Volume 003: City

Welcome to Our Imagination

Mind Map: Internal Cities

Srija’s Mind Map is imagined by Devika Sundar, an artist who works with art as a restorative, meditative medium, to express collective themes of invisibility, illness, memory and impermanence within personal and shared human experience.

Tum Kiski Ho Binni

Bolti Kahaniyaan Ep 4: Tum Kiski Ho Binni

In this episode of Bolti Kahaniyan, Swati Kashyap narrates a transcreation of Maitri Pushpa’s story ‘Tum Kiski Ho Binni?’. When Binni’s mother becomes pregnant after having given birth to two girls, everyone believed that it would be a boy but instead, it was Binni. This is what happened next.   

The Gifts of the City Come with Strings Attached

I learnt the verbal construction of grammatically correct English sentences for the first time in Class IV when my friends secretly chuckled at my mispronounced words. Until then, I hadn’t realised that my excessive knowledge of Tamil had done nothing to win them over. The convent school in my small town seemed to like my English; what happened along the way?

Filming Cities

Lists, of any kind, are subjective and offer only a partial view. Given the rich history of non-fiction films in India on the urban – across time and geography – condensing them into a list will always be an incomplete task.

Does India really live in its villages?

In Part One of this two-part conversation with The Third Eye, Bhan discusses the making of the ‘urban’ in policy versus reality, the lack of identity for the urban poor, what urban practitioners should have learnt from the Covid pandemic, and the great disruptor entering urban studies—the Anthropocene.

It Was Like Collapsing into An Embrace

My first meeting with Annu was over a Zoom call at 7 pm on a Thursday. The past few months I had been meeting with women from rural areas and kasbahs who shared with me their stories of being ekal (single).

Akele Aur Chalna Chahiye

Ekal In The City Ep 3: Akele Aur Chalna Chahiye

In this episode, Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own travels to the tehsil of Ajmer, Kekri in Rajasthan, and meets Annu, a 31-year-old woman who gives it her own meaning. What does this room look like today?

What Shri Found In Her Dream and Then In the Sand Dune

Jyoti was the first girl from her village, Sawau Moolraj in Rajasthan to migrate to the city for a better education—a decision taken by her parents because the village had no such infrastructure. Since then, Jyoti has been an outsider-insider, moving in and out of her village home.

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