ALL BERLIN JOHANNESBURG DELHI SAO PAULO TEL AVIV  

Saturdays, Men and Bridges – The curious case of Suicidal Insanity by Amitesh Grover

OK, So the story so far, after hours of deliberation and knee-scratching, this is what it seems like – In the beginning the Universe was created. This made a lot of women very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. Umm no, what the hell am I reading…

So, how did we get here? Simple. We got very bored and depressed, so one of us went and plugged herself in to an external computer feed. She talked to the computer at great length and explained her view of the Universe to it. The computer, after listening for a whole long day, and evening, and night, and onto the next day, just when the thoughts were seeming more hopeful.. committed suicide.

No, thats not correct. I mean, the computer did commit suicide eventually, but before it did, it flashed a message, it said – Life… Don’t talk to me about life. And then, it flashed two, no, three, yes, three archive photos of man-made bridges, which looked like the ones they made back in the 1980’s… You know like the ones that hung in the air in exactly the way that bricks don’t. Men made bridges all the time, to surmount obstacles like rivers, gorges, seas and Saturdays. To tell you the truth, I never could get the hang of Saturdays. The world today, in 2081, is far more tolerable without Saturdays. Saturdays, like Men, disappeared at around 2031… Curiously enough, the only thing that goes through my mind a lot nowadays is this year 2031. You see 2+0+1+3=6. 6 is the number that represents imperfection. Man was created on the sixth day, so was the serpent. Before 2031, we had six days for labour and temptation. The world stopped every seventh day. 6 is also a number that we do not have anymore, and many women have speculated that if we knew exactly why Saturdays – the sixth day of the week – went out of fashion, we will get to know a lot more about why and how Men disappeared than we do now.

One other thing, most bridges also fell in 2031, and bridges can only fall if there are earthquakes. Massive earthquakes, were there six earthquakes in 2031 as well? Saturdays, bridges and Men all gone together! Is there a link here? what happened to them? Could the photos of bridges lead us to an answer? Is the computer trying to tell us something? Did Men build the computer to tell the story of their disappearance? of their extinction? I think I am beginning to see the irony in this revelation now…

So, we atleast know this – that men built three types of bridges – The I.T.Z. bridge commonly known as “Daring”, the Y.M.A. bridge popularly known as “Audacity”, and the N.Z.M. bridge called “Suicidal Insanity.” Before I go on, I must qualify for the benefit of those who are well fed here, that I am quoting from memory, and the computer.

The computer also flashed a message – It said ‘I speak of none but the machine which is to come after me.’ I wonder why this message was necessary. And then it kept flashing this  photograph, zooming in and out, as if, it was trying to scream out louder and louder. It was the image of a vast, foggy, city of New Delhi, or as we now call it ‘The Family’ and of this legendary bridge, 3.3 miles long, with the river Munaya 150 feet below. The number 6 again. This bridge was the best example in the world of the third type – N.Z.M or “Suicidal Insanity”. It seemed more like a figment of the imagination, a ghostly ironwork extrusion vanishing in the monsoon murk, stretching to some otherworld. The image was disorienting to look at, that latticed half-bridge leaving off in midair, like some sort of Surrealist painting. It gave off a foreboding. Could this bridge have something to do with the end of Men?

By 2031, The Family was now just another one of our typical 600-million-person Indian metropolises, one of the famous Furnaces of India because of its unremitting summer heat. Daytime temperatures regularly topped seventy degrees here, which led everybody to smile for longer duration, leading to uncontrollable facial twitches and hemifacial spasms (HFS). Ofcourse all the trees had been chopped down by then—and the sun rarely shone. Meanwhile, The Family continued to explode in the noonday of the city’s hungry expansion. The past was being abandoned at an astonishing rate, the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings replacing the old neighborhoods. Everything—and everyone—was disposable. Schisms formed. The bridge loomed. Loss led to despair, which, in turn, led to Mrs. Jindal.

Mrs. Jindal is seen in this photo right next to the foot of the bridge. As I searched more about her, I found out that she had a paunch, blackened teeth, and the raspy cough of an avid smoker, and she had the eyes of a hawk, so that even when she smoked and puffed and smoked again, smoking a cheap brand named after The Family itself, her vision could pierce through her smoke. She saw everything.

