Welcome to Our Imagination
Across the world, cities have been designed for men, by men – especially young, healthy, cisgender men. This leads to many challenges – for women, for the young and elderly, transgender community, and anyone else who does not fit into this fairly homogenous group of young, able-bodied men.
Eight of us – four young teenage girls and four women – move about the room imagining ourselves in different places. Sometimes we are walking in open fields, sometimes we are catching the metro. Sometimes we are shrieking in glee and running through unexpected rain.
We spent an afternoon with Nidhi Goyal, stand-up comic and disability activist, who experienced blindness age 15 onwards. She talks about how her city Mumbai changed for her, how notions of safety become fluid when your navigation is defined by dependance, the un-gendering of disabled bodies, and invisible forms of violence that often come within homes and caregiving.
In response, or maybe a rejoinder, to urban conversations full of lament – “Why don’t they just get vaccinated? Why are they getting married at this time? Will they ever learn?” – Disha and Kavita of Khabar Lahariya, after decades in rural Bundelkhand, come with a rather gentle reply (all things considered).
In October 2019, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal introduced free bus travel for women in Delhi, adding free fare to a long history of gender-based public transportation policies. While social media forever boils over in heated response, feminist scholarship on gender and public transit helps clear the steam.
I am a conspiracy theorist of my atiya body by Kuumpiilei is the third step in the author’s Yaang-Huuk-Uun (YHU) project. It began in 2019 and started with the support of BangaloResidency-Expanded, an initiative of Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore. The author worked with the SouthEast Asian (SEA) community as a resident at Zentralwerk in Dresden.
At Dolma Aunty Momos, a shop selling momos in central Delhi, crowds of hungry customers push to the front for a plate of dumplings in a day cloaked by deep summer heat. The shop is named after Aunty Dolma, which is the fond nickname for Dolma Tsering, a Tibetan momo chef and vendor, also known around New Delhi as the city’s “first momo aunty”.
Abhishek Anicca is a part of the Travel Log Programme with The Third Eye for its City Edition. The Travel Log programme mentored thirteen writers and image makers from across India’s bylanes, who reimagine the idea of the city through a feminist lens.
Since December of 2014, The Green Hub in Tezpur, Assam, has turned teachers, forest guards, footballers, field guides, students and youth-at-large, from across the varied landscapes of the north east of India, into documentary filmmakers.
In an unusual memoriam of the times we live in and the year gone by, Parvati Sharma wonders what our cities may feel, through a conversation between its two inhabitants: Sadness and Breeze.
