The following is a reflection on the piece written by Shilpa
Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade titled ‘Why loiter ?’
Loitering is more often than not, a matter of agency and
desire and not of choice. By recasting the meaning of the word ‘loiter’ in the
following manner, the authors shed interesting light on the meaning of loitering.
Based on experiences from the city of Mumbai, the arguments they make complicates
the debate surrounding access to public spaces, deconstruct the binaries
surrounding the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ woman and ways to disrupt existing
hierarchies. Reading the essay reminded me of a performance I witnessed once in
college performed by the theatre artist, Maya Krishna Rao. Titled ‘the walk, it
was a an awe-inspiring solo performance including the mixture of music, acting,
dance and expressive theatre. Post the performance, Rao reflected on this idea
of being in public spaces and talked about staying outside, going to the park
at 12 am in the night, not for any particular purpose but just for the heck of
it. In the present essay, the authors invoke various images: the Mumbai tapori
, the upper class woman and sex workers, to discuss various ways in which possibilities
and impossibilities of access to public spaces are imagined and and constructed
and then go on to suggest over four different ways in which loitering can serve
as a way to imagine a radically altered way of viewing the city- scape.
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