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RTA-RITU - An Exhibition on Cosmic Order and Cycle of Seasons

 SPATIAL ORDER... 

Scores of unplanned cities have emerged to cope with the explosive growth of world population -partly due to the fast growing network of economic and political relationships. Within a decade the urbanisation of the community will be one of the most spectacular changes of our times. By the end of the century there will be cities with millions of inhabitants, resembling an outheap of humanity feeding on each other with a tens of thousands of people every square kilometre. Modern cities are based on the ethos of self-contained functionalism and a fragmented worldview which separates humanity from nature. In time to come, our super-cities will be jeopardized by the violence of techno-era tic worldview.

...in the new city, nothing of consequence is actually willed or controlled by decisions made by individual minds. The greatness of the city is no longer related to the vastness of imagination. It belongs instead to dimension. The new city has a bigness only of size. The cities of today overwhelm, swallowing the past in uncontrollable spasms, stretching bounds into unreclaimed countryside.

Beyond these city garbage heaps, where plastic packets of Maggi noodles mix with rotting vegetable peels, egg shells and abandoned animal carcasses, it is now easy to sense the contradictions of the new city. In the tenements that bled the earth, the overstylized houses of the rich families, the rows of shops and truck repair docks that stretch city bounds into surrounding fields, the blackened car windows pasted with the harried signs of identity: Nathus, Malhotras, Car Decor. The evening dung and coal fires that spread the darkening pall across the cubical mass of unplastered walls, the city is a changed theatrical spectacle, a vast battleground perpetually smoking and smouldering and choking.

Through the smoke, the stretch of a black plastic sheet pulled unevenly across a roof of twigs and bicycle tyres, it is difficult to sense anything of the once high aspirations and ideals that drew people together in the first place. The city that had once held the promise of an inspiring freedom. From the distant sight lines of a flyover it has something of the character of war, a people in temporary flight: the quickly erected stage set of incomplete structures, the smoke, as if the day’s battle is over and both sides have retreated into their makeshift encampments.

But within it life continues, unfettered by the perspective of loss, despair or dereliction: the half clad labourers continue carrying concrete up the bamboo and twine scaffolding, the sun bleached children lie on the sand piles nearby. Sounds ricochet off the hoarding. The fumes, the fake house front, the false front of peoples faces, the lie that is a modern city.

View of Beijing city, 1988

But the lie has enormous power to seduce, to circumvent the difficult, despairing reality. But the buildings around the recreated recapped skylines that wave across the corrugation of monsoon clouds carry their own ideas of falsehood. Even the architecture remains a mere replication of an advertising desire.

Lost in the crowd, humans are like a particle in the mass of humanity that shifts constantly along the sidewalk. People are adrift, seeking ways to redefine their own passage through the city streets.

The only way to survive is to impose one’s own will on the city. So we learn the proverbial signals, the messages of hostility. We collide and rub and haggle and protest as we move about the road. On the crowded bus, we learn to push our way.

Gautam Bhatia

City is a cruel ghetto

Cut off from the Sun,

And we are urban orphans

Who have forgotten the seasons

Sujata Mathai.

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