Plastic Thumb: A person who likes to repurpose bottles, jars, bags, containers or even coconut shells to grow plants.
This is the first in a series of words and photographs to describe things around us and interesting everyday things we do. A glossary of ordinary life (not in alphabetical order) and a small exercise to understand the world around us.
(Above) An abandoned squirrel nest on a coconut tree that can be repurposed to grow orchids.
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Download and read the Zine about the Smokeless Cookstove Foundation's latest work.
No matter how tall its skyscrapers or shitty the sea's odour surrounding it, this city is merely an island that functions based on its stomach.
Before the next issue of Mumbai Paused Zine, the sixth one, comes out before the monsoon ends, here are a few images of the Monsoon in Mumbai.
When the subcontinent's first train rolled out of Bori Bunder to Thane on 16th April 1853, its mechanical noise and speed scared thousands of people, birds and animals.
In the fourth issue of the Mumbai Paused Zine, we step out of Mumbai into the heart of the Deccan to the town of Pandharpur to look at colours rooted to the black soil of the Deccan.
The Invisible Issue
The Male Issue.
The New Words Issue. It uses photos and a few manufactured words to try and understand what we have experienced in the last two years.
Mumbai Turmeric is a compact little photo book that will change the way you see Mumbai's famous 'red-light' district Kamathipura from red to one of Deccan's favourite colours - the yellow of the turmeric.
Mumbai. This is a city that owes its existence to the sea. Once people floated in and anchored here, the old winding trade routes that snaked up the hills and the plateau was strengthened with rails. It was along these rails that the city grew.
You are (no longer) here.
These images are mostly from the window of trains on the Harbour Line of the Mumbai Suburban Network. The lesser-known of the three main commuter lines of the city. It looks into another world from the one people recognise.
Sunday cricket
I am listening to I am a Cat, the Japanese classic by Natsume Soseki. It’s a beautiful slow memoir of a cat that lives in the home of a teacher in the first years of the 20th Century. I said listening because that’s something I do when I walk or cycle. The memoir should be on everyone’s reading list and here are a few images of cats that I saw on the streets I stalk.
In a crowded lane of the Ulsoor or Halasur Bazar in Bangalore is a temple where a goddess known as Plague Devi is still worshipped. Like the Sitala and Mari devis temples dedicated to the small-pox goddess across cities in India, thousands of such temples remember our past. Mumbai is no different, we have our fair share of Sitala devi temples and crosses that remember past plagues across the city and our region. Many of the gaon devis or village goddesses were probably dedicated to past epidemics and pandemics. But most of them could have been related to fertility too, agrarian or for humanity.
Many years ago, when the internet was slow but our patience was infinite for information that was not easily available, I stumbled upon the website of The Dawn, the English newspaper from Pakistan. While scrolling through, I happened to see some illustrations from an artist whose name I no longer remember. It was that of tumblers, cups and things attached to a string. I saw it nearly two decades ago but the image remained in my mind and much later in life when I discovered photography as a hobby, I would often stumble upon similar things on Mumbai streets.
I recently read S Hareesh's Moustache, a Malayalam book set in the Kuttanad region of Kerala. A land reclaimed by lakes and most importantly on the labour distribution, caste, toxic masculinity in late-colonial India. While I was reading the book, I could not stop comparing it to Mumbai. The landscape of both places are not the same but we were also a city defined by a landscape surrounded by water and 'peopled' by communities who live off the natural resources and maintaining a balance between over-extraction and sustainability - before the city grew and ate up the whole region.
We have come to the end of #GreenSpacesDictionary and @mumbaismagic and the last post is dedicated to the animals of Mumbai.
In #GreenSpacesDictionary and @mumbaismagic I focus on people who use our parks and public spaces the most - our young.
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