traced rumours about the treasure down the ages and found tell that the Mughals had discovered it when they ruled the area, and never realizing its significance, had buried it deep somewhere within the city, as you do with random things you find and don’t understand. And there, legend said, the treasure lay still, waiting for an adventurer such as myself to find it in a quest for the ages.

The one problem, however, was that this meant I would have to go to Gurgaon. And brave man though I may be, this almost made me wet my trousers.

Now, dear reader, it is obvious that an illustrious explorer such as myself knows much more about the history of Our Great Land™ than most. Even so, a reminder may help.

Many years ago, you see, Gurgaon was a great commercial and business hub, filled with wonders such as the Sahara Market (which flourished in spite of all the sand), and Metroline (a sophisticated transport system situated entirely underground - the bullock carts were fitted with special wheels to run on the rails, but I don’t know how they handled the dung). It was ruled by the Great Democratic Party of Haryana, the first political organisation to ban chow mein as a serious health risk.

Then a day came when Delhi, then the capital of Our Great Land™, collapsed under political rebellion after the fierce demon Mee-Dee-Ya split the rebels into two equally ineffective parties and when even that didn’t destroy the system, he turned every political leader in the city into a monkey.

Thus began a great migration of monkeys, moving to Delhi to live among their own kind. Monkeys possessing the social skills that they do, most humans were forced to move to Gurgaon. (My grandmother always insisted this is what happened, although by that time in her life she also claimed direct lineage from the de’ Medicis.)

However all those people really ended up there, Gurgaon was already parched, and it didn’t take long for the land to become positively dehydrated. The city’s drainage and sewer systems, dysfunctional at the best of times, were overloaded, and without enough water to wash the waste away, even Gurgaon’s most obdurate residents, the pigs, decided to flee.

Following this great drought (informally called the Shitstorm), the once-thriving city was easily overtaken by the dhau trees of the Mangar Bani, almost as if the forest had been lying in wait, biding its time.

Of course a seasoned veteran of intrigue like myself found all this irresistible. I snuck into the dean’s office in the middle of the night, and as I suspected, found a map to the treasure hidden among his personal effects, with the cunning disguise of an office memo demanding more notepaper on the other side. The next day, I packed my rucksack with basic amenities, along with an earbud music device loaded with my favourite jungle exploration music (popular songs about forests interspersed with vintage cricket match commentaries), and thus equipped, I made my way towards the ghost city of Gurgaon, first passing a strangely smelly mountain and a tollbooth which looked as if it had been the recipient of some significant road-rage sometime in the distant past.

I must have been the first soul to enter the still expanding Mangar forest in at least 30 years. As I made my way in, following the map down trails that looked like they had been tramped by wild animals, I came upon a strange complex of tree roots that had formed into a shape that looked like a coffee shop. Presumably a relic of the magic that had helped the forest take over the city, it was peopled by strange automata, repeating words like ‘gaia’, ‘shakra’ and ‘probiotic yoghurt’ at such speeds I was quickly nauseated and had to hurry past the strange apparition.

And it was right after this, in my disoriented state, that I met the Yogis.

I had heard of these Yogis. The last chai-wallah I encountered before I reached the forest had told me they were the last residents of Gurgaon, descended from two spiritual factions, one that worshipped the forest and one that had urban roots but had decided to go back to nature and play Noble Savage. They were said to live peacefully and abstemiously in the forest, emanating wisdom.

The story deviated a little from the truth as it escaped the forest, I mused to myself, as the feral Yogis, emanating wisdom and transcendence, tried to kill me.

“The energy field is sacred,” said one, as he lobbed in my general direction something I’d only ever read about as being called an iPhone. “You must enter with a pure mind!”

“The path to enlightenment,” agreed another, “is paved with sharp stones and grenades.”

A third, appearing out of nowhere, rammed his forearm under my chin, pinning me against a tree trunk. “Expectations are the enemy. I do not expect you to die. I accomplish the deed myself!”

Struggling for a way to distract them so I could make my escape, I managed to dig into my rucksack and find a rare artifact I’d meant to leave back at the university lab, a ‘Supaar-Dupaar Bollywood Hits’ CD. I lobbed it as far away from myself as I could, yelling, “LOOK! AN OSHO ALBUM! A NEVER-BEFORE HEARD SERMON!”

“Ooooohm,” the feral Yogis moaned in unison. I was dropped as the entire pack of them leapt off after the CD.

I waited until they had disappeared, and, I am unashamed to say, bolted.

I made my way deeper into the forest, following my map, and I came upon a strange temple with faded signboards for what must have once been mantras all over its walls, such as ‘Indigo Nation’, ‘Marks & Spencer’ and ‘Big Bazaar’. Who were these ancient Gods? I pricked my ears and I could hear a soft, hollow voice floating on the wind, chanting incantations over and over, like a spell.

I gathered my courage, hitched up my trousers, and I entered.

When I stepped onto a polished metal staircase inside, it gave a loud beep and began to slowly descend. This wasn’t the first time I had encountered magic, but one never really gets used to it.

Deep in the bowels of the temple, I followed the path and came to a room with a platform in its centre. On the platform sat a box. Shaking with nerves and excitement, I opened the box and found … a rod.

Okay, I thought, that’s an odd bit of treasure.

The rod was made of a soft, pliant material, and had a pebbled surface with a rounded end. As I held the rod, my hand began to feel warm. The warmth spread, and I started to feel a strange pull, which I instinctively followed.

The rod took me back up another staircase next to the first one, back outside the temple.

It led me straight through the forest (bumping into a few trees, though I handled that with my usual grace and deftness of foot), into a perfectly preserved but empty city block. The ghostly chants I had been hearing near the temple were now loud and clear, echoing through the windows and doors of the empty buildings around me.

The rest of the forest had a few buildings here and there, covered in vines and creepers, but this one had no greenery covering it, nor dust. What it did have, that I could see in the distance, was a decrepit old man, the one repeating the spells, hugging a wall.

“Who are you?” I asked, approaching with caution.

He turned his head towards me, and sure enough, the spells stopped, their echoes trailing off into the ether. “I am the last guardian of the Millenarian City,” he said, still rapt in his hug. “I keep it alive with the energy of my mind. I chant my spells all day, every day, and that is how I keep my city alive.”

Right.

“My beautiful, beautiful city,” he continued, “all ravaged by the beastly beastly trees. All her wonderful concrete, Oh, I love her so much, I love her I love her. She keeps me alive and young so I can love her better.”

“Erm,” I said. “How old are you anyway?”

“149 in a week. I don’t look a day over 70, do I?”

“Not at all! And you … love the city?”

“Yes, and she loves me. She told me you were coming. She’s been waiting for you a long time.”

“She’s been waiting for me?”

“Yes. I am to lead you to her hidden treasure,” said the old man, climbing down a manhole.

But instead of the sewer, we emerged into a giant cave, with a river flowing peacefully, and a tall statue of something that looked a lot like a woman.

The moment we entered the large space, the creepy old man ran to the statue and hugged it.

“I brought him, my love,” he shouted.

“Tell me I’ve done well, tell me you love me, please.”

He cocked his ear towards the statue, and then grinned. Presumably she was speaking to him.

“She says that someone worthy of the treasure only comes along once every generation,” beamed the old man, “that the last chosen one couldn’t save the city because he sold all his land and moved to the Bahamas. But she looks at you and she tells me I have chosen wisely.”

I wanted to pat him on the shoulder, but restrained myself. I had a feeling he might have bitten me.

He pointed to a hole in the statue.

“That’s where the key goes,” he said.

I walked to the statue, and looked at the hole.

“Can I help you put it in?” he asked, his eyes pleading.

“I think I can handle it.”

I put the rod in, and stood back. Nothing seemed to be happening.

After a moment, I applied my superior observation skills in the direction of the underground river. “Is the level of the water rising?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the old man.

“And,” I said, listening keenly to the sounds of my environment, “is that the sound of water flowing more urgently?”

“Yes,” said the old man, cocking his head, listening.

“What’s she saying now?” I asked. “She says, ‘RUN!’”

