As we left the Kankaria Lake for Gita Mandir, we realized that we still had a lot of time to burn before we went back to college. So we walk till the Gita Mandir and then manage to get a drunk Rickshaw waala to drop us at Mirzapur for 15 bucks. Of course, the actual cost of reaching the place is 20 bucks from Gita Mandir.
Now despite one near accident situation, we managed to reach Mirzapur without much hassles and we see this single food stall selling non-vegetarian tava food. Now we were told about this place by one of our professors and we had come here to have a chat with Iqbal Bhai (the owner) of the stall. As it always happens in such situations, he wasn't there! And he was due to come at around 11:30 PM in the night and the time then was 8:30 PM and we had no intentions of getting that late.
So as we ate our food, we managed to get on of the waitors to get to talk about the place and he told us, "Iqbal Bhai is one lucky man. Wherever he started his tava, it always worked. Be it Baroda or Anand or Ahmedabad! But then , he started having alcohol and had to give up on his franchises in Baroda and Anand. He still has five outlets in Ahmedabad which he has given to people on lease of 200 bucks per day."
The waitor himself had come from Bihar and had been working on the tava centre for the past seven-eight years. We asked him how did he come to know about this place. He smiled and said, "Apne bahut log hai par! (We have a lot of our own people out here.)" He told us that they usually get the raw material for the food from Mirzapur itself. And he would show us the place if required.
We told him that we would come back to meet Iqbal Bhai and see the place on a later date as we realized that it was already 9:30 PM and we still had to walk a lot to reach a bus station from which we could get a bus for Gandhinagar.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Day 1 - Kankaria Lake
It’s interesting that despite the fact that we have written two proposals on the Food Project and even submitted one with big words to Doors of Perception. We still ended up discussing the objectives and deliverables of the project yesterday as we proceeded towards a quite obscure destination at that time to get the Bajaj Avenger repaired.
Anyway, we discussed possibility of an offline architectural system design of the food distribution mechanism around the city of Ahmedabad which could be easily molded into an Online Website, or a book or even a map. Though it leaves us with the same basic question…
What is this system architecture that we discussed? Is it just a information visualization mechanism or its the metaphor that proves the theory that the plurality of a city is a function of the multiplicity of the food it consumes.
I guess the issue is still under thought and requires a few more days for its construction, but we started the project anyway. To be perfectly honest, we had no idea that there was a lake in the middle of the city in Ahmedabad which is called the Kankaria Lake. All that we had plans for was to visit a so-called huge 10-Acre-Mall. The place was a not quite impressive as we had imagined, but we spent most of the afternoon there trying to ward off the extreme heat of the day.
So, come evening we walk back to the Lake via the Kankaria Road and are welcomed by this gentle breeze around the lake. We managed to walk through the entire perimeter of the 76 acre lake by the end of the evening.
The place was filled with local food stalls throughout its perimeter; they even sold you coconut water to probably give you a sea beach experience(or rather to help you from dehydrating). It also had a 462 years temple (the usual with any place in Gujarat) and a whole lot of people, making it more of a picnic spot for people belonging to the middle class or the lower middle class.
We didn't quite bother to ask a few stall owners where they had come from. But yes, we managed to ask them about whether the lake was artificial or not.
Kankaria: History
Kankaria is a polygonal artificial lake, situated in the south east region of Ahmedabad with an island summer palace. This lake has 34 sides and was constructed by Sultan Qutab-ud-Din in 1451 A.D. The lake was frequently visited by Mughal Emperor Jahangir and his Empress wife Noor Jahan. It now stands as a local picnic spot and has vivid bird life.
bushBhutta, originally uploaded by clakeSnapster.
Anyway, we discussed possibility of an offline architectural system design of the food distribution mechanism around the city of Ahmedabad which could be easily molded into an Online Website, or a book or even a map. Though it leaves us with the same basic question…
What is this system architecture that we discussed? Is it just a information visualization mechanism or its the metaphor that proves the theory that the plurality of a city is a function of the multiplicity of the food it consumes.
I guess the issue is still under thought and requires a few more days for its construction, but we started the project anyway. To be perfectly honest, we had no idea that there was a lake in the middle of the city in Ahmedabad which is called the Kankaria Lake. All that we had plans for was to visit a so-called huge 10-Acre-Mall. The place was a not quite impressive as we had imagined, but we spent most of the afternoon there trying to ward off the extreme heat of the day.
So, come evening we walk back to the Lake via the Kankaria Road and are welcomed by this gentle breeze around the lake. We managed to walk through the entire perimeter of the 76 acre lake by the end of the evening.
The place was filled with local food stalls throughout its perimeter; they even sold you coconut water to probably give you a sea beach experience(or rather to help you from dehydrating). It also had a 462 years temple (the usual with any place in Gujarat) and a whole lot of people, making it more of a picnic spot for people belonging to the middle class or the lower middle class.
We didn't quite bother to ask a few stall owners where they had come from. But yes, we managed to ask them about whether the lake was artificial or not.
Kankaria: History
Kankaria is a polygonal artificial lake, situated in the south east region of Ahmedabad with an island summer palace. This lake has 34 sides and was constructed by Sultan Qutab-ud-Din in 1451 A.D. The lake was frequently visited by Mughal Emperor Jahangir and his Empress wife Noor Jahan. It now stands as a local picnic spot and has vivid bird life.
bushBhutta, originally uploaded by clakeSnapster.
