2011年10月8日 星期六

The art of darkness

The peanut masala seller was lustily announcing his presence outside my friend's house in Chennai, as he did every evening, when I left for the airport. I was returning home to Delhi.

The taxi driver was taciturn, loath to engage in conversation; one turned to the pursuit of a silent observer. The republic of perspiration as my friends liked to call their city had just started to emerge from the lassitude of yet another day trapped in a giant humid sigh. At a traffic signal, as a woman walked past, the jasmine flowers tucked in her hair threw out a fragrant lifeline; a signal perhaps for the city to be enveloped in the voluminous folds of twilight.

This pleasant reverie put me in a happy frame of mind. The instant the aircraft arched towards the sky, I peered out of the window, nose pressed against the glass.Replacement China Porcelain tile and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide.The additions focus on key tag and magic cube combinations, Maybe it is an instinct to affirm rootedness to terra firma at the very moment one denies it in an exhilarating rush. Below us, Chennai was aglitter like a mammoth circuit board of civilisation — silvery blue fluorescent interspersed with sodium's golden halo. Picking out lights at random I wondered what they signified — hearth or street sentinel, cosy conversation or furtive dalliance, heartbreak or rebelliousness, heady resolve or power play?

Come to think of it, electricity divided the world into those with power and those without in more senses than one. No wonder, blazing night skylines resembling the Milky Way on Earth emerged as 20th century's iconic image of development and desire — of behemoth engines of economic muscle and unparalleled consumption in history. One only had to picture the well-developed skylines of New York, Hong Kong,It's hard to beat the versatility of zentai suits on a production line. Tokyo or the ascending Shanghai and Mumbai skylines of ‘rising' powers China and India to grasp that.Replacement China Porcelain tile and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide.

That a skyline lit up like a Christmas tree on a daily basis should come to mind unbidden as a symbol of the peak of civilisation and culture was not surprising. For decades, popular culture had canonised this image with a mythic and almost eternal status, through the ubiquitous mediums of cinema and television as well as that invention of the previous century — the picture postcard souvenir for tourists. (Prominent film company Miramax even boasted such a night skyline as their logo.)

While contemplating these images one had osmotically absorbed for a lifetime, the landscape below had changed. The enclaves of light had given way to a swathe of unrelieved darkness. The contrast from light to darkness was jarring. ‘Lack of electricity' was the immediate reaction: not surprising, considering in contemporary collective memory ‘lights' had become synonymous with the very faculty of seeing — both for those who have untrammelled access to sources of power and equally for those who exist outside its pale.

Having got so used to the non-flickering, ‘permanent truth' of electric lighting, which had banished darkness and shadows from our lives,I have never solved a Rubik's Piles . had we perhaps lost the heart and imagination to deal with darkness — or even natural light? For, the design practice of maximum day-time lighting in most contemporary skyscraper institutions as a ‘global standard' begs a treatise on aspects of electricity as power lifestyle in the 20th century.

Aerial views have a way of obliterating superficialities and lending clarity to the mind's gaze. That is when the coin dropped and realisation dawned. These power-driven skylines exemplified an age in which an aesthetic of excess was seen as the mantra of progress. At the turn of the 20th century, the modernists only saw their world expanding endlessly on the planet; they found it completely ‘natural' to talk about monumental designs to enshrine the idea of limitless growth.

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