It’s eight in the morning. I’m at a street
corner in Tiruvannamalai, at the junction where the Asaliamman Koil street
meets the Tiruvoodal street. There are trucks, bullock carts and people all
going about their morning routine. As I sit here, I wonder ‘Are there footpaths
in the town of Tiruvannamalai?’ I look around to see if there is a footpath
here. There isn’t.
what I see from where i'm sitting at the junction of two streets
I’m sitting on the steps of a shop. Steps
of shops just begin or end at the edge of the road. The edge of the road belongs to walkers, to
two-wheelers that have parked themselves there, to pushcarts selling ginger and
to coconut-sellers on bicycles. The shops are just beginning to open up. Some
of the shops have a small truck or a tempo parked in front of them as goods for
the day arrive.
This is looking towards the temple and going towards Car street. Many shops aren't open yet but there's already a lot of movement on the street.
The road curves at a right angle creating a
large, triangular ‘no man’s land’ between the curve of the road and the
straight line of shops from both directions. At the corner, there is a woman
selling banana leaves, raw bananas and the banana stem. She keeps herself busy,
sprinkling water on the leaves, cutting the long leaves to make them into two.
Nearby, the woman selling flowers tells me that the market is open 24 hours.
There are wooden carts with rubber tyres drawn by bullocks that bring goods
into the market.
Here, one can see the golden roof of the shrine to the left and the Arunachala hill beyond. The architecture is more 'contemporary vernacular' - concrete one-storeyed constructions that use a mix of elements all together - the arch, the jaliwork, the steel railing and the corrugated fibreglass roof.
There are people about and some making
conversation. I can see them, but not hear them. There are no conversations to
be heard, just the loud honking of the Tamil Nadu State Road Transport
Corporation buses. Just sometimes, when there isn’t a bus passing by and a
bullock cart goes by, you hear the bells on the bullocks that drive the goods
cart. There are two-wheelers with no silencers and autorickshaws that make
louder sounds than the two-wheelers; schoolgirls go by silently on their
bicycles.
Looking towards Car street, there are flower vendors in the foreground - the biggest business at this hour of the day.
On this crowded morning, a monkey comes
onto the street as if out of nowhere, climbs up the side of a shop’s
collapsible shutter and disappears from sight. A two-wheeler stops and the
woman selling banana leaves has a customer. The two-wheeler is so convenient. You
can stop anywhere, make your purchases while you are still sitting on it and
then move on.
This market surrounds the area around the
Arunachaleswara temple that the town is known for. And, everywhere there are
smaller temples, smaller shrines, where people come to pray. These shrines are
painted in bright colours. The one at this street corner has a golden roof.
The Palani hotel is doing good business.
The restaurant can be identified from its large, red nameboard but for most
passers-by, it’s the copper pot with steam coming out of it that tells you that
tea is available here. Another banana leaf seller sharpens his knife by rubbing
it a few times against the tar road in front of him. Two cows cross the street.
The Lorry corner at Gopal Naicken street.
I came across other street corners in
Tiruvannamalai which seemed to have become the center of bazaar activity. For
instance, there was a corner which was the hub for lorries arriving with
wholesale goods. At this junction was an old heritage building that was the
office of the Agro Inputs Division of EID Parry (India) Ltd. This was on the
Gopal Naicken Street. There was also the Sri Venkateswara Lorry Booking office
at this corner. It was a relatively large corner junction making it possible
for 3-4 trucks to park here as they unloaded the goods.
The weighing scales occupy space on the street. It is convenient to unload and to measure what is purchased as soon as it arrives.
The street corner in Tiruvannamalai is as
informal an urban space as one can imagine. As a vendor on the street, you take
the space you find. If anyone questions you, you put up some resistance. Only
for a little while though. If the questioning goes longer, you do not give up.
You just move. To another street and another street corner.
The shrine typical of a Lorry drivers neighbourhood.
In his essay, ‘For whom is City Design:
Tactility versus Visuality’, Ken-Ichi Sasaki mentions that Japanese architects
have two technical terms designating types of corner: ‘de-zumi’, literally
‘projecting corner’ and ‘iri-zumi’ or ‘drawn back corner’. Sasaki says that
architect Yoshinobu Ashiwara insists on the use of this ‘drawn back corner’ and
proposes planning many such spaces for the city.
The EID Parry building that houses their Agro Inputs office in Tiruvannamalai.
In India, we seem to have already this
‘iri-zumi’ or ‘drawn back corner’. We need to only become aware of it and
choose how we will use them. For now, it is not the planners who think about
them or who use them, nor the administrators. It is the walkers and the
consumers of our informal urban spaces who transform these corners into ‘spaces
of commerce’ and much more.
Related Posts:
In his book, ‘A Geography of Time’, Robert Levine points out that cities and cultures across the world seem to keep time a bit differently from one another. In his research, Levine works towards getting objective indicators of the pace of life. He measures people’s walking speed, their talking speed and their work speed. He finds that places that have warmer climates tend to have a slower pace of life. Places that are economically vital tend to be faster. The vital economy puts pressure on people to make every moment count.
Coming back to the watermelons, when does one order them online? When we don’t have the time to go out to shop for them on the street? An image of it becomes available for us in virtual space, to see and to order. No real space is used. But, the watermelons that are delivered to our homes are real and they need to be stored in real space before the final dispatch happens. These watermelons occupy real space, but not street space. This does not mean that cities where the pace of life is faster have streets that are empty with everything being bought or sold in virtual space.
On one side of the Krishnarao Park at Basavanagudi in Bangalore, there sits a watermelon vendor occupying a huge part of the footpath there. Perhaps, it is the wide footpath and the proximity to Krishnarao Park that makes this an attractive location for him. It is anyway a matter of a few months only. Watermelons are a seasonal fruit and he will not occupy this space forever. But, these watermelons change the visual landscape of the street.
You walk through almost any street in the Gandhi Bazaar or Basavanagudi area and there isn’t a dull moment. We do not in India need to plan for an “active street edge” as some cities in western countries do. Here, we have them already. What we do need to do is to figure out how we can smoothen the conflict between what street space belongs to the car, what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vendor. How does one do that?
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