bombay: the nostalgia of gyan prakash [sunday, april 03, 2005]

This is one of those randomly different ways to spend a Sunday evening. Attend a humanities lecture (with a suspicious whiff of the history of town planning) at Emory University. The speaker: Gyan Prakash. The topic: the city of Bombay. To be precise: The Modern City in Ruins: The Memory of Cosmopolitan Bombay. If you thought that this would offer insight into the rich factors that influenced the city of Bombay (Mumbai for the SS followers) as it stands today, as did friend who convinced me to tag along (and who also has been responsible for my growing interest in town and city planning), you were mistaken. All this talk amounted to was a nostalgic journey peppered with interesting phrases(Dude! This guy is from the humanities folk; they know how to weave complex tapestries of words) and some nice humour. The piece de resistance for me was the food treat at the end of the talk. Hogged on the samosas and the free soda. And thanks to his name-dropping, I've begun to read some Rohinton Mistry (Family Matters).