[Reader-list] Fun in the time of Development

[sovan tarafder]

Dear all,



This is my first posting and will not be a lengthy one. Hope you have already gone through my proposal abstract (which I sent to Vivek a few days back), so I won't be re-iterating the same story. I'm going to write, for the first installment, about what drove me to the present project. 



"As Partha Chattopadhyay has argued, since the 1990s, Indian cities have been abuzz with the cry to rid the city of encroachers and polluters only to give the city back to the proper citizen (Chatterjee 2003; 178)". This essay made me ponder over the properness of the citizenship. What are the proper citizens doing here in Kolkata? I found that the graph of urban fun and frolic in the city has been on the rise since the 1990s. I decided to explore the kind of fun the now proverbial city of joy has been reveling in. 



On an official assignment, I wrote a story on the changing face of city's entertainment in Anandabazar Patrika back in 2001. At that time, I didn't come across Chattopadhyay's essay, which is a fairly recent one. The seed of thought however was sown. Chatterjee's essay really stirred my thought. 



In this project I seek to explore if there is any relation between developmentality and the funtastic face of Kolkata. 



All the new fun spots are away from the central portions of the city, for quite understandable reason. Lack of space. But being positioned at the outskirts of the city proper, as I found, gives these spot an added attraction. 



The promise of an ambience a la rural, that dangles the evanescent hope of getting rejuvenated. 



But then, what about the current real estate boom in the city where almost all promoters and developers dish out the promise of being located in a village (though a highly comfortable one!) that is situated within the well-connected city ambience. 



How do these rural and urban interpenetrate? Does the specter of rural haunt the urban? How do these fun spaces fall into the map of development of the city? 



These are some of the questions that I am going to explore in the coming few months. 



Hope I'll be enriched with your valuable comments. 



Reference: 

Chatterjee, Partha (2003), Are Indian Cities becoming bourgeois at last? in Body.City: Siting Contemporary Culture in India (Ed. Indira Chandrashekhar and Peter C. Ceel) The House of World Cultures, Berlin and Tulika Books. 



Thanks

Sovan Tarafder. 


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