The City as a Studio

Solly B.,the new mayor had a grand vision for the city.Having 70mm visions was a matter of course for a movie-financier turned real-estate developer.Before work could begin full steam,he insisted dividing the city into several phases.The city, he said,had the history of the country's film industry embedded in its very layout.

First,you had Phase 1.At one end,we had the Film City.It had its own Swiss gardens, Venetian canals, Parisian boulevards,even its own White House.It reminded you ,or at least it reminded  the mayor of the time when our countrymen got starry-eyed at blockbuster protagonists alighting from helicopters landing on the roofs of fairy-land palaces to rush into the welcoming arms of mothers in large banquet halls.

Phase 2 was that section of the city which reminded you of movies where it is okay to have  your heartthrob on a scooter with an old man for a pillion rider or own a solitary chauffer-less car or eat at a table with three chairs instead of fifty.Our country had moved on and it was not necessary for a film hero to be a millionaire.

Then there was Phase 3.How did Solly B discover Phase 3 in the first place? During his heydays as a successful producer, when he sourced all his sets from the Film City, one of his faithful carpenters invited him to grace the occasion of his daughter's wedding.Generous Solly B arrived on that fateful day.But as he stepped out of his limousine, he was almost swept over by a horde of little ragamuffins.Before they could mob him, this tiny ghoul popped out of a manhole.Being drenched in human feces,all his friends stopped in their tracks lest they ran into this literal piece of shit.          
Bewildered Solly B gave him the autograph which all the others had wanted.As the wedding guests, overwhelmed by his presence,bowed and nodded and knelt before him, he recognized the many other carpenters,weavers,foremen,plasterers,welders,scenic painters and stage hands from the Film City.This was their own neighbourhood.

When Solly B became mayor, he envisioned that the future of the film industry was in celebrating precious spectacles such as that of a kid swimming in shit to get his idol's autograph.His movie business having gone bust,he couldn't do much about this vision.

Then,fortuitously,Black Day happened.

Concerned over the safety of the city,overnight,Solly B got the government to sanction money for a hundred millions CCTVs.They were installed at corridors,street lamps,traffic junctions,gates,bus stops and movie theaters among other places.Because the CCTV budget was not yet exhausted, Solly B ordered that there would be cameras in every alley and every toilet of Phase 3 because the Black Day culprit was a Phase 3 man.Phase 3 was the most happening place,generally.

(There was still a lot of CCTV money left.Solly B,being a movie person, came up with a novel pattern for the placement of new CCTVs.If earlier,the CCTVs were located at fixed,static positions, Solly B ordered the next batch of CCTVs to be positioned on mechanically moving objects.So now there were CCTVs customized for the handrails of escalators, the outer side of glass-walled elevators,the hooks of tower cranes and so on)

All this might explain why at the mayor's office there are crates and crates of hard-disks containing the raw,unedited city,whose safety is,no doubt,the prime concern of Solly B which is why he won't let the crates be anywhere out of his sight.Needless to say,Phase 3 ,once the future of the film industry,is now our all-pervasive present.

The City that Leaked Out

Between any adjacent pair of cities,there are connecting paths carrying all those elements which endow a city with its 'city'-ness.Railways tracks,for example.Highways bearing trucks carrying cement, steel wires,petrol, cars, pasteurized milk, cold drinks,burgers, asbestos sheets, televison sets,--just about anything trucks could carry.Electrical power lines shooting over empty fields.The most sensational city rumours  transferred over telephone cables worming through the barren earth.Gas and hyper-mineralized water running through huge pipes crawling across the landscape like anacondas of infinite lengths.


Yet as it often happens, too many drunk truck drivers are skidding off their paths and crashing into the weeds and bushes.It might explain why this inter-city space is not as deserted as the view from our speeding cars suggests.Indeed,at around a kilometre from the asphalt roads, there is a fairly habitable hut with an asbestos roof.This oasis might also be miraculously blessed with a colour television(fed by antennae which caught a few of those stray television signals),powered by wires which trace their origin to an ingenious system of hooks tapping onto the power lines.On the rare occasion which turns festive they enjoy pasteurized milk.A couple of the kids frolicking in the scrapyard have shoes with spikes.

Now it is true that not every boy has a shoe with spikes.But they share.In the evenings, the whole city descends at the doorstep of the hut with the best sixth generation Plasma Screen TV to catch the episode of their favourite American TV series.We will never have the city people complaining of an unjust distribution of resources among themselves.How grateful they are that they have all they do.And  they get more and do more and become every day,more of a city than they were yesterday.With what joy they celebrated the night when one of them figured out a way to make telephone calls without paying a single penny.And for days on, there were people queuing up to use the phone to dial random permutations of numbers to talk to random people in random parts of the world speaking the most random of unheard languages.



