Contents: The importance of being a Flâneur today (Issue 43)
Contents: The importance of being a Flâneur today (Issue 43)
Mar 14
Guest-Editorial: The importance of being a Flâneur today
By Maitreyee B Chowdhury
People wrote in with childlike delight in the exhilarated pleasure of describing their walks, the conversations they had struck with children or beggars on the roads, with a movie camera, with the forgotten Madonna, small talk with vegetable vendors, artisans and random tourists on the streets. The stories reeked of the strangeness of the pleasure of pause it had taught them, the appreciation of finding common ground with randomness on the road, finding snippets of the street’s history tucked away at odd angles, in spaces drawn with the brush of life.
Flaneuse in an Indian city
By Yamini Krishna
As several scholars like (Susan Buck-Morris, Anne Friedberg, etc.) have argued a flaneur is a male figure. They have gone to define the female flaneur, a flaneuse. We currently live in a society which is much farther from the early modernity and Parisian arcades when this concept was first defined, but the idea has much wider significance even in the current society.
Meandering Feet and Multiple Roads
By Gargi Ray Chakraborty
The first time I landed in Varanasi, what struck me was how unclean it looked, followed by the unpleasant smell that hung over the entire city. It was all rather overwhelming, the politics of being a city in one of India’s infamous state, UP, the massive university, the student-cum-hostel life and taking the first steps towards living on your own, away from everything familiar for the first eighteen years of life – at a glance it was more than one could chew.
Meandering through Vertov’s ‘kino-eye’ and City Symphonies of the 1920s
By Goirick Brahmachari
The kino-eye, according to Vertov, is the conquest of time and space that captures the visual linkages of people separated by space, and phenomena separated by time, and is based on the continuous exchange of visible fact. It is this eye that observes the society, documents its transitions, ironies, and peculiarities within the cosmos and the chaos of a modern city and archives its people, meanderers, and the homeless with all of their multiplicity.
Poem: Seville Sequences
By Sophia Naz
Seville, you silenced
my hand with your
cheek, humid
rukhsar turning me
back to amnion, a rumpled
spilled-skin
Stories on the Road
By Elita
Laden with the vestiges of all things colonial, Fort Kochi with its cobbled paths and stonemasonry offers the curious walker a peek into remnants of footprints left behind by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and even various tourists to the place – all within a radius of 4 kilometres.
Trieste
By Ananya Dasgupta
I spent two weeks rediscovering Trieste through Joyce’s eyes. I convinced myself that I loved it as much as Joyce did. I visited every house that he had lived in, every tavern that he had visited. I walked up to his statue on the bridge on Via Roma and asked him several questions. I sat around at the Piazzas, walked along every street. And I understood him so much better that I had ever done before.
Visions
By Uddalak Gupta
The guidebooks, if we had looked them up, would have told us that Selaron was the creator of the Lapa Steps, known also as the ‘Escadaria Selaron’. A self-taught Chilean artist, he’d knocked around the world as a painter and sculptor till he arrived in Rio in 1983, taken an instant liking to the dramatic contours of the beach city and stayed on.
Moo-ving On
By Shreya Sen-Handley
In fact, I hadn’t even planned on being in Zurich. After four years of putting one foot in front of the other to get from one day to the next, of meticulously planning and executing survival strategies to keep, not just going, but alive, all I wanted was to be. I had been in a violent marriage for too long. One that had left me battered, and bewildered. To make matters worse, I had been serving out this time in a strange city far from the one I called home.
Comma for a Thought, Semicolon for a Memory, and a Pause for a Pocket Book of Life
By Anindita Chatterjee
Troglodyte is not connected to any dinosaur family, just a natural temperature regulated, no electricity bills generated habitat that provide heat in winter and remain cool in summer. The underground city is approximately 85m deep and contains all the rooms required (stables, cellars, storage rooms, refectories, churches, wineries, etc.)
Zurich to the Edge of the Black Forest: Wanderings of a Wayfaring Woman
By Neela Bhattacharya Saxena
Watchmaking people of the land had watches all over the shop windows. From one peered a familiar face – Aishwarya Rai, Indian movie star and Miss World selling Swiss watches! I had a feeling this is where shootings for old Indian movies took place. I could almost see a dancing and singing pair sloping down the hill adorned in seventies outfits.
