I have to arrange my trainticket to Tilonia. After several attempts i finally reached someone at Barefoot. Vasu is sick and is in Jaipur. Dr. RamKaram (the administrator) is my new contact.
It becomes a real difficult task to arrange a ticket via the people from Harbour View. I think they have a percentage on the bus tickets, they absolutely want to sell me a ticket to Udaipur. After half a day they tell me that the bus is full and that i better arrange the ticket myself.
At Churchgate station I get a reservation -by wonder- in no time. Long distance reservations: a destinated office and very good service from Indian Railways. I ‘ll leave Bombay the 7th at 9pm. Take a direct train to Ajmer, from Bandra Terminal. It will take me 17 hours to get there. I’ll arrive the 8th around 4pm.

From Churchgate I take a cab to Candy Breach, up to Crosswords bookshop. Nice ride, longing Chowpatti Beach and Marine drive. Candy Breach is uphill, direction Malabar. It’s an expensive residential aerea of Bombay, all very nice old houses — Victorian Bombay looks great.
I can’t find the book by Vandana Shiva. Staying Alive. She must be too alternative for regular Indian bookshops. Instead I buy a book by Octavio Paz, who was Mexican Ambassador in Delhi for 6 years. And The Story Teller’s World, short stories by Indias’ greatest novelist, Mr. Narayan. And a non-fiction on Bombay by a booming star: the New Yorker Suketu Mehta. By the way: Shantaram is everywhere. I’m sure Johnny Depp is hyping the story before the movie comes out.

Be careful when you have to read a taximeter: you have to recalculate the amount.
The taxi driver at Candy Breach wanted me to pay 520 Rs (5.20 RS was on his meter). All drivers have a fare card by which you can recalculate the exact amount. For 5.20 it’s 75 RS. But I didn’t know, and that driver seemed not to understand english and kept telling me 520. I refused to pay. Then, he said, he will take me to the police. I relied: OK, because I was sure that something was not right. He called a cop, and this man explained me how it works. Another Indian misunderstanding.
Headed back for Colaba wanting to check out Kamata restaurant. I t was closed. Paltri as an alternative. Disappeared. The guard at Paltri suggested me to try Put-in on Colaba Causeway. I was not sure to understand him well. Puutin? Turned out to be Food Inn ofcourse. Reminding pipty pipe, I should have known.

Shaina gave me directions how to get to her Indian dance classes at Santa Cruz. In Churchgate, took the slow train for Bandra and checked in the ladies compartment. Quite an experience! All women and children, packed. Singing, chatting, talking. From time to time a woman vendor came up to sell oranges, notebooks, sweets. The women were very helpful, though most of them didn’t speak english so we had to communicate via body language.

Got off in Santa Cruz and was dropped in the middle of a very busy evening market. Took a riksha on SV road, and tried to explain the directions to the driver. After a while found the Milan subway, turned left and yes: there were the cows, my landmark!
In a classroom at the first floor some women and children were practising indian dance. The teacher seemed very severe. They had to try over and over the complicate movements. I didn’t see Shaina, supposed she was late. After a while it turned out that I was in the wrong class. Shaina came from upstairs, the graduate class.

We took a riksha to her place. Her home is a very busy studio. With some 8 people, they’re setting up a movie archiving project. It’s a collaboration between Shaina, Ashok and Sebastian Luetgert and Jan Gerber from Bootlab Berlin. It’s a very complicated project and they’re in the phase of outlining it. It was very interesting to follow their discussions about the basic decissions they had to take to set up the archive. Keywords, tags, movieclips, raw material, edited films, transcriptions, descriptions, location tags, maps, …
The possible ways how to search the database, visualize the interface, getting the content annotated in the right way.
I’m curious to see what will come out of it. This can become a very interesting link for the Mahila Samiti project. I would love to program a presentation from their project in Brussels. All by all, I felt home again. Talking computerlanguage, busy people setting up custom made projects from an artistic point of view. This database will be open source under a specific license, worked out by Lawrence Liang. It focuses in the beginning on Bombay and Bangalore content, but will extend to the rest of India. Besides their own movies (Shaina’s) they fill the database with important audiovisual material from NGO’s working in culture and human rights.

We all went out for food at Liao’s chinese/indian restaurant. After dinner I took a taxi back to Colaba. It was past midnight in the meantime, and the taxidriver didn’t seem or want to understand english (again). I asked him to put the meter, he refused. I said I want him to stop so that I could get out. He didn’t stop. I opened the door, he started to slow down, and I jumped out of the car. Tried to find some other cabs willing to take me to Colaba. It was very busy at that 4 way street, and suddenly I got a litlle scared. In the morning I read in the newspaper about a mob of 80 man molesting 2 women duren the new years’ eve. Suddenly all men had an agressive look. Probably imagination from my side, but aniway. No cab wanted to take me putting his meter. The first driver finally came running after me, and promised me to put his meter. We drove through a desolated city. Strange, never a stop light. We crossed all crossroads without stopping. It took us 25 minutes to reach Colaba aniway. Imagine what this must be in daytime during rush hour! I was happy when I reached the Harbour View hotel.

cities are the gateways to dreams and devils :: the acclimatisation station [quote by Suketu Mehta]