Kankaria Lake: Life around it.
So this is the place where we meet Gautam Bhai [ Bhutta walla (roasted corn vendor) ]. Quite an interesting find if you just manage to have a look at his nothing-out-ordinary stall with a giant flex which apparently has been covered by two English Newspapers and a magazine called Chitralekha. The reason being that his flex has George W. Bush eating 'bhutta'! We spoke to him about the cost of the flex and he says, "I spent 900 bucks on the flex, but I don't regret that expenditure a bit. I wouldn't have made into newspapers even if I had spent 5000 bucks on it." It's amazing that even Bush can take you that far with your publicity. And then he gave us his card and said that that he thought of putting a photo of George W. Bush on his visiting card as well but then he thought is zyada ho jayega. (it would be too much!)
He presents another model of original and different thought that probably reinvents the concept of innovation. Before I forget to mention, the place presented a strange distinction, all the proper big size stalls made for the elite among the ordinary men and women out in that place were on the outer perimeter of the lake. All the smaller stalls were on the inner perimeter separated by a road. Probably it’s more a function of the proposed architecture around the lake but still it creates an essential notion of separation between people mostly economic in the present scenario. Now, the Lake has an island garden set amidst of the lake, Nagina Wadi. There is a beautiful pathway that connects one side of the lake to Nagina Wadi. It involves an expenditure of 10 rupees per person to get inside for a laser and musical fountain show, which was not bad except for the part where one thought it was a waste of the technology they had at hand.It lacked the essential construct of experience design and with the amount of exposure that my friend has of such things in Singapore and Thailand, we ended up discussing the possibility of a BTech. Project in experience design and yes, we ended up telling a few things to the manager of the place.
Kankaria Lake has been garnered into quite an interesting ensemble of places for entertainment around. With a zoo and a park and an exhibition center, the place forms the essence of reason for the growth of the place and the interactions between people! Food happens to support the cause in elementary ways. Public interaction requires food because the notion of food and its consumption probably breaks down the inherent barriers among people easing conversations and the overall experience of a place.We moved on from that place, knowing for starters that food and experience are complementary. One works for the other. And the relationship is mutually dependent.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
intimacy, food and patterns
An indian city lives in multiple times, with western styled hotels, fast food restaurants, bhajiya wallas, food stalls and dhabbas coexisting. Many city dwellers find themselves at ease at any of these places, but there lives a differentiation in the social structures that form at each of these places.
A society creates for itself spaces which lie at different levels in the 'intimacy gradient'. A multinational restaurant may allow you to create a personal space with no disturbance from others. But a food stall encourages conversations, much like the pubs in european countries. The kinds of food that attach themselves to the different kinds of vendors also fall at particular places on the gradient between public and private spaces.
The kind of social interaction and the level of privacy that is created of a particular space interacts with the preparation, presentation and service of food available. A waiter shouting out your order to the kitchen will not go too well in a fancy restaurant where a certain level of privacy is expected. The kind of space that is expected to be in a public sphere where people start conversations, needs to be open but also should allow a kind of a closure that creates a feeling of togetherness and safety.
Such patterns, in relation to architecture and now for digital social spaces are well documented. It would be interesting to learn about the structures and flows that create the intimacy gradient in an Indian city living in multiple times. Much of the food stalls and thelas are emergent spaces that attain a certain balance over time and a multitude of variables come into play.
The emergence of such spaces and the semiotics of their architecture, the materials used for the chairs, the kind of tables in place, seating capacity all in some way create a space that allows for certain forms of human groups to be comfortable. It can be said that the kind of utensils, the name of the recipes, the look of them, the texture would also be in a state of interaction with the social groups that consume the food. Maybe it is just economics, availability and taste.
But the complexity of social existence demands a look at such patterns, or the search for them. The hospitality of a people, their communal ties would in some way influence the kinds of food spaces that they create for themselves.
A society creates for itself spaces which lie at different levels in the 'intimacy gradient'. A multinational restaurant may allow you to create a personal space with no disturbance from others. But a food stall encourages conversations, much like the pubs in european countries. The kinds of food that attach themselves to the different kinds of vendors also fall at particular places on the gradient between public and private spaces.
The kind of social interaction and the level of privacy that is created of a particular space interacts with the preparation, presentation and service of food available. A waiter shouting out your order to the kitchen will not go too well in a fancy restaurant where a certain level of privacy is expected. The kind of space that is expected to be in a public sphere where people start conversations, needs to be open but also should allow a kind of a closure that creates a feeling of togetherness and safety.
Such patterns, in relation to architecture and now for digital social spaces are well documented. It would be interesting to learn about the structures and flows that create the intimacy gradient in an Indian city living in multiple times. Much of the food stalls and thelas are emergent spaces that attain a certain balance over time and a multitude of variables come into play.
The emergence of such spaces and the semiotics of their architecture, the materials used for the chairs, the kind of tables in place, seating capacity all in some way create a space that allows for certain forms of human groups to be comfortable. It can be said that the kind of utensils, the name of the recipes, the look of them, the texture would also be in a state of interaction with the social groups that consume the food. Maybe it is just economics, availability and taste.
But the complexity of social existence demands a look at such patterns, or the search for them. The hospitality of a people, their communal ties would in some way influence the kinds of food spaces that they create for themselves.
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