square haunting

  • The right to water from Metropolis to Mahad

    Yesterday, the Instagram algorithm introduced me to ‘Metropolis’, the 1927 silent film about a dystopian city where the rich live above ground, in luxury and light, and the poor underground in grime and dirt, near machines they are meant to operate to keep the city running. In the climax, the machines break, triggering a flood…

    Barathi Nakkeeran

  • Paris: what I know, what I (don’t) fear

    I still know little about Paris, having moved here less than two months ago. I know that it is small in area. The inner city, that is Paris intra-muros, is only 105 square kilo meters. London and Delhi are both roughly fifteen times larger. I also know that this small circle is not its limits.…

    Barathi Nakkeeran

  • Do cages have sunlight?

    A tiny note from our mini reading group. I have started to realise that ‘abolitionism’ and ‘carceral justice’ are rich frameworks, whose use go beyond jails. I am new to it. I am also not used to with looking at the world through the frames of ‘climate justice’, though waste is intimately connected to this…

    Barathi Nakkeeran

  • Demolishing homes, building cities

    Demolitions share a long history with our cities. For scale, between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi alone, under “slum clearance” schemes. The Shah Commission reports record that during the emergency, several states in India enforced demolitions using police force, razing homes, often without any notice or rehabilitation. Of this time, the anthropologist…

    Barathi Nakkeeran

  • A partial biography of city-names

    Adjectives are thrilling. They bring theatre to the sentence. In simple terms, an adjective is that part of speech that alters a noun or a noun phrase or describes its referent. Old copy. White ledge. Its etymology can be traced back to the latin phrase nomen adjectivum– itself a loan from Greek– that roughly translates to…

    Barathi Nakkeeran

  • The city that is nearly no more

    I have begun 2022 with Ganbare! Workshops on Dying by Katarzyna Boni (translated Mark Ordon). In it the Polish journalist excavates a beautiful account of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Ganbare gives a voice to the living and their grief. Very early in the book, there is an essay titled ‘The city that is…

    Barathi Nakkeeran

  • Cities in Books

    This is a sample of the city-related books I have read this year. While I have reviewed Amita Baviskar’s Uncivity City in detail for the LSE Review of Books (link here), regarding the others, I have only been able to write about in snatches. With the exception of Shanta Gokhale’s Shivaji Nagar, however, I have…

    Barathi Nakkeeran
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