Thus,we have a city that was not meant to be.An invisible point in the super-smart national grid.A city that congealed into one with all this city-ness leaking out.A city without billboards that doesn't seek too much attention but a real city all the same,just about keeping its nascent city-ness intact.

The Forgotten Twin Sister of the Zoned City

Yesterday, at a large function at the Town Hall, the Zoned City announced that it has decided to embrace another city across the oceans as its twin sister city.But it is often forgotten that there was another city,separated at birth from the Zoned City.Discarded into the sluice that runs through the outskirts of the zoned city, this twin city was splintered into a million tiny cities teeming through the networks of sewers and drains before they reunited again at the mouth of the river flowing into the ocean--activating a violent current in the seas which culminated in the city rising as a tsunami and washing over onto the coast of another country,clogging its drains ,setting the platform for breeding what may never be recognized as the real twin sister city of the Zoned City.


It may be the city to which you cannot take a trip because your wife suspects you or fears for your life, but it is also the city that celebrates everything that you were ashamed about in the Zoned City.It may be the city where the kitchen sink multi-tasks to serve as a urinal,but it is also the city that offers you air-conditioning for thedirt-cheap cupboard-sized room you are stationed at.It is the city where they use Teddy Bears to stuff drugs with,where the same table serves as the base for dining,drinking,gambling,negotiating,celebrating and also,during the day, as a point on the assembly line connected to other points through a ladder going through the kitchen chute.The odd plush toilet of a bygone era has been cleverly converted into a special economic zone where crucial currency exchange take place over hushed voices.The same building may house the headquarters,the subsidiaries,the quality checking unit,the retail outlet and the scrap yard.There is a courier service which handles the transport and delivery of letters,packages,drugs,toys and dead bodies.

At a particular floor of a certain curious building in the city, the tailors produce clothes which are packaged and passed off as being produced in one of those Special Manufacturing Zones(SMZ) of the Zoned City.People,the world over,are absolutely crazy about wearing clothes produced at these SMZs.On TV,these clothes are advertised as befitting the "One Man Who Can Don Many Roles".As the tailors catch this fleeting advertisement between their favourite dinner time soap opera,they are amused as to how their everyday way of life could be an elusive ideal for the Zoned City folks.The same tailor could be a tout,a waiter and sometimes on some nights,wear a wig to become a female prostitute and why not? Something of the caprice of the city has infected them.A city where the same space at the flick of the right switch,transfigures into a hotel, a tavern, a shop,a kitchen,a bedroom and then again into a factory."One Man,Many Roles"--they chuckle,thinking about this tagline while slurping at their noodles.


In this way,(and not just because of the frequent power cuts and electrical fires)this city seems to be dying and resurrecting every few minutes to play its several roles,compressing entire lifetimes into a single day.Much unlike the Zoned City, whose map with its carved up spaces,seems  sometimes like a cemetery containing men with  bodies-monstrous and deformed.Not all twins are identical,as they say.And history will allow the reunion of even fewer twins separated at birth.

The City and its Zones

It is the city for you if you are preparing yourself for a war.As in any war,the most important quality is to stay alert and this city that will teach you to keep yourself on your toes.Because as you walk through the city,you must be careful that you do not trespass on some new zone or the other.You may not realize that the No-Parking Zone is also not meant for taking a stroll.Or that there can be no picnics in the lush lawns making up the Special Administrative Zone.That when you make plans to waste another weekend lazing at the beach,you will discover that the entire waterfront has been converted,almost overnight, into a Special Economic Zone.You will be ashamed of your Saturday afternoon joblessness as you retreat from the SEZ ,admiring in the rear-view mirror, the reticent man in the distance-immersed in navigating his forklift car around the 100 foot shipping containers.As you pull up your car to take a leak by the highway,you will suddenly be reminded that now,to take a pee,you must go to the Special Ablution Zone.A strange nostalgia is felt for the once naive and adolescent city whose gutters gratefully drank arcs of your piss.

As you drive back home,you are hungry.So you steer into the Shopping Zone and then into the Pastry Zone.Today,you forgo your favourite variety of Black Forest and choose the other pastry with clearly delineated bands of blue,green and yellow cream as if it were sliced off from a map of this beloved Zoned-up city of yours.Is it a coincidence that the confectionery calls it City Special?