– moist smells
– perfumes of jasmine and pepper
– stinking garbage
– black and yellow cabs
– slums and stray dogs
– complete traffic chaos
– new year, radio club – people – bars
– booking misunderstandings
– tips, tips, tips
– betel stains on the sidewalk
– beggars
– horn battles
– too many busses and taxis
– wide avenues
– victorian buildings
– hindus and muslims
– bright colored sarees
– dark faces
– yes, madame – yes, madame!
– coconut and sugercane juice
– cows and dogs
– faded flowers and big old trees
– cricket & more cricket
– hindi and english
– crows and rats
– gods and temples
– tinckle bells and streetnoise
– homeless people, rich elite

On my arrival, 02.30am new years night, I book into Strand Hotel as Harbour View did not confirm my reservation. Typical, I have to find out later. Strand offered a small room for 2020Rs, Harbour View’s slightly bigger but with a ‘cornered’ sea view and too highly priced (3520Rs) for what it is. Their highlight is the view on -stinky- Mumbai Harbour.
The gateway of India is still a landmark for tourists. It doesn’t look that impressive as it should: due to renovation works it’s rigged from all sides. Don’t stand still at the gate because guides are poppin’up and it’s difficult to get rid of them afterwards. You can’t look someone in the eyes, or he thinks that you will gladly follow him, the guide, or at least buy some stuff or let him arrange a citytour for you.

The sun is shining and it’s a pleasant 25 degrees, not so hot. I wander through the corridors of the Taj Mahal hotel. There’s still a scent of old (expensive) glory but it’s most of all an expensive vulgar place for rich Indians, NRI and rich westerners.
I walk around Colaba. My immediate impression is that things did not change that much since 2000, the last time I was here. Cafe Leopold is still packed with tourists, and now more than ever: it’s holiday season and the Shantaram-story made it even more (in)famous. Bur for good food you better go elsewhere.
Shantaram-the-book is ubiquituous present in Colaba. The hash vendors and the rats too. Homeless kids won’t let you go unless you buy them rice or powdermilk. I read somewhere that they make a deal with the shopkeeper. After you bought it, they resell it immediately to the shopkeeper for half the price, take the money and run.

I made an appointment with Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran to visit their studio in Bandra tomorrow evening. I tried to reach Vasu at Barefoot, and Shumona in Bombay, without result.

Sounds of the Djna El Fna square and the Marrakech souk.
Best listen with binaural headphones.

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The skinhead had no face, he was all head. He took me to the ocean somewhere in Belgium where we roamed the dilapidated bunkers. Thick concrete slabs, although fallen, had created a geometrically imprecise organism of their own. We crawled between the empty spaces created by the fallen concrete. We made a campfire and smoked Moroccan hash while my skinhead told World War II stories. That night the skinhead and I went for a walk on the beach. He told me about the white supremacist conferences he would travel to in the south of France and Switzerland. He told me that European countries were too small to handle immigrants, and that he was fighting for the renewed prowess of his country. He said he didn’t mind the fact that African people existed, he just wanted them to go back to their own countries. It was very dark. The Bunkers made dark silhouettes that looked like perpendicular mountains.

I had no language that I could use to rebuke him. I had nothing to say. The next afternoon I sat quietly in the kitchen watching his sister drop crabs we had trapped on the beach into a pot of boiling water. Those Europeans, I thought, really know how to cook. I am haunted by that silence. I became determined to never again be speechless. I did not ever again want to be baffled by my own lack of language. Never again would my vocabulary fail me. Apathy and silence became equated in my mind. To exorcise this ghost I came to believe that language must be used to articulate silence. Tunesia, Morocco, Algeria were all colonized by the French, skinhead. The united countries of France. They have made new homes in Paris after their countries crumbled into dictatorship and war. They are still living the effects of colonization. As colonizers, Europe will never be purely European. I know this because I live in America. Cultural hybridity. Political Integration. These words are a part of my vocabulary.

annemie maes and kristin prevallet (excerpt of the peopledatabase)

I am not misunderstood to be anything less than a woman, and yet fall into dream over the most despicable of men. I am a sucker for power, I can smell it, it smells good, enticing like Madison Avenue, the street of evil. I went there once trying to find a modern art museum and ended up stepping on a poodle. In my neighborhood the rats who circle the trashcans at 4 a.m. eat poodles whole, swallowing their pink knit sweaters and hair bands, and digesting every curl. I am not fond of the rats, but this thought makes me like them at least a little bit. There are also the junkyard dogs in my neighborhood, hair all matted from rolling around in other dog’s shit and scents, eyes poked out by bumping into beams during dog fights. Ah, the smell of them while they are sleeping, you pass them and they might as well be dead.

I heard it rumored at a bar that there are illegal dog fights that happen in this neighborhood, and this is why there are so many half-dead dogs lying around in the street. They were the losers, the ones who had to be abandoned. I once met a man on the jogging track who said that his dog had been stolen right from his front yard while his brother was inside watching TV. He thinks it was stolen to be the weakling in fights. He was almost crying, and handing out flyers with inkjet printed color pictures of his dog.

I felt sad, and thought of my own dead dog. The one that died of neglect and a lack of love, that wanted love so badly that she had to be neglected, always lapping, licking, and forcing her head under your hand at every moment, wanting to be pet. She stopped eating, and developed a strange and rare dog-cancer that started in her front leg and then moved into all her bones. Then she was quiet, just silently whimpering to herself, wanting love but wanting too much of it, and never being satisfied with what she had. Not a tough dog, but a dog born into a sad and broken household who absorbed all the sadness and brokenness and tried to amend it by believing that love could cure anything. I have never before seen anyone or anything die from a lack of love, but now that I have seen it I will never again crave anything that I do not already possess.

annemie maes and kristin prevallet (excerpt of peopledatabase)