Monday, November 20, 2017

Simulacra in a shopping mall

Space creates meaning in the endless process of signification. You see, learn, experience, and make sense of the externalities through internal and unknown mechanisms - we often call the cognition. Kaleidoscope discovers newer experiences from the same 'objective' material world. While he is not too far from Kolkata, spending most of the time within the outer peripheries - fringes of the city, however, there isn't any of the traces! Just when kaliedoscope started to believe in the fate of the 'new town' as a place devoid of history to have a depthless present in the making, he discovers the howrah bridge.

It is not that he didn't see the miniature bridge near the place he is having late afternoon coffees every now ans then, but the Baudrillardisation didn't happen until now.

Kaleidoscope says new town to be a space without time or history because it has wiped off the entire dimensions of old place, landscape and names. There are street snd roan numbers and not names, no localities based on landscape or other features. A complete out of nowhere cityscape. Soon all the memories will die with the death of the physical bodies of the people who still have nostalgia embedded.

Meanwhile, the Howrah bridge - the miniature of it,  makes simulacra. Simulations of an imagined experience routed through miniature takes kaleidoscope to the memories of a distant past when he had to cross over the bridge every now and then. He could remember the day he was caught by the police for doing photography of the bridge in early morning or the day he purposefully missed few trains to his workplace miles away. However, such memories could only restore the space in time 'New Town - kolkata.'

Meanwhile Kaleidoscope can see Baudrillard as he sips his black tea, smiling and saying 'you too are saturated in constructs... truth conceals that there is none!'

1 comment:

  1. So Baudrillard had whisky nearby? Good pun by the way.

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