Indeed,it is a city that makes you want to organize your own messy life.Where you want to go back to your room  in the fifth floor of Majesty Tower in the High-Security Housing Zone and decide that now it is time to set your own life in order.So you clean up the ugly clutter of books on the floor and organize them ,like pallets in the warehouse,in the bookshelves.The shoes go to the shoe-rack zone, the millions pens converge in the pen stand,the clothes strewn on the bed are rehabilitated in the cupboard.And your study table is cleaned up-looking no more like a hawker's spread containing myriad colourful and defunct wares but more like the clean slate that awaits the wisdom of the future.











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The Completely Organized City

It is possible that one might fail to discern the extreme levels of organization in what seems to be a chaotic shantytown.While its maze of narrow alleys may lead to nowhere, it would be foolhardy to think that the city itself lacks a sense of purpose.While it is true that one might be exasperated by the moist petticoat flying into your face as the wind blows into clotheslines hanging uncomfortably low
,it is quite possible that the petticoat belongs to a matron who runs a drug cartel through her kitchen.You might pity the man who ekes out a living selling Pan and cigarettes from the coop into which he just about fits,but be almost completely assured that he is an intermediary facilitating the exchange of crores of rupees.

The  inn-keeper is obviously in league with the Boss who he regularly hosts without a fee.Every other senile and emaciated beggar could be a spy.And of course,every well-known crook is a policeman in disguise. The juvenile delinquents fool around in the day as a well-deserved respite from the back-breaking labour of the night:heists,kidnappings,gang-wars and the planning that goes into heists,kidnappings,gang-wars and the like.

At restaurants,the most peaceful dinner meetings break into a brawl.Tables,chairs and cutlery get smashed.But the unperturbed owner calmly collects his tribute from the Boss who merely set it up as a diversion.Shopkeepers and passer-bys are fairly nonchalant about the hundred odd chase scenes they might witness in  a day and needless to say,they never assist  the one chasing or the pursued for they never can be sure if they are on the side of the pursuing or the pursued.It is,after all,  never clear when the pursued will be chasing and vice versa.

In this way,the entire city is implicated in organized crime.Nobody here is completely innocent.The Boss ,like an invisible CEO runs this factory of crime more smoothly than any multi-national corporation can.No wonder that the minister who comes visiting annually never fulfills his promise of connecting this city with the other larger city with a proper asphalt road.That larger city--the one with tall buildings occupied with men with crinkle-less suits and spotless criminal records--needs to be protected from the contagious crime that infects the Completely Organized City.Last thing you want is to build a road connecting the two cities and let organized crime trickle like water into the larger city.Also,the minister is secretly proud of the shantytown and of just the way it is.

Cities and Gods

Even today,every second horde of migrants heading for Ramashivabrahmapatnam often mistake themselves to be on a pilgrimage and why not?The shops are named after gods,houses after deities,slums after their patron saints and cricket stadiums after ancient sages.The prosperity of the city is often attributed to the fact that it contains the holy triumvirate in its name.And prosperity is flocking to our glittering malls,many of which resemble the Pantheon, containing rows of shops selling  bags,shoes,clothes,jewellery,cars and mobile phones among other things.All the showrooms sparkle more than our temples and being named after Gods, deserve to be housed in a building Pantheon-like.

As you settle into the city and veer towards dismissing the city's holiness as delusion, a time will come when at a car mechanic's garage,you might wonder why some evenings, the heady stench of grease is tempered by the perfume of incense sticks or why the busy traffic is sometimes blessed by the prayer songs at the inauguration of a roadside tea stall.It is also possible that you might have been befuddled as to why,on special days, the waiter at the 3.85 star hotel offers you a piece of sweetmeat as ambrosia complimentary to your Intergalactical cuisine.

It is merely to prove you a point that God manifests itself not just through the machinations of nomenclature but through real,tangible,eat-able,smell-able objects.It is only the city that can make God as real as the sweaty railing in the bus you clutch on your way back home from work.

In the horizon, one of the hills bounding the city has the giant statue of the mighty lord squatting with a snake around its shoulder --looming large over the sprawling city,paternally dwarfing what we thought were the largest hoardings possible ---advertising coaching classes for entrance examinations,insurance policies and English speaking classes --almost as if embracing them within the omniscient gaze of the lord.


And that is why, if you ever despair over a lost job or a miscarriage or bankruptcy or any other time of misery in the divinely calculated cycle of life,keep faith that you,who like the the city,must be named after Rama or Brahma or Shiva-- are no Tom,Dick and Harry for this is the city of the gods,by the gods and for the gods and good times are only just one more U-turn ahead.