shivajinagar

On the afternoon of 28th april 2014, I had set myself the task of observing two street corners at either end of Noronha road at Russell market in Shivajinagar - a corner at the Broadway street end and a corner at the St.Mary’s Basilica end (Fig.1). I am reproducing here what I noted and what I sketched there. These were ordinary activities. They probably happen everyday. I observed the urban space – how the vendors create their informal selling spaces on the street and how walkers/shoppers enter these selling spaces and engage in a bargain, a conversation or a purchase.…

The Samosa Mela at Shivajinagar is a study conducted as part of a CEPT-CPP Summer school on The Everyday City that was held in June 2016 at the IIM Bangalore campus. It was a collaborative effort between CEPT University, Ahmedabad and the Center for Public Policy, IIM Bangalore. As part of the two-week workshop, the participants worked in groups to identify & analyse the everyday activities on the streets in different locations in the city. The Samosa mela project was done by Drashti Amin, (Anant Institute of Architecture, Ahmedabad), Akshata Bhandiwad (CEPT University, Ahmedabad) & Suyash Bhardwaj (NIT, Surat). The…

One thing led to another. I was looking for feedback on sketches of the street life at Russell market and that led to the suggestion: “Why don’t you try meeting Mr.Zaffar Sait? He has been an old resident of the neighbourhood” So, that’s what I did and then couldn’t help but turn it into a post just so that others would have the chance to listen to this story as well. So, here is the account of life in Bangalore in the 50’s as narrated by Mr.Zaffar Sait, who belongs to one of the most well-respected mercantile families of the…

In his book, ‘Sidewalk’, Mitchell Duneier describes the lives of people who “work the street”, the book vendors, the magazine vendors and the ‘men without accounts’ who guard the door to the ATMs on Sixth Avenue in New York. It is an intensive ethnographical study of the social structure of street life in the city. As I read the book, I’m reminded of my interactions until now with the street vendors outside Russell market in Bangalore. They also “work the street” some becoming entrepreneurs out of necessity and others by choice, in many ways living the same lives as the…