[Reader-list] Moscow Metro -Underground Palace Panoramas

[Punam Zutshi]

The point surely is about Russian political history and an act of
imagination and aesthetics within which the modern was visualised. And
specifically in relation with the worlds that Zainab and you have been
sharing with us, here was a
fantastical counterpoint, both paradoxical and radical in its own historical
moment.Does a genealogy of the modern and a comparative perspective on
public spaces have no use? That the creation of spaces like these were
undertaken by a Stalin and doubled as bomb shelters was an education in the
experiments that the modern is constituted by.

Punam

----- Original Message -----
From: "Shivam Vij" <shivamvij at gmail.com>
To: "Punam Zutshi" <pz at vsnl.net>
Cc: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 3:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Moscow Metro -Underground Palace Panoramas


> Have a look at some pictures of the Delhi Metro:
> http://www.vij.com/archive/mind_the_gully.html
>
> The Delhi Metro looks lavish and luxurious enough as compared to the
> state of public transportation otherwise in Delhi and much of urban
> India. Thank you very much, but the palace-like look of the Moscow
> subway belongs to a world that won't arrive here for the next fifty
> years. I am told even some New York subway stations are equally
> palatial. But what's the point? The New York subway has other
> problems. Didn't I post an article on the list written by a New Yorker
> who was embarrassed to see that Indians could make a better, faster,
> more modern subway in much less money that New York plans to spend on
> a new subway they want to build to replace the current subway, which
> is now a century late. And the NY subway is also dirtier than the
> Delhi Metro.
>
> S
>