“She says, ‘RUN!’”

And that, dear reader, is what we did.

We came up out of the manhole, and we ran, looking back to see the ground blast open as the water spumed violently from underground. We ran like hell, but the river caught up with us. We tried to run faster, but in the end, we swam.

The year is 2080, and I, Haryana Jones, consummate voyager and archaeologist par excellence, have found the lost treasure of Dronacharya. Water. All the water Gurgaon would have ever needed.

I don’t know in which direction we’re floating at this point, but somewhere

beneath me, the thirsty city has been drowned. I try reading the stars, but I’ve only ever used them for guidance in the southern hemisphere and they make me dizzy. I look up at the sky anyway. I’m trying to see if there are any helicopters. I hope the dean has noticed his missing map and sends someone to look for me.

This lifesaver that happened to float by is very uncomfortable, but it’s all I’ve got to keep me afloat. My butt keeps getting wet. The creepy old man has a comfy log to stretch out on, and yet he keeps weeping uncontrollably. But I can understand that. His beloved city is now lost. His immortality is bound to be lost with it. But he’s right, he still doesn’t look a day over 70.

Faulty Towers

pooja.harry@wk.com (Samantha de Bendern) — Wed, 01 May 2013 01:21:00 +0000

In September 2012, a young entrepreneur from Austria named Federico decided to move to India. He told himself that the future lay here, and that the ‘old continent’ was on its way out. He and his two business partners decided to move to Gurgaon, thinking that “it would be like New York, and give us the buzz we needed to feel the pulse of the emerging economic superpower that we came to find. Instead, we are in a shitty version of Dubai.”

From its floor-to-ceiling windows, Federico’s high-rise apartment overlooks a wide highway, with similar high-rise complexes beyond. The pièce de resistance in this 200-square-metre flat is the Jacuzzi: large, round, white, plopped into the floor in the corner of the bathroom. It is big enough to seat half a dozen people, and I imagine the kind of wild parties three young, single men could throw here. I ask Federico what it’s like to bathe in it. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I have never managed to get water running long enough to fill it.”

This may sound preposterous to the uninitiated visitor to a city often touted as the symbol of India’s future, where some of the world’s most well known multinational corporations have their offices, and India’s cutting-edge technology companies work out of gleaming office towers. Aren’t we supposed to be well into the third industrial revolution, that of IT, cyberspace and alternative energy? How is it that Federico is so concerned with something like a lack of running water?

Dev Chopra, UN retiree and leading member of Mission Gurgaon Development, a ‘people’s movement... against inadequacies in governance and resultant development’, puts it to me simply: “What is the most important element for there to be life on Earth?”

I want to answer “oxygen”, but sensing a loaded question I answer, “Water.”

“Yes,” Chopra beams back at me, “and this so-called Millennium City was built without any planning for where the water would come from. How are we supposed to live without water?”

While opinions may vary, the issue is not whether the city will run out of water, but when. The Central Ground Water Board of the Union Ministry of Water Resources predicts that at “current population levels”, water reserves will be depleted by 2017. The Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) went into somewhat more detail, making headlines in April 2012 with a report that said because of water problems, Gurgaon will be “drowning in its own excreta” by 2021.

According the CSE report, ‘Excreta Matters’, if by 2021 the population of Gurgaon reaches 3.7 million, water demand would be 666 million litres per day. The CSE’s projections are at odds with other research, but what can’t be contested is the importance of correct sewerage planning and sewage recycling as part of the solution to the potential catastrophe looming over Gurgaon, where two thirds of the population is not covered by the municipal sewerage network.

In September 2012, the month Federico arrived in India with stars in his eyes, the Haryana government published the muchawaited Draft Development Plan of Gurgaon- Manesar Urban Complex 2031 AD, detailing how Gurgaon will be developed in the meantime. While the document goes to some length to mention that all new development must be accompanied by adequate water supplies, nowhere does it say where the water will come from. Where the document mentions waste, it is merely to state that more waste treatment plants will be built, not how wastewater will actually reach them.

The programme director for water at the CSE, Nitya Jacob, explains that while some people in authority are aware of the situation, “they are actually pretty clueless about what to do. Most decisions are taken in Chandigarh, where there is little concern for what is happening in Gurgaon.”

This is rather surprising, considering that Gurgaon comes third in India’s per capita GDP, and generates 60 percent of Haryana’s stamp duty. Surely, in a functioning democracy, a state government should be concerned about the city that’s home to their largest taxpayers?

I put this to Major General (retd) Satbir Singh, chairperson of the Residents’ Welfare Association of Sector 23 of Gurgaon and president of Mission Gurgaon Development, during an MGD meeting in November 2012. He laughs, and then, in a more sombre tone, explains that my logic would only work in a place where citizens are stakeholders and believe that their vote can actually change things. Here, the multiplicity of authorities and the skewed nature of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) that has shaped Gurgaon make concepts of local, or even regional, politics irrelevant.

And, according to Dev Chopra, hardly anyone votes in Gurgaon. The rich are safely cocooned in their colonies with private generators, private water supply, and private security guards. They see no link between local politics, tax money and what are considered public services. Mission Gurgaon Development believes that only 20 percent of eligible voters in Gurgaon are registered.

Into this democratic and governmental void the private sector has not only stepped in, but almost completely taken over as the provider of Gurgaon’s public services. This is not your usual PPP where, under guidance from government, the private sector steps into a framework drawn up by the state and takes over some of the functions that the state is either unable to provide, or would provide at higher cost and lower efficiency. At least this is how it was first envisaged when the concept was first introduced in the US and later in the UK during the late 1970s. Indeed, as Bhawani Shankar Tripathy, communication specialist (health) at UNICEF in New Delhi, and cofounder of Mission Gurgaon Development, puts it very clearly: “How can we have a Public- Private Partnership when there is no public sector? What does the ‘Public’ part of the equation do, apart from simply provide the land?”

Here, the concept of PPP has been turned on its head: Gurgaon is, more or less, one big private city, or, more accurately, a collection of private mini-cities. Water, electricity, transport, waste disposal: all are provided for, at a cost, by the private developers who built Gurgaon, and usually rather dismally. With little or no coordination between them, or with the public authorities, they are operating in the vacuum of their mini-city walls with little or no concern for how, ultimately, resources and waste will be managed for the benefit of the surrounding communities.

Inside Federico’s high-rise complex are manicured lawns and immaculately kept footpaths. On the other side of a 10-foot-tall security fence patrolled 24/7 by private security guards, the pavements are crumbling, and just in front of a billboard advertising an idyllic garden city of the future, a large electrical transformer is planted in the middle of a busy road.

This is all eerily familiar. The scenario seems to award prescience to JG Ballard’s 1975 novel, High-Rise, which plays out in a self-contained luxury tower occupied by a community wealthy enough to buy in, unconcerned with anything happening outside the gates—until necessities like water and electricity begin to fail.

As Ballard saw it, such an isolated structure could only serve to agitate civilised man’s alltoo-recent savagery, bringing out everything selfish and violent in human nature, and in true Ballardian fashion, this is precisely what occurs. The outcome isn’t pretty.

In 1983, Ballard said in an interview, “I would say that a lot of my fiction is, if you like, open-ended. ” To be fair, rich Gurgaonites sequestered from ground reality may not be slaughtering each other in the malls yet, but somehow, suddenly, the claustrophobic madness of High-Rise doesn’t seem to be a story told almost four decades ago, and the premise doesn’t seem so fictitious, or absurd.

When I pad across the wall-to-wall marble floors of Federico’s expansive high-rise apartment, a closer look reveals cracks in the façade. The light and fan switches have been sloppily daubed over, with paint dribbling over the fixtures. A ventilator fan is placed in a corner of the modern shower stall, but uncovered electrical wires dangle, potentially carrying a deathly charge for anyone venturing too close with wet feet. Even the marble tiles surrounding the Jacuzzi are badly cut. I ask whether the owner of the apartment is not concerned that residents will just up and leave in the face of such shoddy construction. “He does not care,” says Federico. “The value of the property alone has gone up so much that he has already made a fortune.”

