My friend Shashi Baliga invites me to be a part of the Literature Live festival that she is putting together and I can’t say no. Although my panel on e-literature has me rehashing a whole lot of stuff I thought went out with the ’90s (debates over whether online is better that offline, or if the internet will reduce attention spans!), the sparring with co-panelists and bloggers Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (The Compulsive Confessor) and Anupam Mukherjee (Fake IPL player) over the monetisation of creativity is fun.

Starchitect Charles Correa is the highlight of the next session. I’ve loved hanging out in his MIT building in Boston (among other things, a train runs through it, whee!) and I’m mesmerised by the humility, passion and clarity of vision he displays during the session. NGOs are a cabaret act, he declares, while explaining his thesis about how cities like Mumbai can recover from the mess they are in. Builders are pimps, he adds, smiling, stating that they aren’t creating demand, just servicing it. It is faulty land use politics that is creating the demand.

Correa talks about how there is a need for competent politicians to manage our cities professionally, citing individuals like Paris’ Chirac, New York’s Bloomberg and Chennai’s Jayalalitha as examples of leaders who’ve managed their cities well. He flits from Palo Alto to Kerala in discussing poly-centred cities and once again pleads for the opening up of Mumbai’s eastern seaboard so that the city can spread across the harbour instead of further inland.

Listening to Correa, I am reminded of Princeton professor Gyan Prakash’s new book Mumbai Fables. It contains a poignant chapter outlining Correa’s New Bombay plans and the fate they met. Other chapters include one on Doga, the Hindi comic book superhero, who fights every possible type of corruption to save the ordinary Mumbai citizen when no one else will.

I get my copy signed by Prakash at the book launch that is held at the historic and atmospheric Astoria Hotel. As the conversation moderator Naresh Fernandes reminds us, we are seated in the room where Venice, the legendary jazz club of the ’60s used to be located. He plays us a rare LP of a song, recorded within this very room. Anurag Kashyap tantalises with snippets of the screenplay of Bombay Velvet, his next film, which Prakash has scripted. It is set in a nightclub, perhaps not so different from Venice, in the jazz age of Bombay, between the 1930s to the ’60s.

Can’t wait for the film, but until then, Prakash’s meticulous research in Mumbai Fables reads pretty much like a cinematic thriller. Land records have never seemed so sexy and his close reading of the Blitz coverage of the infamous Nanavati court case of the early ’60s has me awake till 3 a.m. While the book brings into detail the glaring problems of the city, it is also an affectionate tribute to its transformative power, and its capacity for imagination and possibility. As Prakash says at the launch, he himself first came to Bombay knowing absolutely no one. Within a few years, he established a network of friends and they like him merely because of who he is, not because of his name, family background or any other connection. Would this be possible anywhere else in India besides within its cities?

The formality of a city might be its roads, buildings and other elements of its physical infrastructure but it is the informality of the city, its web of relationships, that make urban living so special, despite its pressures. And then there is also the informal city, the city that exists beyond the scope of urban planners, which is the subject of a fascinating conference called 361 Degrees that I attend at the Rangasharda auditorium in Bandra. This is turning out to be a city-centred month indeed!

Here, I learn about some really innovative user-generated design solutions created by Dharavi slum- dwellers for their own habitat. The question is, how do we scale these up to be viable alternatives to the ugly, unlivable government sponsored rehabilitation fiascos? Rahul Mehrotra is of the opinion that perhaps we are focusing too much on other megacities and are obsessed with undemocratic places like Shanghai or Dubai as models of development. The solutions to our problems, says Mehta, may emerge from other democracies, and from the global south.

Gautam Bhan’s talk on how the evictions of the urban poor get reconfigured to seem like they are in the public interest, is my personal highlight of the 361 Degrees conference. It is a searing critique of ‘people like us’ and our complicity in turning the informal city into the illegal city. Nithya Raman from Transparent Chennai is doing some very good work on mapping public toilets and other facilities in Chennai. Her finding that public toilets are built randomly, clustered near highways and not at all women friendly are sadly, not so surprising. I love their website, which allows users to map government projects and services, and also overlay them with layers containing social, political, jurisdictional, and environmental information. It’s a simple and wonderful idea that enables the same ‘people like us’ to participate in change-making instead of armchair criticism.

To Ameen Sayani, this poem more comprehensively reflects India’s current aspirations. You may argue over whether it’s a good idea or not, but I just love the way Sayani makes his case. He sings the poem in Hindi to the tune of Jana Gana Mana, and says it should be translated into all state languages and there should be an option to us as Indians about which language we want to sing it in. I remember listening to Sayani on air towards the end of his radio career, and visiting him in his office, for research, some years later. Listening to him live once again, reciting Gulzar, breaking off into Sanskrit or Bengali, is a privilege.

