India dreaming

"When you're n India, the rest of the world does not exist."
Some images of Rajastan and Maharashtra © Le Flaneur

Marvellous, maddening Mumbai

The sprawling IIT campus (see Design Local Conference, below), set in the once-rural far northern suburb of Powai, near to a lake of the same name, is of some intrinsic interest - a well-maintained example of 60s concrèt brut – I’m told it was a showpiece of Pandit Nehru’s visionary investment in Indian tertiary education, the results of which are so evident in India’s growing global IT prowess today. Well-planned quadrangles, walkways and plantings provide pleasant vistas, with frequent water features and sculptural installations. Outside this almost Arcadian setting lie the traffic-choked roads and high-rise towers of the ‘new’ town of Powai – a suburb on steroids, with its Hutch mobile phone shops and gated enclaves sprouting along the lake to accommodate the newly wealthy, while (as always in urban India) the impoverished workers and their families huddle in shanties across the fence. It reminded me of London’s Canary Wharf under construction in the early nineties, without the auto-rickshaws or wandering cows of course. The rather pristine-looking Lake Powai (which forms part of Mumbai’s fresh water supply) while no doubt providing spectacular views from the residential towers, is disappointingly difficult to access, and it proved almost impossible to stroll along the shore. There is no footpath or much evidence of traditional ghats (public bathing areas) – just a traffic-choked and hazardous lakeside road. Given the Indian love of strolling by and bathing in bodies of water, I was surprised by this.

To really see Mumbai-by-the-water, one must travel many kilometres south to Back Bay on the western side of the peninsula that is downtown Mumbai, where Marine Drive curves northward from Nariman Point to the famous Chowpatty Beach. While the ocean is somewhat toxic, the beach and promenade, especially in the cool of evening, brings out thousands of Mumbaikar families, and the big thing to do is eat kulfi and watch the sun dip below the horizon of the Arabian Sea. I had the rather magical experience of watching this from the so-called Hanging Gardens (Kamala Nehru Park) on Malabar Hill. On the eastern side of the peninsula is Colaba and Mumbai’s even more toxic but atmospheric harbour, the maidans (parks) and grandiose colonial buildings of old Bombay, and the arts precinct of Kala Ghoda (Black Horse) which was buzzing in February with the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. This lively week-long event encompassed numerous exhibitions, sculptural installations, performances, a literary festival, street art markets, information and food stalls. I was also fortunate to catch the last days of a major survey of Indian contemporary art, Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, at the National Gallery of Modern Art.

Fans of architectural monstrosities should venture further north to the outlandish Victoria Terminus (officially now Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus but know to one and all as ‘VT’). Designed by Frederick William Stevenson and completed in 1888, its provenance has been described as ‘Indo-Saracenic-St Pancras-Gothic-Revival’. North of here begins what Mumbaikars would call the ‘real’ Mumbai – the teeming central bazaars and the vast suburbs stretching north to the airports, Bandra, Film City and the lakes, west to the posh beach suburb of Juhu, and east to the estuarine coast – middle class residential areas cheek-by-jowl with decaying flyovers, Asia’s largest slums, and eternally humming street markets. The buzz of Mumbai is akin to that of New York, give or take the odd elephant in the street, and what is remarkable is that despite the chaotic traffic, the press of people, the melting-pot of culture, language and religion, and the appalling disparities of wealth, this metropolis of 15-odd million remains relatively peaceful and crime-free – certainly compared to western cities of similar size. For all its problems, India manifests an immense humanism, as well as an immense vitality, and in a very real sense all life, no matter how low in the caste system, remains sacrosanct.

A visit to Mumbai will leave you exhausted, but you may well come away with a renewed faith in humanity.