I go out onto Federico’s balcony to take in the skyline after dark, and for a moment I want to believe in this perceived emblem of progress, in how mankind can conjure a brand new city out of nothing in a little more than a decade. Then, very much unlike New York or Dubai, some lights begin to flicker, windows darken like eyes gone dead, before somewhere an underground generator comes to life. I think about how the Haryana government can only provide 50 percent of the city’s power needs, the rest drawn from privately owned generators. I think about Gurgaon charging unprepared into the future and I imagine the city as a kind of Ballardian experiment, where like in High-Rise, barricading oneself in an enclave seems to offer some degree of comfort and safety. I think about how close we are to the Central Ground Water Board’s 2017 prediction, and what might happen should the water run out.

Gurgaon: a History According to Other People

pooja.harry@wk.com (Sidin Vadukut) — Wed, 01 May 2013 00:54:00 +0000

For all practical purposes, India is governed from New Delhi. But New Delhi is not, and never has been, a reflection of what the country is, was, or will be. The Mughals wrung the villages dry to create their ‘Dilli’, and the British crippled local industry and diverted economic surplus to create theirs. In 2013, perhaps the best place to envision one of India’s possible futures is about 30 kilometres south of the capital, next state over in Haryana, a city that has surpassed even Delhi in terms of material growth.

Gurgaon is, however, teetering on the edge of societal and administrative dysfunction. Never mind New Delhi, even the Haryana state government doesn’t have much sway over this self-arrogated dominion.

Its observable growth from dusty hamlet to hick town to a city of well over a million people began as recently as the early 1990s, thus Gurgaon is always thought of as a beginning, a crucible of new experiments. But the settlement is, in fact, ancient—although just how ancient is disputable.

Gurgaon’s earliest history is the stuff of mythology:

How much real but forgotten history is preserved in such legends it is impossible to say, but it appears certain that they often preserve relics of ancient creeds or religious organizations. Thus Gurgaon derives its name from the tradition that it was granted to Drona Achárya, gurú of Yudishthira.

(A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, by Horace Arthur Rose; Government Printing Press, Lahore; pp 131, Volume 1; 1911.)

But the Haryana government suggests that the name ‘Gurgaon’ originates not in the Sanskrit word for ‘teacher’ but in, simply, ‘big’:

It is said that the name Gurgaon is a corruption of Guru Gram, i.e. village of a spiritual leader ... The tradition also has it that it was here that Dronacharya gave instruction to the Kauravas and Pandavas.* It may also be the case that on account of its association with Dronacharya or otherwise, this gram was considered guru or big. Adjectives like bada, chhota and uncha are sometimes used in the place names to indicate their physical character.’

(‘Origin of the Name of the District’; Chapter 1; Gurgaon District Gazetteer, 1981)

(*Gurgaon District Gazetteer, 1910)

The Gurgaon Municipal Corporation’s website, a playground of aperçus and choicest grammar, offers a more folksy etymology: “In a layman understanding, the word Gurgaon has its origin in an amalgamation of the words gur (Jaggery) and gaon (village).”

It goes on to say that nothing of note happened in the region until the reign of Akbar (1556-1605):

History of Gurgaon is a normal path undergoing progression starting from a village to a subha of Akbar, the Mughal Emperor comprising of sikars of Delhi, Rewari, Suhar Pahari and Tijara. Tribal infighting gave the Britishers an excuse to step in acquiring the region in 1803 AD through Treaty of Surji[-] A[nja]ngaon with Sind[h]ia ruler.

(www.mcg.gov.in; website of the Municipal Corporation, Gurgaon)

But, in truth, Gurgaon followed anything but a “normal path undergoing progression”:

Gurgaon, with the rest of the territory known as Mewat, formed in early times part of an extensive kingdom ruled over by Rajputs of the Jaduvansi or Jadon tribe. The Jadon power was broken by Muhammad of Ghor in 1196; but for two centuries they sturdily resisted the Muhammadan domination, and the history of the District is a record of incursions of the people of Mewat into Delhi territory and of punitive expeditions undertaken against them…

After Lord Lake’s conquests the District passed to the British with the rest of the country ceded by Sindhia in 1803, but was left in the hands of native assignees, the District of Gurgaon being formed piecemeal as their estates for one cause or another escheated.

(The Imperial Gazetteer of India [Vol. XII]—Einme to Gwalior; The Clarendon Press; 1908; pp 403-04)

From “their pre-mutiny status as a spying post”, Gurgaonwasis turned patriots during the 1857 Rebellion and threw in their lot with Bahadur Shah Zafar:

The division of Dehli comprised, in 1857, the city of Dehli, and the districts of Gurgaon, Hisar, Panipat, and Rohtak.

Dehli

The history of Dehli antecedent to and during the period of the mutiny, has been so completely told in the preceding volumes of this history that further reference is unnecessary. I therefore propose to pass at once to Gurgaon.

Gurgaon

The district of Gurgaon possesses an area of nineteen hundred and thirty-eight square miles, and it had, in 1857, a population of something more than half a million. It is bounded to the north by the Rohtak district; to the west and south-west by the native States, Alwar, Nabha, and Jhind; to the south by the district of Mathura; to the east by the Jamnah; and to the north-east by the Dehli district. Its principal towns were Gurgaon, the capital; Rewari, Palwal, and Farrukhnagar. The principal river traversing it is the Jamnah.

Its fate decided by that of Dehli

Of this district it will suffice to say that its fate was decided by its proximity to the imperial city. Its chiefs and its people, especially the former, threw in their lot with the representative of the House of Taimur. Its fate, then, followed that of Dehli. In the fourth volume I have told how, after the conquest of that city, Brigadier Showers marched a column into the Gurgaon district and put down all opposition. After that exploit it ceased to have a history.

(‘The Agra and Rohilkhand Divisions’; Chapter 4, in Colonel George Bruce Malleson (ed.) Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8 (Volume 6); WH Allen & Co, London; 1896; p 139.)

Terrified of another rebellion, the Victorians played a balancing game between elite Indians seeking self-governance and their own apprehensions about letting the least whiff of parliamentary democracy into their greatest colony.

But what actually gave Gurgaon some cachet in Old Blighty was famine, with the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (April 1st, 1884) writing: “The partial failure last autumn of the crops is now beginning to make itself felt in various parts of India. Among the districts most seriously affected is the one of Gurgaon.”

It is this rural misery that inspired Frank Lugard Brayne (1882-1952), an Anglo-Indian deputy commissioner of Gurgaon (1920-28). He was behind the much-lauded ‘Gurgaon Experiment’, or ‘Village Uplift movement’, which attempted, according to the ‘Brayne Collection’ of photographs “illustrating rural upliftment [sic] in India” at the British Library in London, to transform lives “lived in the most unnecessary squalor, misery, suffering, degradation and disease”.

Gurgaon, a few miles south east of Delhi, was one of the most backward tracts in the Punjab; a sandy, famine-stricken area on the fringes of the Rajasthan desert. The crops were poor: with unreliable rains and inadequate irrigation, the cultivators had to grow low-value, drought-resistant millets ... The Meos, who made up the bulk of the population in the southern tehsils, constituted a race apart: isolated, illiterate, impoverished. Yet Brayne knew that if he could change the Meos, he could change peasants anywhere in India. So he hurled himself into an orgy of uplift. He set out to transform the entire lifestyle of 700,000 people, from their soiled cradles to their premature graves by making them industrious and thrifty.

(Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service, by Clive Dewey; The Hambledon Press, London; 1993; pp 61-62)

Brayne tried to change how the local farmers lived and worked, introducing compost pits, Persian waterwheels, iron ploughs and pedigree bulls. But he was haunted by one question:

Will this work last and spread? Alhas no! This work is not being done by villagers determined to leave a better life but by villagers determined to please their district officers. A good enough motive in its way but not the motto we are looking for. There is no permanence about this kind of work. What if the district officer’s attention is diverted elsewhere, or he want something different does, or in a different series of villages?

