Navi Mumbai, March 2008. A recently built residential area

If you were in New Delhi now instead of in Florence, the mornings would appear as a hazy glow. The sun is a gentle benefactor and not the tyrant it is through the long summers. Buildings lose their edges in the distance. Black and yellow taxis roll out of a cloud like a Bollywood 1950s hero. The blood-red paan stains that mark city walls burst with colors like rare winter foliage. On street corners, steam curls slowly from cups of chai being handed out by snotty urchins. The city shimmers around you. It feels like the nascent beginning of a new world, a dream where all things are possible. Maybe the citizen could reach for her desires, if she could only stretch her hands into the haze and find it? In recent years, we know the haze is actually a heavy smog that settles on the city all winter, choking its children, sending pollution levels beyond the maximum measure of online trackers, rousing its leaders into many statements and little action. This fog is both dream and reality. It is a collective dream, the fevered dream of development and growth for its own sake, driven by polluting industries that draw labor from the farthest reaches of the country. It is the heady aspiration of a rising and ravenous middle class whose cars clog the streets and cloud the skies. It is the disjointed dream of a federal democracy, with farm stubble burnt in one state shrouding the city in smoke and local politicians refusing or unable to stop the practice: the revenge of rural India on the megalopolises that are rapidly replacing rural communities, the stubbornness of rural communities who refuse to remain unheard and can still bring cities to a standstill with their protests. The viewer is unsure if this is a nightmare or a dream. The progress that delivers some to their destination crushes others under its grinding wheels. Rural families who starve and slave on their fields as mechanization renders their labor useless decide to starve and slave in the cities instead where opportunities are scarce. It is the young girls who cram into auto-rickshaws and ride pillion in threes and fours on scooters to reach hockey practice at dawn and strive for Olympic glory but fear stepping out on the streets at night. It is the laundry lines of multi-colored clothes hoisted above slums in the shadow of skyscrapers, fluttering like flags of island countries that refuse to disappear. In Rocco Rorandelli’s photographs, he does not comment on its nature, he only presents this phantasm in precise detail. A ladder rests on a promise of glory next to a thatched hut, a dwelling that could be a rural implant in the urban environment. A set of stairs offer successively loftier rewards for the job-seeker or those who seek to emigrate: confidence building, personality development, fluency in English, SAT, GMAT; a laborer clambers over sacks of rice that will feed a growing population; two young girls reload their shooting rifles and take aim at a hopeful future; an ice cream vendor stands aloft his glowing cart like a fishing boat captain on choppy seas; the residential towers of a city loom over barren fields. There is a haze around lives in the city. We are unsure if its communities are facing a creeping dusk or a brightening dawn. These photographs offer us the megapolis in the clear light of the artist’s lens.

 

Kaushik Barua