Namaste

Design Local Conference, Mumbai

ICOGRADA Design Week in India
5 – 9 February 2007
Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Powai, Mumbai, India

This two-day conference was the culmination of week of student workshops, exhibitions and a Design Education Meet organised jointly by ICOGRADA and IDC/IIT. The cavernous Convocation Hall of the IIT has seen better days and presented some inevitable technical challenges, headache-inducing stage lighting, and the whirring banks of overhead fans struggled somewhat to mitigate the Mumbai afternoon heat. There were a number of local speaker ‘no-shows’ (or late scratchings) and the schedule was consequently re-shuffled a number of times, but despite these factors, the conference managed to be a reasonably stimulating ideas-fest. If some western delegates looked a little wilted, the more acclimatised Mumbaikars took the heat in their stride, and attendance numbered in the hundreds – predominantly enthusiastic local students and designers, with a sprinkling of design professionals and educators from other Indian cities, and the world at large.

Keynote speakers were the venerable New York-based architect/designers Massimo and Lella Vignelli, and Massimo got things underway with an elegantly argued plea for less bland internationalism and more of the vernacular, the culturally particular, in design. India has one of the world’s most distinctive visual cultures – as unique as Japan or China’s – with extraordinary architecture, metalwork, decorative arts, calligraphy, textiles and clothing, along with awe-inspiring sculpture and painting traditions. While there are many contemporary expressions of these arts, and Indian films have spawned a worldwide affection for Bollywood popular culture, there is a perceived tendency among young Indians to regard all things Western as self-evidently good. Vignelli argues that in design this is a negative tendency, a sentiment that was echoed again and again subsequent sessions, as one might expect from the ‘Design Local’ conference theme. The great Indian typographer / calligrapher / designer / educator R.K. Joshi gave a passionate presentation of his breathtaking work, and design luminaries Vikas Satwalekar (erstwhile head of Ahmadabad’s prestigious National Institute of Design) and Sudarshan Deer moderated Designing from around the world sessions.

Australia’s Russell Kennedy (Monash University) delivered a thought-provoking paper on that most visible, and contentious, symbol of Australian identity, the national flag, followed by a fascinating overview of several other projects such as INDIGO (Indigenous Design Network) and MIX06 (Migrant Indigenous Exchange). This was complemented the next day by Don Ryun Chang’s (South Korea) excellent paper on place branding and tourism identity in Asia, with a useful overview of world practice. Jacques Lange’s (South Africa) presentation on vernacular trends in South African graphic design, Halim Choueiry’s (Lebanon/Qatar) playful take on hybrid Arabic and English typography, Ruth Klotzel’s (Brazil) overview of Brazilian trends and Omar Vulpinari’s (Italy) survey of the body in visual communications, were all standout presentations from international speakers. Vulpinari is the creative director of the visual communications department at Fabrica, the Benetton-funded research centre in Treviso (near Venice) founded by Oliviero Toscani. The designer as social provocateur seems to be alive and well at Fabrica, and the reaction to his presentation was illuminating. To western eyes, exposed to a decade or more of Colours magazine, the images of bodies (sometimes naked) used in many Fabrica-designed awareness campaigns were not particularly shocking, but it was evident that some participants found them both confronting and perplexing, questioning their relevance to graphic design and their ‘accessibility’ to mass audiences. Vulpinari’s response, that it was about encouraging his students to explore the gamut of communications techniques, seemed reasonable to me, but there were some snorts of disapproval from the floor.

Two additional international ‘grandmasters’ rate special mention: April Greiman USA) and Mervyn Kurlansky (Denmark). I’ve been a fan of Ms Greiman’s deconstructed yet lucid approach to graphic design since the eighties, and her elegiac and seamless slide show of images, set to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, did not disappoint. Mervyn Kurlansky, founding member of the firm Pentagram and now a Denmark-based consultant, gave what for me was the most rigorous and challenging presentation, focussing on the need for triple-bottom-line (plus spiritual wellbeing) analysis of design effectiveness, and the need for design education globally to include mandatory studies in environmentally sustainable practices. His case that green design is also good business was persuasively made, and we designers have a growing responsibility to make a similarly persuasive case to our clients. To paraphrase James Carville’s famous piece of political haiku, ‘It’s the environment, stupid’.

The conference ended with the formal inauguration of InDeas (Indian Design Association), and a rather moving
commemoration and induction of Indian design ‘grandmasters’ into a kind of hall of fame. A pleasant and very sociable alfresco dinner then followed for all participants in the gardens of the IIT Guest House.

Namaste