(Better Villages, by Frank Lugard Brayne; Oxford University Press, Madras; 1937)

In 1947, Gurgaon was far enough from the Radcliffe Line to escape any direct Partition-related violence. But it was still close enough for Hindus and Muslims to act according to rumours. The disturbances drew the attention of Lord and Lady Mountbatten who, on the very day that the programme for Partition and independence—the 3rd June Plan—would be made public, fit another stop into their day’s itinerary:

Viceroy visits Gurgaon

The Viceroy and Viscountess Mountbatten accompanied by the Governor of the Punjab, Sir Evan Jenkins, visited this morning some of the areas of the Gurgaon district which have been affected by the recent disturbances.

They left New Delhi at 7-30 am, met the Governor at Palam airfield, and returned after hang visited five of the burnt out and desolated villages. At Palwal, Their Excellencies visited the mission hospital and saw some of the victims.

Viscountess Mountbatten has arranged for some much needed medical supplies to be sent immediately to Palwal.

(The Indian Express; June 3rd, 1947)

A decade after Partition, fallout from the linguistic reorganisation of states would hit the region, and the Hindi-speaking population of Punjab would rise up against the hegemony of Punjabi-speakers. Still a decade later, Haryana would be born:

After the Hindi Andolan—a combined assertion of the Hindus from both regions (North and South) of the state against the imposition of Punjabi as a compulsory language for all in Punjab—another important instance of the assertion of identity of the southern region of Punjab was the Parliamentary by-election of the Gurgaon Constituency in 1958. In 1957, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had been elected from this constituency, but his death necessitated the by-election the next year … The defeat of the Congress candidate in this election was significant in that it implied a warning from the emerging power of the Arya Samaj and the Jat peasantry, clearly heading towards demarcating a political territory of their own in which they would call the shots.

(‘Towards the Creation of Haryana 1957-1967’; Chapter 3, from Power Politics in Haryana: A View from the Bridge, by Bhim S Dahiya; Gyan Publishing House; 2008)

In 1971, Indira Gandhi’s sociopathic younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, went to Gurgaon to set up a manufacturing unit for India’s first small car. He failed; but India’s automobile dominator today is, literally, his legacy: he named it Maruti, after the Hindu god of the wind, and he was its first managing director. In a sense, Gurgaon gave India wheels.

As Vinod Mehta, him of Lucknow Boy: A Memoir (2012), wrote in The Sanjay Story: From Anand Bhavan to Amethi (1978):

Having obtained his Letter of Intent Sanjay’s next objective was land, a plot where he could construct a factory capable of delivering 50,000 vehicles a year. Bansi Lal had been following the Maruti license age with more than neighbourly interest. Beginning as a “phaticar vakil” (bankrupt lawyer) he had quickly become Chief Minister of Haryana, thus providing an Indian version of the rags to riches story. One would have thought that he had reached the pinnacle of his ambitions.

This was nowhere near the truth: Bansi Lal had grander visions. Being a wily and scheming politician, he understood that his grand visions would remains illusory unless he was able to ingratiate himself with someone at 1, Safdarjung.

The obvious choice was Indira Gandhi. But toadying to the Prime Minister meant facing competition. There were scores of Bansi Lals in India trying to further their political careers by demonstrating “unstinting loyalty” to the Prime Minister.

To his credit it must be said that Bansi Lal was the first to spot Sanjay Gandhi as a man of the future, a man to hitch your bandwagon to. As his initial offering the Chief Minister of Haryana offered Sanjay choice real estate for his factory, and offered it at a knock down price.

Bansi Lal made sure his offering was not spurned. Since Sanjay would continue to live with his mother, the plot had to be within driving distance from Delhi. And so it was. Gurgaon district is situated 7 kilometres from Delhi, and the site selected was on the Delhi-Gurgaon highway. Bansi Lal offered Sanjay 296.7 acres of land on this highway.

I had always thought that the roadsidemeeting anecdote about Kushal Pal Singh Teotia (KP Singh), chairman and CEO of DLF Limited, the country’s largest and most politically-influential real estate developer, and Rajiv Gandhi was apocryphal. But apparently not, and their chance meeting changed the face of urbanism in North India. In a recent review on www.firstpost.com of KP Singh’s book, Whatever the Odds: The Incredible Story Behind DLF (HarperCollins; 2011), Raman Kirpal wrote:

During the summer of 1980, K P Singh recounts, it was a chance encounter with Rajiv Gandhi in a deserted part of rural Haryana near Qutub Minar, when K P Singh had eyed an area of around 40 acres to set up what is now Gurgaon city.

He was chatting with a villager when a speeding jeep screeched to a halt nearby. Rajiv Gandhi, who was driving the jeep, emerged from the vehicle and asked if he could get a can of water as his engine was overheating. Rajiv Gandhi had just given up his pilot job with the Indian Airlines and had taken his ‘first hesitant steps’ into politics after the death of his brother Sanjay Gandhi.

Rajiv Gandhi, who often used to take this route to visit his Mehrauli farmhouse, asked Singh what he was doing in such a desolate place at the height of summer. Then Singh told him all about his vision of Gurgaon as the international city and how the government laws are not helping him to create this city and not providing private developers a level playing field.

K P Singh writes: “He (Rajiv Gandhi) became interested and pressed me on the issue. What is holding it up and why don’t you do it, Rajiv asked.

“At that time, DLF had no money or business worth talking about. Banks were forbidden to give loans to purchase land. There was no such thing as housing loans. The only capital that DLF had was my optimism and determination to revive the company and make it a real estate giant. Rajiv sensed that… In fact, it was this one incident that was to transform Gurgaon from a rural wilderness into an international city,” Singh says in his book.

Rajiv Gandhi and Singh sat there for an hour and half, “in the middle of nowhere, engaged in detailed discussions about the idea of creating an integrated, world-class township in Gurgaon”.

Rajiv Gandhi then asked Singh to make a presentation on Gurgaon before Arun Singh and him at his Delhi office. A string of meetings followed. The final consensus was that Gurgaon should become a model city through substantial private sector development. At the same time, it was decided, that while licences will be granted to the developers, they would have to make sure that the weaker sections of the society benefited from the project.

The policy was changed and the first licence to DLF was issued in April 1981 to develop 39.34 acres.

From then on, Gurgaon and DLF Limitedhave been synonymous: DLF builds andruns some of Gurgaon’s most expensive realestate—214 million square feet of it, all withthe insularity of a gated development. Outside,Gurgaon is an ode to future decrepitude: buildfirst, rebuild later, plan never.

In a city where the brutal utilitarianism of modern India meets the dark comedy of public administration, a satire akin to The Onion seems to offer more truth about the state of things than reality could hope to, and the following holds as true today as it did when it was written:

Murphy’s Law in Gurgaon

A mock disaster management drill in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon ended in disaster on Friday as a participant in the drill was crushed under a fire tender [fire truck].

The mock drill was choreographed by the newly-set up National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to fine-tune preparedness to face disasters.

There was not much that could go wrong with the drill. After all, participants had rehearsed the drill for four days before inviting the media. And if organisers were under any stress, they did not show it.

But what is it about Murphy’s Law that rings so true? It says that anything that can go wrong, it will.

Sepoy Ramanand Negi, a para-military trooper seconded to the National Disaster Response Force, was crushed under a speeding fire tender when the drill was simulating a chemical leak.

If a death can happen in a mock drill, one can well imagine the situation in an actual emergency. But organisers did not seem in the least bit shaken by Negi’s death. Says Vice-Chairman of NDMA General NC Vij: “The police immediately acted and he was evacuated in seconds.”

It doesn’t matter that he was already dead. But at least someone was being honest. “Nobody knew what was happening where, and as has been said, there were so many people there,” says DC Gurgaon, RP Bhardwaj.

However, some like Lt Gen JR Bhardwaj, a member of NDMA, seemed satisfied with the drill: “Everybody’s performance has exceeded expectations.”

If a real disaster was to strike a high-rise building, Gurgaon does not even have snorkel fire tenders to deal with the situation. It could take at least 45 minutes to rush a snorkel like this from Delhi to Gurgaon to deal with the situation.

