7 - Their City

Summary

We have been crawling all over their city. We have all been working, travelling, enjoying and living in their worksites and their recreational spaces. Our footprints overlap with theirs when we traverse through their world. We are actors in their theatre, as customers, adversaries, invisibles, accomplices, well-wishers and benefactors, adorning the garb of software engineers, factory workers, shopkeepers, food vendors, researchers, teachers, lawmakers, the police and other ‘decent’ people. Our structures sit as stage props in their cityscape, around which their material experiences are built, while our presence and our activities colour their individual and social experiences. The cartography of sex work is one of the shapes of this city, and the labour of sex workers contributes to running this glittering metropolis. However, they are cast as the unpleasant and the execrated, the threatening and the targeted, the invisible and the visible. They are one of the many non-blind people who stroke the surface of this elephant and, consequently, the beast needs to be redrawn, rewritten and reseen from their eyes, feet and minds. Their own unique experiences of the elephant's movements and transformations need to be understood. As a preparatory step towards this, we need to acknowledge that they too are some of the people associated with the elephant.

Old Bottle of Nostalgia, New Wine of Futurism

The elephant has been restless for a long while now, persistently striving to be something else. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Bangalore's planners wanted it to become India's Singapore. During the 1990s and after, for lack of originality in nomenclature (and abundant delusion), they wanted it to become India's Silicon Valley. Each of the Comprehensive Development Plans, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, the Vision Group and other plans, charted out by the city's principal planning bodies, decade after decade, have had an undertone of image as a prime concern, with these bodies constituted by individuals from industry and commerce, by default, within their august panels.