Six months earlier, working as a driver for a transportation company, in 2031, Mrs. Jindal had read a story about the bridge in the papers, about mysterious jumpings having been sighted of lone men raining to their end off the bridge of Suicidal Insanity. Soon after, she quietly took her post at the West foot of the Insanity, the bridge that is. Ever since then, when not working at her job, she’d been up on the bridge, trying to fathom what was happening. This is what she found out – At least once every hour, a man, reasonably occupied and seeming like he was in a hurry to get somewhere, stopped, turned, climbed up the railing and jumped off the bridge to his death in the river below. Every hour, this happened with the precision of a clock, and it was becoming more frequent by the hour. The local people of The Family became superstitious and suggested that somebody should be ordered to smear butter over the steel railing of the bridge and also putting up notices asking men not to commit suicide there. But, there is no evidence of this having worked.

At some point, we don’t know exactly when, Mrs. Jindal decided to do something about it. She started pulling would-be jumpers from the railing. According to her blog, she was able to save 15 jumpers—and in the process had taken on a local legendary status of one of The Family’s great Mothers. One account on her blog was especially riveting, almost like a blow-by-blow of life and death on the Suicidal Insanity. One afternoon, around a hundred men came together, hand-in-hand. They were dressed in dhotis, some in ties and suits and others in jeans and t-shirts. They walked together, smiling, chatting with each other, sharing jokes and making each other read SMSes on their phones. There was a peculiar morbidity in the air, and purple colored birds flew over the bridge. At one moment, they all turned towards the railing, and started to jump off as if they were genetically programmed to do so. No hesitation, nor sign of sorrow, nor misery. It was as if their time was up, and they knew it. And they were fine with it. Much like how pigeons return to their breeding place when they are about to die, only these men were not that old. When Mrs. Jindal tried saving one of them, and pulled him off the railing back onto the bridge, the fellow displayed his first sign of rage. He was confounded, like when somebody is stopped from getting to a  train ticket counter just when his turn arrives, but is not given an explanation for it. He seemed to have become glass-eyed, and Mrs. Jindal felt this compelling need to let him be. He dragged himself back on the railing, and jumped off, only his flight down to the river was much slower than others before him, it was more like… Saturday. This had profound effect on Mrs. Jindal, although she says that the moment was not very poetic.

After some time, a total of how many men had committed suicide and how many remained, was hard to come by. Similar news reports began to appear from other major bridges across the world. The authorities around the world refused to count the tens and thousands of suicides being committed by men, simply because there was no way of conducting such a massive statistical study. Whatever strict bookkeeping records we have from 2031 do not make sense anymore, because we have also lost the Number 6 from our numeric system.

What is clear is this – It seems the governments of the day simply ignored the problem, hoping it would go away, or maybe thinking in the most Darwinian terms of suicide as its own method of population control and evolution. All we know is that day after day, week after week, month after month, Men came, they came alone, they came in pairs, in groups and in large crowds to end their lives. Most ended up in the River below, but some missed it by an inch or two, but they were all gone by the end of 2031, all but 15 whom Mrs. Jindal managed to save. It is believed that a small number of men still meet at the East foot of Suicidal Insanity every year to lights candles, sing songs, offer their thanks. We dont know for certain if they do, when they do, or if they have not had their sex-change operation yet.

Men, who were almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, were also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. They lived in fear of the time they called, “The coming of the Great Sunny Saturday”. And, it all ended without a single drop of tear!

Perhaps I’m old and tired but I always think that the chances of finding out what really was going on in 2031 are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, “hang the sense of it” and keep yourself occupied.

Text rearrangement, rewriting and original writing – Amitesh Grover
For Maya Rao, 2081 – Delhi Odyssey, Max Mueller Bhavan/Goethe Insitut, India
With Christopher Roth and Georg Diez
Saturday, March 02, 2013

Credit where due –
Reportage on suicides by Michael Paternity, Big Issues, GQ
Fragments from Douglas Adams’ writings – The world in 2081 has several of his prognoses manifested into outbreaks, he himself having attained the status of a prophet in the form of a ‘sentient puddle’.