The incident has raised questions about the coherence of disaster management drills and the ability of Government agencies in handling a real calamity.

(‘Mockery of a mock drill in Gurgaon’, by Vishal Thapar; CNN-IBN; December 2006)

Birds of Aravalli

pooja.harry@wk.com (Iain Beattie) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:33:00 +0000

The Aravalli mountain range, stretching 800 kilometres from Ahmedabad in Gujarat to its termination point in central Delhi, is the oldest mountain range in India, and one of the oldest in the world. On its northern extreme, known as the Delhi Ridge, sits Gurgaon, and only a kilometre from the Guru Dronacharya metro station lies the Aravalli Biodiversity Park.

Inaugrated on June 5th, 2010, the park’s mandate is to rehabilitate an area that has been ravaged by the mining industry’s quest for minerals, rocks, sand and mica, which has resulted in the decimation of the thick forests which once covered this ridge. The main rehabilitation strategy for the park’s management is the systematic replanting of endemic tree species, in hopes that the trees will enable the regeneration of the entire ecosystem: everything from mammals, birds, reptiles, as well as the many natural microhabitats that once existed here.

As with many other degraded environments in India, the most most noticeable tree species in the park is Prosopis juliflora, or mesquite, known locally as kikar. While considered by many to be a weed, kikar is an extremely hardy pioneer species, the first to colonise previously disrupted or damaged ecosystems, beginning the chain of ecological succession that ultimately leads to a more biodiverse, steady-state ecosystem, the ultimate aim of the Aravalli Biodiversity Park.

Since 2010, the park’s management has enlisted the assistance of private individuals and corporations in their efforts to reintroduce other tree species, such as dhau (Anogeissus pendula), babul (Acacia nilotica), kair (Capparis deciduas) and dhak (Butea monosperma). Upon maturity, these trees will constitute an open forest canopy about 12 metres high. When other trees native to the National Capital Region take root, like sheesham, kanju and peepal, the canopy could reach 20 metres in height. The park’s target is to have planted some 30,000 saplings, comprised of 80 species, by the end of July 2013. About 8,000 saplings were planted during the planting season (August to October) of 2012. The target for the next two years is 50,000 saplings per year. As these trees take root, the invasive kikar will slowly give way to tree varieties that originally forested the Aravallis. Apart from the trees, native grasses have also been encouraged to grow in the flatter parts of the park.

All this new flora has attracted an assortment of fauna. The largest mammal found in the park, apart from the stray cows and buffaloes that graze the park’s periphery, is India’s largest antelope, the nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus). Although they are discouraged from browsing on the new saplings, they easily negotiate the park’s fences and a migrant herd of up to about eight animals can be spotted quite regularly. Indian hare (Lepus nigricollis) have also been spotted and the odd quill lying around testifies to the nocturnal presence of porcupines.

The park’s main goal may be restoration, but aside from the nature reserve there is an admission-free visitor zone, criss-crossed by a network of wide, paved pathways where one can walk, jog or cycle. Those venturing out in the very early mornings and early evenings are often treated to the eerie wail of the Indian jackal (Canis aureus indicus), which are usually seen in pairs, close to the park’s nursery, where the majority of the park’s saplings are germinated.

Ornithologists are treated to a multitude of bird species in the park. Commonly seen species include laughing doves, red-vented bulbuls, Indian robins, black kites, paddyfield pipits, red-wattled lapwings, black drongos and spotted owlets. If one perseveres and perhaps sits for some time on a quiet promontory in the centre of the park, one is treated to black-shouldered kites hovering above the treetops, an Indian nightjar emerging into the thickening dusk to hunt, or a Eurasian eagle owl poised motionless on a rocky outcrop. Small raptors like shikras scour the terrain from the sky, while common hoopoes can be seen winkling grubs on the ground and the familiar chirp of the Indian grey partridge can always be heard echoing across the park.

The past mining of the terrain has had one unintended benefit for birdlife; it has created catchment areas, some of which the park’s management are creatively turning into semipermanent water bodies and some of which have spontaneously started the formation of natural wetlands. In time, these will perhaps lure waterfowl such as ducks, waterhen, coot and perhaps even cranes to the park. The possibilities are endless.

Life's Too Short

pooja.harry@wk.com (Debojit Dutta) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:33:43 +0000

The monsoon has arrived early, and as my car putters along the bumpy, muddy road, a cow tied to its tether gives me an uninterested glance. Three more bovines sit oblivious on the other side of the road, chewing cud as I pass. I give them about as much thought as they give me.
Even the majestic scenery fails to register. I am far too preoccupied. I’m afraid I’ll be late. I’m on my way to meet the actor Akshay Kumar.

When I arrive at our appointment in Tangla, Assam, he greets me, shakes my hand, and before the interview he adjusts himself on a plastic chair, his legs dangling half a foot above the ground. He is about three feet tall, half the height of the Bollywood actor who shares his name.

AKSHAY KUMAR (not that Akshay Kumar), 55, in Tangla, Assam.

Our Akshay is 55 years old, with a scruffy beard and threadlike moustache flowing over his lips. If he were that Akshay Kumar, he jokes, “I would not have given you this interview. I would have figured out ways of avoiding you.”

The Assamese dwarf may not be a movie star, but as a theatre actor he has faced his audiences live and at closer quarters than his more famous namesake. In his next performance, three days from now, Akshay’s role won’t be much of a stretch. He will be playing himself.

First staged here in Tangla in 2010, Kinu Kou (What to Say?), is based on the life of Akshay and his fellow actors in the Dapon theatre group, dramatising the trials and struggles that they, as dwarfs, face in their day-to-day lives.

Akshay is a widower with two children, and is the only person in his family with dwarfism, but he says it has never been an issue with them. “The problem came from outside, and it hurts inside,” he says, but “the same people who used to mock me now call me ‘sir’. And it hasn’t been that long.”

PABITRA RABHA, 36, the founder and patron of the Dapon acting troupe.

Until a year and a half ago, before he joined Dapon and moved to Tangla, a small town in the Udalguri region of Assam, Akshay Kumar’s acting was limited to playing a circus clown in his village, a humiliating vocation to which dwarfs often resort to make ends meet. “Even after coming here,” says Akshay, “the circus owner wanted me back. They tried a lot of tricks, but Rabha sir said ‘No’.”

The man Akshay calls “sir” is Pabitra Rabha, a 36-yearold Tangla native. After graduating from the National School of Drama in Delhi in 2003 and taking on various writing, acting and directing jobs, Rabha founded Dapon (meaning “mirror” in Assamese), an amateur theatre group based back in his native Assam. Five years later Rabha started recruiting little people into Dapon, oftentimes through a network of friends and supporters who would inform him about dwarfs being mistreated. Rabha would then go to the dwarfs’ homes and try to convince them
and their families that his acting troupe was a unique opportunity and not some kind of hoax.

“At times, I needed to perform workshops right there, in front of their houses,” Rabha says. “There’s this fear attached to outsiders. Sometimes we see it in their parents’ faces, sometimes in their own. ‘Where does he want to take them? Is he going to sell them off to some circus?’ ”

Rabha held acting workshops for dwarfs from across Assam, and by the end of the multi-day process, he’d chosen 30 to join Dapon. His goal is to empower the dwarfs with real acting skills, and through their plays, he hopes to make society more aware of their plight as
little people.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Rabha tells me. “Maybe I shared a train compartment with some dwarf and saw him being cornered … But it always simmered inside me. I wanted to do something for them.”

After many Dapon stage productions throughout Assam and one show in Delhi, the troupe has managed to pull the attention of the national media, which hasn’t hurt what Rabha has next in mind: a new village just outside Tangla, which he will populate with 70 dwarfs from across the state, including members of Dapon.

RABHA’S vision for Amar Gaon. So far, it only exists as a model

“Here are the houses,” says Rabha, pointing out a cluster of simple, one-storey structures with slanted roofs. An otherwise workman-like expression shifts towards childlike enthusiasm as he explains: “This is the basketball court, the football ground just behind it, schools, hospitals … This is the swimming pool, and most importantly a centre for training and development. I have planned a computer centre, a library also.”

