W for Workspace

For #GreenSpacesDictionary and @mumbaismagic I speak for the thousands of businesses in Mumbai that have trees as their roof while working. The workspaces below our trees

They say that even our stock market started off under a tree in Fort.

During the pandemic, I guess the air is safer than the ac offices with air vents that, if you look back, gave you flu from around the world, every other month, before the pandemic started and now shut for who knows how long.

Natural Air Conditioning and purifiers, zindabad.

Here are the workers of a Mumbai Metro contractor who was cutting down that tree

Do you have ideas for Mumbai that you think everyone should know? Make your voice heard at the Ministry of Mumbai's Magic.

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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. It has numerous mouths to feed and generates very little of what it consumes. It serves as a destination, port, and junction for things that pass through to other places with mouths to feed. Gatekeepers shadow its every movement. Hungry mouths scream and retaliate against them.

1 E-Book

I am a Cat by Natsume Soseki

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.

Urban gods

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.

Mumbai on a leash

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.

Book-wish

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.

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Low tide smells from the Island City

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River in the Sky

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#NewGlossary 01: Plastic Thumb

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Mumbai Turmeric - Digital Photobook

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Mumbaicars : Car spotting in the city

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Maps in Mumbai

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East Side Story

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Playgrounds of Mumbai

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I am a Cat by Natsume Soseki

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Urban gods

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Mumbai on a leash

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Book-wish

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