Monitor the city’s silent stopwatches | Bombay News

MUMBAI: Let me start by putting all of this in context. If you find yourself in a difficult situation, how many public clocks have you ever seen in Mumbai? In my experience and talking to people, most have told me they don’t remember “more than three or four.” I have been walking the streets of Mumbai looking for public clocks for 28 years and a few weeks ago I found my 100th such clock in the city.

But I’m not the only one who found this clock. In these difficult times, she appeared thanks to an Instagram tag. It turns out that @twiningcities – “a photo project featuring Mumbai and Karachi, two sister cities united by a common heritage and warm waters” – tagged me in a post by @passportandpizza. It was a photo of the clock hanging at the arched entrance to the Mahim Dargah. And so, just like that, out of pure serendipity, I found my 100th clock! Even to an eye accustomed to spotting clocks or picking up on clues as to their location, I had somehow missed this one despite having visited this Mumbai landmark many times before.

I have always joked that this project, which dates back to 1996, is the first participatory photography project from a time when the term ‘crowdsourcing’ had not yet entered our lexicon. My mother was one of the first to find me a clock – she spotted the Prince’s Arc de Triomphe near Cadbury’s Junction on a bus ride. That was in 1997. Since then, I have received a steady stream of contacts from sharp-eyed friends, Mumbaikers, quiz hunters and people who have visited and enjoyed the four exhibitions of ‘Seeing Time: Public Clocks of Bombay’. It is very interesting for me to see how, over time, diverse citizens have gradually become participants in my project through a shared love of the city and the simple act of keeping their eyes open.

The growing number of artworks has also worried me for some time. When the work was presented at the Goethe-Institut in early 2020, a few weeks before the Covid lockdown, the number stood at 81. Then, a few months later, when it was presented again just before the second confinement, I managed to add five more, all thanks to the tips provided by visitors to the previous exhibition.

Here, let me take you back to the beginning of the project when after about two years of research and photography, I was invited to exhibit the work at the first Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. At that time, in 1999, I knew of 22 clocks, most of them in South Mumbai and among them were many of the usual suspects. Most of the visitors to that exhibition were surprised that this city had so many clocks. Twenty-two seemed like a large number to them. Who would have thought that my research would continue and reveal many more. At a time when the number was hovering in the 80s, I was seriously starting to think about a book on this work which may well be the earliest photographic documentation of a single aspect of a city in India. Gradually, others were added to the list and I entered the 90s. What nagged at me, however, was that if the book had been published then, how many of them might I have missed?

One day Dilip Doshi, the bespectacled former Indian cricketer from our childhood who watched cricket and a family friend, said to me, “You should definitely try for a hundred.” He is a cricketer, after all, and a century in this bat-and-ball affair has a certain significance. But I don’t think he quite grasped the import of what he had just said. Anyway, this was ’96 and, in the cricketing sense, the nervous 90s. A hundred sounds nice, a nicely rounded number and so, in the event that I declare the innings over with the publication of a book, the book with four short of a century would seem an incomplete effort. This worried me constantly. Added to my worries was the fact that no one really knows how many such clocks there actually are in this city. In any case, these are not things that can be rushed. We must continue to search and travel the miles, one step at a time, always on the lookout for revelations.

Something else had been developing in parallel in the life of the project in the weeks leading up to this sequence of events. As we were preparing the Goethe-Institut exhibition in the last months of 2019, it had been suggested to me that I should consider the construction of typologies as an organising principle. I began to separate them into categories such as ‘Residences’, ‘Office Buildings’, ‘Educational Institutions’, ‘Railways’ and buildings that stood on ‘Docklands’, etc. Most of the buildings that floated outside a category after this exercise were more recent buildings – mostly around 15-20 years old. I wondered whether these should be included in my documentation. Intending to be thorough and keep my records up to date on the Excel sheet I always filled with details of the shooting plans and various information about these clocks, I had also photographed several of them. There were some strong photographs among them, but also some indifferent ones in this mix. It was then decided that since they represented a significant number of 17 (even though in the age of wristwatches and mobile phones the modern public clock is something of an anomaly), these more recent clocks should not be excluded. And so I moved closer to the historical century and ended up at 97.

Malabar Hill resident Indrani Malkani confirmed that the Roman numeral clock at Kamala Nehru Park, which a stranger had given me information about, was still there, although dead. Number 98. Then one day, Zoru Bhathena, the intrepid city activist, shared a photo on Facebook of the main office building built in 1951 which houses the office of the manager in charge of Aarey Dairy. And There you go. I had my number 99. Until then, the farthest clock I had photographed on the Bombay map, heading north from the southernmost tip of Colaba (where the clock tower is located from Sassoon Dock), was Bhagat Bhuvan, a private bungalow of one storey and above. in the Vile Parle. Now I had pushed further north to Goregaon. A century was only a matter of time.

Of course, the search didn’t stop at 100 o’clock and two of my friends spotted a clock each in the lanes of Girgaon and Thakurdwar and another discovered one at Mulji Jetha market. Since then, a few others, old and new, have been found and photographed. Recently, Vikas Dilawari, one of the city’s best-known conservation architects, referred to a structure his driver had pointed out around Mankhurd, at the junction just before entering or exiting the highway. ‘East. It’s still a work in progress and I’ve been watching since everything was wrapped in green netting and scaffolding. From what it looks like today, it may well be Mumbai’s public clock number 107. But let me not get too far ahead of myself.

My research continues and dear readers, if you spot a clock, you can always send me an email at [email protected]. Who knows, maybe you would have helped me find one that was hiding unnoticed.