It’s also a privilege to read from my own book to another equally passionate city audience, as a featured author at India’s first Queer Ink book fair. This is the brainchild of the people behind India’s first queer online bookstore, and it gives readers of queer literature in the city an opportunity to connect to each other as well as the authors they love in a physical space. The fair is held at the yummy Candies restaurant, which means that for me, it’s a weekend for all kinds of food, including food for thought.

The same weekend, there is a really cool festival called Art Conspiracy that’s taking place in Bandra. Spread over 15 different venues, the festival includes belly dancing, live painting, music performances, stand-up comedy, tarot readings and poetry readings, in addition to art exhibitions, conferences and workshops. It’s a guerrilla style artistic take over of the city, and information about it spreads like a virus entirely on Facebook and Twitter.

Interior designer/architect Ashiesh Shah, throws a very cool art salon in the bedroom of his sleek new Peddar Road duplex. He’s invited Berlin based South African artist Candice Breitz, to show and discuss her award-winning video installations. Candice’s work plays with fandom and popular visual conventions, and draws loud exclamations from all of us who’ve piled up on Ashiesh’s gigantic bed. He’s working on a kickass Bollywood project right now, but I can’t reveal anything more. Let’s just say, watch this space.

Over the years I’ve come to know Ashiesh as one of the few collectors who is very engaged with both the artist and gallerist communities. As we nibble on fluffy dhokla in his open kitchen downstairs, he tells me that this evening is important not only because it marks a new chapter in his life with his new apartment, but also as a way to give something back to the art world. He is all set to host his next salon soon, with the famous furniture and product designer Patricia Urquiola, and that’s an event I certainly don’t want to miss.

The crowds at Sharmistha Ray’s diaspora art exhibition at Gallery BMB (‘A Place of their Own’) make me feel like it’s 2007 all over again. Sudarshan Shetty’s post-opening party, which I miss, is even more fun, I’m told. I’m a huge fan of Shetty’s work ever since I saw a steel dinosaur do unspeakable things to a white Jaguar car at Anupam Poddar’s Devi Art Foundation some years ago. In This Too Shall Pass, his show at the Bhau Daji Lad museum in Byculla, his imagination explodes all over the ornate Victorian interiors. There is a giant statue of himself, placed right in front of the Prince Albert statue at the museum’s entrance, that rises up more the more coins you deposit in the donation box kept next to it. There is a tower fallen over, with plastic blood leaking from it. There is a wonderfully carved wooden gateway that defies you to walk under it and avoid the sword that swings over its entrance. This is a master in full flow, and hats off to Tasneem Mehta for engineering this collaboration.

In Delhi, the Devi Art Foundation itself is moving into a new direction, with its new show, the Vernacular in the Contemporary, that focuses on folk, tribal and traditional art. At the exhibition venue, the works of approximately 60 artists are being exhibited. What is interesting is that the exhibition is also an archival venture since artists were selected, interviewed and photographed in their studios and workspaces. This fieldwork and documentation is now a source of art historical knowledge.

I’m particularly drawn to Adishakti by Neelkant Choudhary, which embodies the spirit of women that Madhubani celebrates. In this work, that took Choudhary six months to make, he presents the Mother Goddess as imagined in Sri Durga Saptashati. The goddess is personified as the universe from whom all creation emanates. The deity’s head is the sky, the eyes are the sun and the moon; the eyelashes are day and night, the ears are the directions. Her life-breath is the Vedas, music and languages. I doubt if you can get the details in the reproduction here. If you’re in Delhi, catch the show, which is on till February 28.

Verve cover artist Aditi Singh is also back after a gap of more than two years with her new show, Let it be a Heaven of Blackred Roses. Do you remember Aditi’s flower on our January 2009 issue cover? She has returned to flowers this time too, but now, they are more abstract and angry. She’s also moving outward with larger, darker, non-red works. This Dark Brightness that Falls from the Stars, The Darkness has a Glow, Blume and Burial are extremely powerful. I urge you to go see them at Gallery Chemould, before January 6.

So much to see, so little time. What does one do? Anish Kapoor is a must, no? Then the India Art Summit is coming up. Or should one do the Jaipur Litfest, despite it becoming more of a social gathering these days? Should one stay in Mumbai and have the New York based actor Sohrab Wadia move us to tears with his sensitive one man show version of the Kite Runner? (I’m so glad I did, it was a massive cathartic collective crying experience in the audience). Or should one go to Kerala to watch Sting at the Hay Festival? (Couldn’t, alas). Does one listen to Rumi in the Horniman Circle garden, or go to the ITC Grand Maratha to hear music gurus like Ralph Simon and Seymour Stein talk about how they discovered and promoted legends like Madonna? Decisions, decisions. It’s a celebration of choice, and I’m loving it.

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