But none of this has been built yet. Rabha’s conceptual village, Amar Gaon, “Our Village”, is still just a crudely fashioned tabletop model in his sparsely lit office of the troupe’s Tangla headquarters; a simple brick structure with a grassy courtyard out front. In reality, only one small structure of bamboo and hay has been erected on the village site, built by the dwarfs, a space for what Rabha calls “reception”.

Rabha tells me he has the land, but not the money, and it will cost an estimated Rs 20 crore to take Amar Gaon from miniature to full-size. So far, there are no real investors, but he plans to approach the state government soon.

He then takes me to the second room in the building where 23 of the dwarfs – ages ranging from six to 70 – live and sleep. A rehearsal stage occupies more than half of the room and the rest is used as living space, with the actors’ clothes, costumes, shoes, set aside and their mattresses piled for the day.

Rabha recalls an eerie silence when the dwarfs first arrived in Tangla and met each other for the first time. “Everyone was looking at each other. For a long time none of us talked. Maybe they didn’t know there were so many of their kind. Maybe they did. I don’t know.”

At many stages of designing the village, Rabha says, he has pondered upon the possibility that a separate community might remove the dwarfs further from society. “But then I am not planning to alienate them. My whole group, even the non-dwarfs, is going to stay there. I will
carry out all my theatre activities there, children’s workshops, the rehearsals, everything.”

Rabha has already started involving his dwarf actors in other activities, like assisting drama teachers in the children’s workshops; workshops held on the stage in the room where the dwarf actors sleep. Despite the cramped quarters, Rabha maintains that everyone is as
enthusiastic as he is: “It is just a beginning. My people are really excited.”

But Amar Gaon is still far from even basic selfsufficiency. For now, the land of the future village is being used to grow food to feed the troupe.

“Sometimes, we go for months without being able to pay for our necessities,” Rabha says. “We are kneedeep in a loan. Thirty-five to forty thousand rupees are to be paid to the shopkeepers. Whatever little the actors earn from the plays” – which Rabha says is roughly Rs 1 000 each per show – “is counted as their pocket money.”

JAMES DAIMARY, 45

They may be broke, but Rabha recently turned down an offer from a Bengali film director who had come to him asking for dwarf actors. “I agree it would be a lucrative option. They would become more popular, make more money, but that, according to me, would have a short-term impact. In theatre you actually meet people eye to eye. It’s also a part of their psychological
development.”

It may seem idealistic, even irresponsible for Rabha to keep the Dapon members from such film earnings, but he has his reasons.

He fears that their acting in films would be “the same old story, the same roles, the same slapstick humour, the self-mockery. I couldn’t have pushed them backwards in time.”

More bluntly, he doesn’t want his dwarf actors to be clowns again. “Clowns are only to be mocked,” he says. “Even the animals in circuses are looked at with awe.”So far, as the troupe has continued to perform Kinu Kou, “there hasn’t been a single incident when my actors have been mocked by the crowd.”

MIJING BASUMATARI, 27

The self-confidence that Akshay Kumar exhibited in our interview didn’t come without work, and Rabha says it took two long years to make his amateur dwarf troupe believe they could succeed, that acting was something they could do well, and finally bring Kinu Kou to the public stage. But as far as Akshay is concerned, he says the dwarf actors trust Rabha’s decision-making,
and are happy to no longer face humiliation. They have made new friends through Dapon, people who understand their unique plight. For the inhabitants of an as-yet Amar Gaon, this newfound respect is worth more than money.

This is not to say Dapon has been without financial support. When Rabha first began the project, the Bodoland Territorial Areas District provided some funds. His alma mater, the National School of Drama in Delhi, helped find sponsors for five of Dapon’s performances and
invited them to perform in the capital. And credibility is growing. Earlier this year, Rabha was a recipient of the annual IBN Real Heroes Award, which honours Indian citizens for remarkable contributions to society.

DILIP KAKOTI, 21

Three days after meeting Rabha and the troupe in Tangla, it’s show night in Rani, a picnic spot about 90 kilometres away. I find Akshay seated with his co-actors in a bus, parked outside the gate of the venue.

“Don’t let outsiders in,” he says, ushering me inside the bus as a bunch of kids stand just below the windows, some excited, some giggling, some awestruck. Standing on the bus’ stairs, I listen to Akshay’s complaints about the event’s poor organising. “It will be morning by the time we reach Tangla,” he fumes. The performance has just been bumped from 8 to 10 pm.

The organisers have also come up short on accommodation, and the actors have had to spend most of their day on the bus, and inside, towels and clothes are slung over the seats. A bedsheet has been tied between two bamboo stakes, a makeshift boudoir behind which the women change their clothes. The men get changed in the open, more carefully, under loosely wrapped towels.

PRABHAKAR DAS, 47

Rabha is busy attending to the final details before the Dapon troupe takes the stage, which is not much more than the ladies’ clothing curtain with two more bamboo supported sides, covered with a tarpaulin.

A stagehand comes to collect Akshay and carry him on his back to the side of the stage; for one, so the actor doesn’t get lost in the crowd, and two, Rabha told me earlier, so Akshay can immediately see the audience from the perspective he will have when he reaches the stage.

The set-up seems pretty rustic to me, but from upon the stagehand’s back, Akshay assures me it’s not so bad.

“See?” he says. “Here, we are the star attraction.”

R E T H I N K I N G P E R I P H E R A L

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:31:26 +0000

For centuries and in cities the world over, it has made sense for artists of every kind to locate themselves at urban peripheries. With increasingly compressed, high-priced city workspaces, it’s certainly about cheaper rents—just look what happened to downtown New York in the 60s, or East Berlin after communism. But since India’s economic liberalisation in the early 1990s, as Gurgaon has exploded from a humble Haryana village into a major centre of commerce, real estate value has increased by several hundred percent, pricing out all but a handful of India’s most established artists such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Jagannath Panda, and Arunkumar HG.

Mapping Gurgaon’s fast-changing socioarchitectural landscape is Prasad Shetty, who, along with Rupali Gupte and Prasad Khanolkar, two fellow urban sociologists from Mumbai’s Collective Research Initiatives Trust, has been busy compiling The Gurgaon Glossaries. The ongoing book project looks at new terminology that emerges as the city’s identity begins to form, and also outlines a series of walking routes through Gurgaon’s newer neighbourhoods, older villages, industrial areas and highways. Shetty says that their research into the city’s “shortcircuited development” surprised them: “All of our meta-narratives were being challenged, and newer micro-narratives were breaking and being reconfigured.” As they began to see Gurgaon as more than just a city in chaos with huge environmental and developmental problems, they slowly came to understand its nuances and the subtexts provided by its myriad variety of inhabitants, migrants and settlers alike, and the personal histories that they bring with them. Shetty is also one of the mentors of City as Studio 03, a three-week residency initiated by Raqs, to be held at the Devi Art Foundation later this year. Artists, architects, writers, filmmakers, photographers and performance artists have been chosen to engage with the idea of ‘the city’ through informal conversations and practice oriented presentations.

Dak Bungalows

pooja.harry@wk.com (Motherland) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 07:43:09 +0000

In 2007 I began photographing dak bungalows, the traditional rest houses of travelling government officials, located throughout the isolated, hilly and mountainous areas of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal. A legacy of the British, these bungalows, built in the architectural style of the colonial era, were constructed as far back as the late 1800s along remote routes used by the empire’s administrators.

I embarked on this photography project to try to capture and revisit some of the memories and emotions I associate with dak bungalows, and to also document these spaces. In this series, I have sought to document only the bungalows – some now quite dilapidated – which still retain their original character.

My memories of dak bungalows go back to the 1970s and early 1980s when, up until I was about 16, I’d accompany my parents to these rest houses – my father’s post with the Uttar Pradesh government took him regularly around the hilly regions of what is now Uttarakhand – where we’d typically stay for one or two nights. The bungalows were often poorly connected by road and we’d have to journey by horseback, jeep or on foot to reach them.

