Sunday, November 28, 2010

What could be good about a palm tree that has had most of its leaves hacked?
Dirty stubs forming a pineapple pattern on a cylindrical trunk. Nothing interesting there right?

Think of opportunities, of possibilities, of pretty colors and then, look at it again, preferably in early morning sunlight:

The Pruned-Palm trunk


Hiranandani Gardens, Powai, Mumbai.

They seem like the neatest, upwardly mobile area in the suburban Mumbai.
The cluster of buildings look really nice, with their yellow arches, domes and ornaments. Right? Ummm...

Architecture-wise, they are a horror show, a road show and a circus act mixed together. Elements that have been haphazardly put together, with a lot of yellow colour and no semblance of aesthetics. However, when you see this place as a whole, you anyways feel impressed.

My guess is that this may be because of a phenomenon Barney Stinson (NPH, How I met Your Mother) calls 'The Cheerleader Effect' (google it!, UD, even FB!).

There are too many tall buildings around you that all look and feel the same. The sheer volume and detail overwhelms you into believing that it's all good work.

A (relatively) new entrant on this cruel and unusual exhibition of neatly-aligned-eyesores-in-cement is, this fountain. In the middle of buildings that are a mix of Gothic, Baroque, Greek, Roman and plain old Stack-o-Boxes styles of architecture, comes this fountain that has five Polynesian tiki columns mounted on a pile of concrete - no reason, just five tiki columns and a set of water jets. The whole thing looks plain weird and thoughtless.

Last night was different.

The Tiki-Con Fountain


I found a way to look at the ugly with a glint of pretty in my eye.

These images tell me that in everything ugly, there is a hidden angle, a perspective, that can make it look pretty.
A point of view. A point of contradiction. An Irony. A Con.
:)
.

N.B. On a lighter note, it seems to me that the bloody spot is jinxed... Before this fountain was built, Amrita Rao, shot for a forgettable film called 'Pyare Mohan' with Fardeen Khan and Vivek Oberoi (whatever the spelling of his name was, at that point of time) in the exact same spot. Sigh! there are still somethings you can't find a good way to look at, no matter how you look at it. :P

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'twas A Dark And Stormy blog by Shaurya Agarwal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
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