These spaces always seemed very lonely, and haunted to me. The bungalows normally consisted of two or three rooms, a veranda orientated towards a picturesque view, and an outhouse for the staff and horses. Most of them did not have electricity or running water and they were often not in good condition as it was difficult to maintain such remotely situated properties. But I liked their handmade nature, the unevenness 62 of the lime plastered walls, the locally sourced wood and stone used in their construction and the way cobwebs and spiders would hide in room corners. These were stark spaces, and when night fell, for a child sleeping in the pitch black in their own room surrounded by the eerie quiet of the forest, the rustle of a breeze, the scampering about of a wild animal outside or pine leaves falling on the roof could be unnerving sounds. Animals such as leopards were not uncommon in these elevated areas, and it wasn’t safe to be outdoors after sunset. And once one was ensconced in a room at night, the idea of something wild lurking about outside, coupled with the creaky spookiness of the indoors, could bring on a sense of there being no escape.

The chowkidars, the caretakers of the bungalows, who were solitary characters with the pronounced idiosyncrasies of people who have spent days on end without any company and have done so for many years, would recount stories of haunted souls. I recall staying in one bungalow located by Dodital, a lake in Uttarakhand that was said to be haunted. In those days, it was forbidden to swim or boat there because it was said that the souls of people who’d once stayed in the bungalow and had drowned would pull you into the water. The chowkidars’ stories carried similar strains, and were centred on death, sometimes very violent demises, and would occupy my thoughts while lying in the dark. It was only when I started taking my own children to stay in dak bungalows that their uneasiness at night replaced my own.

Of the scores I have stayed in, I have only photographed about 15 rest houses. If they have been renovated, as it has happened to bungalows along the tourist trail, under the initiative of the government bodies managing them, I won’t photograph them. Most of the ones I have photographed have remained untouched and unvisited for weeks or months.

The journey to a bungalow is very important to my photographic process. The way I get to the place – following hazy directions, driving along unpaved roads, sometimes in the dark or through rain or sludge, often without any phone signal the deeper I go into the forest and rarely encountering a soul along the way apart from the odd person who can provide directions or may ask for a lift – builds up a mood for what I will find and photograph when I arrive. Without that journey, I may not connect with that bungalow. I stay for one or two nights and then head off.

When I look at these images, some feel purely documentary, and others, the darker ones in this series, bring to mind certain things I felt when I was a child. Even the images taken in the daytime, with light coming in through a door or window, remind me of the way the shadows of branches would play on the bed sheet at night. I will often head out to a dak bungalow when it’s nearly a full moon to maximise the amount of natural light. I photograph deep into the night with very long exposures and in this way the moonlight can sometimes capture strange shadows and inexplicable reflections.
As told to Annette Ekin

Photographs by Dileep Prakash/Photoink
(This series is a work in progress.)

Sleepers

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 07:00:35 +0000

Fish Out Of Water

pooja.harry@wk.com (Annalisa Merelli) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:57:52 +0000

A PIGEON COOP lined with discarded fishing net.

For generations, the lives of traditional fishermen who inhabit the tiny, coastal hamlets around Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, have revolved around the sea – its changing tides and seasonal produce.

And for these villages, fishing is not simply an activity; it defines the way of life of entire communities.

A VENDOR selling candy floss.

The sea is not just a resource but also the central element around which an entire social ecosystem is built.
Fishing imposes its rhythms on those who practice it from youth, and somehow steals them away from the central life of the community: most of the men from these villages are fishermen, who leave their villages to go fishing at night, often for a few nights in a row. When they return, they sleep throughout the day or go drinking as a way of restoring themselves from such a physically demanding activity.

PEOPLE refold a fishing net.

In a way, those who are responsible for supporting the communal economy become an invisible force that is absent during the daytime, and the fishing villages are a reality animated mostly by women, children and older people.

A CLOCK SHOP in Pondicherry.

For these communities, the activity of traditional fishing and the environment are strongly interlinked, having a kind of timeless quality: from the natural surroundings from which they source wood and other materials they use to build their kattumarams (traditional canoe-like vessels) and fishing implements, to all the detritus and refuse associated with fishing scattered around. Stacked nets and lined up boats are everywhere.

UNUSED NETS are stored by being hung in a shelter on the beach.

Yet in a sense, despite living by the ocean for generations, the fishermen’s relationship with it is somehow purely functional: it’s the source of both their food and primary commodity. Their contact with the sea is limited to that practice. And while the fishermen are generally adroit swimmers, they will rarely swim for leisure.

A YOUNG BOY swims in the ocean.

And fishing rules the lives even of those who are not going into the ocean: older men and sometimes women sell and process the fish, or help to make and mend the nets by hand.

A WOMAN SITS on part of a discarded fishing boat.

But things are changing. To promote the mechanisation of the fishing sector, the Indian government invested in it, introducing fishing trawlers in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, the investments were not followed by proper regulation when it came to the quantity of the catch and trawlers; both have grown exponentially having now reached a level of saturation saturation. Rampant over-fishing by trawlers selling in the export market has resulted in less catch for traditional fishermen.

A SCHOOL GIRL stands in front of a temple on the outskirts of a fishing village.

Today, traditional fishery remains a somewhat sustainable livelihood. With welfare measures in place and at the local marketplace level, the increasing cost of fish – reflective of both demand and depleting numbers of fish – are he keep traditional fishery afloat, albeit tenuously so. For now, even a smaller catch is bringing in a sufficient income.

A FISHERMAN uses his feet to steady a net as he repairs it on a beach.

Increasingly, many young men of the fishermen’s caste are less willing to choose fishing as a job and a way of life, and are now looking for other kinds of occupations, in most cases outside of their villages, which means the socio-economic dynamic of the fishing villages around Pondicherry seems destined to change.

A MAN stands for a portrait in front of his house on a fishing beach.

In these communities, men may no longer just be virtually invisible, but absent altogether, gone elsewhere to look for a more sustainable, and perhaps more satisfying job. These fishing hamlets, where the fishermen are hardly to be seen around, are perhaps telling of things to come.

Bottled Water

pooja.harry@wk.com (Kapil Das) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:56:20 +0000

COMMUNAL TIPI, Hampi, New Year's Day, 2011.

THE WAY to Baba School of Music. Meer Ghat, Varanasi, 2010.

These photographs were taken in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh in the fall of 2010 and in Hampi, Karnataka during ten days over the 2011 New Year period. Hampi and Varanasi are key fixtures on a well-trodden backpacker route which spans from the peaks of Ladakh in the north and Manali in Himachal Pradesh, right down to the beaches of Gokarna in Karnataka. I visited these two places with a curiosity about the different young people who come to India and the visual ways in which their presence has impacted such places.

The travellers immerse themselves in a simple, frugal lifestyle, and a culture unto its own. In these travel destinations, pre-selected outlets of Indian culture, they seem to blend into the landscape as much as they do with one another. They don a similar look: lungis, harem pants and baggy, seersucker cotton clothing. One traveller I met had his hair dreadlocked in Thailand, thinking he’d preempt the spirit of what it was to be in India.

VINCE, 22, a mechanic from France, was travelling through India for six months. He spent two months in Hampi and would spend a few days at a time collecting semi-precious stones from the river to polish and sell later on in his travels in places like Japan, where he anticipated a decent sale. Hampi, 2011.

DISCARDED PLASTIC WATER BOTTLES piled up behind the favourite travellers’ haunt, Arba Mistika, Hampi. As there is no proper garbage disposal, the empty bottles are a permanent, growing fixture behind the hotel.

And the locals of Varanasi and Hampi, as well as those of other towns along this trail, have over time, shaped pockets of their locales to play up to travellers’ needs. A visual thread connects these places. The cleverer proprietors of guesthouses and restaurants dress their establishments up in the same, distinctive, bohemian new-age aesthetic the travellers chose for their outfits.

Locals also take to the streets to send out signals with hand-painted signage. Take for example, the painted sign in Varanasi for a German Bakery, an ubiquitous offering along the backpacker route. Signs for eateries, guesthouses and other traveller-centric services are cluttered on walls amongst other miscellaneous signage related to political or religious groups, but in a sense, stand out only to travellers who are accustomed to looking out for them.

VADIM, 22, is from France. He was unemployed and was travelling through India for six months. He made leather handicrafts which he hoped would fund and prolong his travels, but the leather dragons and trance hats that he made, exacted few customers. Hampi, 2011.

GRAFFITI ON A BOULDER in Hampi. Amaar, dressed in a lungi, is standing behind the huge bush. Amaar is a jack of all trades: writer, poet, equestrian, singer, photographer, traveller and Sufi aficionado. He hails from New Delhi and has seen most of the country.

Travellers spend months on end in Hampi. During the day, the rock landscape heats up, making it hard to stay outdoors; I spent a lot of time hanging out in a communal tipi. Backpackers stick to their own kind here, having little contact with locals.

The images in this series are a glimpse into this backpacker trail and the visual dynamic between travellers and the places they visit.

The travellers may wash infrequently and wear threadbare clothing, but they’ve always got the luxuries of bottled water and hand sanitizer. And one can’t help but wonder if what is approached as an adventure isn’t, in reality, little more than a guided tour in disguise.

YOVAV, 21, a former Israeli soldier, was travelling across India for six months. Hampi, 2011.

ASSI GHAT, Varanasi, 2010.

RISHAB, 22, playing chess in Arba Mistika in Hampi, the guesthouse that he co-owns with a local partner. From a wealthy south Bombay family, Rishab spends half the year running the establishment and the other half travelling the world.

THE ENTRANCE to Arba Mistika guesthouse and tipi, Hampi, 2011.

STEPHAN, from Sweden, was travelling in India for three months before heading to Nepal and then South Asia. He was photographed just before crossing the river. Hampi, 2011.

REMAINS of a boat, Varanasi, 2010.

Guwahati Express

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:59:39 +0000

SIRAJ Age: 18 / Boarding: Guwahati / Destination: Okha / Distance travelled: 3 234 kms

Works for the Indian railways selling tea and coffee on the train. He had begun his journey in Okha.

SUMITRA Age: 70 / Boarding: New Jalpaiguri / Destination: Ratlam / Distance travelled : 1 965 kms

Was on her way to visit some relatives who had moved to Ratlam. She lives in Darjeeling.

RAM Age: 28 / Boarding: Jamnagar / Destination: New Jalpaiguri / Distance travelled: 2 658 kms

Ram was on leave from the army and was on his way to visit his home in Darjeeling.

PAO Age: 15 / Boarding: Guwahati / Destination: Lucknow / Distance travelled: 1 451 kms

Pao is from Manipur and he was travelling to compete in an under 16 Kabaddi tournament.

SONICA Age: 8 / Boarding: Jamnagar / Destination: Guwahati / Distance travelled: 3 066 kms.

Was moving to Guwahati with her family and starting a new school.

Her father had been transferred there with the Indian Air Force.

ARJUN Age: 25 / Boarding: Guwahati / Destination: Jamnagar / Distance travelled: 3 067 kms

A champion wrestler, Arjun was awarded a position with the Indian Civil Service which means a "job for life" for him.

KIRANI Age: 4 / Boarding: Mughal Sarai / Destination: Patna / Distance travelled: 212 kms

Kirani performed an acrobatic dance on the train to earn money with her 7-year-old sister.

LIHAJUDDIN Age: 14 / Boarding: Guwahati / Destination: Surat / Distance travelled: 2 636 kms

Originally from Manipur, he was on his way to study at a Muslim school in Surat.

On Rent

pooja.harry@wk.com (Tenzing Dakpa) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:55:37 +0000

New Delhi, the capital of India with a population of 19 million, is host to people from all corners of the country.

These photographs comprise part of an on-going series in which the subjects are young people from the Northeastern states of India who have moved to the capital for a multitude of reasons.

I’ve chosen this subject as while I’ve made Delhi my home, I originally hail from Sikkim, a small state within the Northeast. A region with varied cultures and sensibilities, it has its fair share of strife and struggle. However, a move to the big city renders a sense of commonality amongst us all; an undefined sense of community binds us in our everyday lives.

I embarked on this project to visit this thread of commonality which, despite its many iterations helps give meaning to both those who have found a niche, and for others who still struggle to keep up with the fast pace of urban life.

Those from the “mainland” have perceived much about the ethnic differences of people from the Northeast. This project is a celebration of the personal triumphs of individuals, who despite their own internal and external struggles have defined themselves within this urban terrain and help show the way forward for others wanting to do the same.

MAYANGLAMBAM DINESH, 26 KAKCHING, MANIPUR. Illustrator and painter.

BEELASH TAMANG, 25 DARJEELING, WEST BENGAL. Tattoo artist.

ROBERT HYUNGO, 23 IMPHAL, MANIPUR. Student at Delhi College of Art.

YANGCHEN YONZON, 25 GANGTOK, SIKKIM. Marketing manager.

TAJANG TAGE, 23 ITANAGAR, ARUNACHAL PRADESH. Student.

VICKY CHANDRA, 25 IMPHAL, MANIPUR. Painter and illustrator.

PRASHANT DAHAL, 26 GANGTOK, SIKKIM. Accounts manager at Sikkim House.

MENDE LAMA, 25 DARJEELING, WEST BENGAL. Student.

ZAURIN THOIDINGJAM, 22 IMPHAL, MANIPUR. Graphic designer.

A Life in Pictures

pooja.harry@wk.com (Pooja Harry) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:44:21 +0000

Often finding herself on the opposite side of the lens than most of her peers, Pushpamala has amassed a body of work as varied as it is distinctive, subverting and playing with compositions from Ravi Varma paintings to recreations of ethnographic surveys. Whether her images appear on gelatin prints or giclee, in sepia or saturated colour, her photos are always hers. And just as her work contains sometimes contradictory ideas, so it is for Motherland, that Pushpamala has curated her own photo essay — a career retrospective for a very much living artist.

PUSHPAMALA N. “Phantom Lady or Kismet” 1996-98. A photo-romance.
Photography: Meenal Agarwal. Silver gelatin prints

PUSHPAMALA N. “Sunhere Sapne” (Golden Dreams) 1998. A photo-romance.
Photography: Thomas Kumarrow and Bastienne Kramer. Handpainted silver gelatin prints

PUSHPAMALA N. “Dard-e-Dil” The Anguished Heart 2002. A photo-romance.
Photography: Hany el Gowily. Handpainted silver gelatin prints

PUSHPAMALA N. “Portrait of a Christian Woman” 2002-2003
Photography: JH Thakker and Vimal Thakker, India Photo Studio, Mumbai. Sepia toned silver gelatin print

PUSHPAMALA N. AND CLARE ARNI “The Native Types / Lakshmi” 2000-2004.
Project “Native Women of India: Manners and Customs”. Type C print

PUSHPAMALA N. AND CLARE ARNI “The Ethnographic Series / Toda H-26” 2000-2004.
Project “Native Women of India: Manners and Customs”. Sepia toned silver gelatin print

PUSHPAMALA N. AND CLARE ARNI “The Popular Series / Returning from the Tank C-7” 2000-2004.
Project “Native Women of India: Manners and Customs”. Type C print

PUSHPAMALA N. AND CLARE ARNI “The Process Series / Lady in Moonlight 17” 2000-2004.
Project “Native Women of India: Manners and Customs”. Silver gelatin print

PUSHPAMALA N. in collaboration with Studio Harcourt, Paris.
“The Spy” 2009. Giclee print

PUSHPAMALA N. “Motherland: The Great Sacrifice” 2010. Mother India project.
Photography: Clay Kelton. Giclee print

PUSHPAMALA N. “The Pond” 2012 from “Avega-the Passion”.
Photography: Clay Kelton. Giclee print

PUSHPAMALA N. “Return of the Phantom Lady aka Sinful City” 2012. A photo-romance.
Photography: Clay Kelton. Giclee print