 

 

 



the archive

Preservation of the Future, Delhi, 2081 tries to remember what might have been for the research audience who themselves see their own story. Archivists around the world examined items in our present and determined their new past, all in one day, Saturday, March 2, 2081.

Index Number: 0504 2107
Date of entry: 03/20/2061
Location: Exit Ramp 29, Highway 101, Japan
Size: spherical solid and ring with approximate radius of 22mm
Date of manufacture: 2019
Notes: Fragment of a Netsuke. An ivory hare‘s ruby eye. Ludwig Engel

Index Number: 0520-2020
Date of entry: 05/22/2020
Location: mud hole in Socialist Republic of Europe
Size: 18 cm
Date of manufacture: 2055
Notes: High-sec key on key ring with two non-descript tags. Ludwig Engel

Date of entry: 03/20/2069
Location: Reykjavik, ISLAND
Size: Triangular Shape of length of approximately 2.5cm, and Cylinder of length of 8.5cm
Date of manufacture: 2067
Notes: INTREX‘ self-optimization plug; Sanskrit language/culture extension package,
Ludwig Engel

Index Number: 0526-2309
Date of entry: 11/25/2066
Location: Nantes, Loire-Atlantique, Pays-de-la-Loire, France Jupiter 47° 13‘ 0“ North, 1° 33‘ 0“ West
Date of manufacture: before 2073
Notes: ragment of Jupiter; retrieved by Exoplanet Explorer ‚Kepler-20e‘ Ludwig Engel

Index Number: 0403 2710
Date of entry: 09/12/2054
Location: Holy Lands, Tibetan Republic, China
Size: approximately 6cm
Date of manufacture: 2035
Notes: Ticket for Band-Aid Music Festival Dalian China.
Ludwig Engel

Location: 33°43′N,73°04′E
Size: 100 mm x 60 mm x 7 mm
Date of manufacture: approx. 2022
Notes: The whistle hung around her neck and swung like a pendulum ticking off time until it fell into the grass. I found it resting in a stand of poppies, six new stems, wide, with dandelion fur, stitched into a fabric of yellow draped over burnt packed earth, holding above a set of glowing and burning lanterns, and floating fragile as butterfly wings. The breeze of a white horse‘s leg passed by, wrinkling the petals at their edges and they glowed like embers swollen by bellows, dancing like anemones with their tender lips opening in a slient cadence against the passing tide.
Hugh Stockton

Index Number: 0535 2032
Date of entry: 04/01/2032
Location: Lower Saxony, Northern Kingdom, Developed Lands
Size: square with edges of approximately 30cm and rectangular solid with dimensions of 1cm by 5cm.
Date of manufacture: 2024
The activities of the British Library for Development Studies are well documented, a covert operation set up by ultra nationalists to promote critical re inventions of the 20th century decline of the former UK in part by destroying evidence incompatible with their world view. It is not clear why this device is so clearly labelled, perhaps because the agency adopted the view it was best to “hide in plain sight”. Technically the device belongs to a transitional period during which the physical carrying of digital data seemed less absurd than it does today. Bob Last

Index Number: 0527 2013
Date of entry: 05/02/2020
Location: Parcel 65, Chamber 111, Ditch 7.2
Date of manufacture: 2025
Notes: this is an Emotimometer manufactured in Weisbaden in 2015, modelled on the classic 20th century mercury thermometer. The Emotimeter purported to measure the intensity of ambient radio frequency radiation surrounding the user and the consequent emotional damage. The liquid inside in fact just responded to the level of static electricity generated by the user, as this was likely to be higher in heightened emotional states a false correlation appeared.. Before the technology was exposed as a fraud its use became irrelevant on the introduction of sub atomic data transport and the disappearance of radio frequency communications. Nonetheless the illusory emotional feedback could be addictive and the devices were manufactured up until circa 2025. Bob Last

Index Number: 0408 2023
Date of entry: 05/03/2033
Location: Third penninsula
Size: 12x10x6 cm
Date of manufacture: 2035
This item is an unused sex toy mass produced at the peak of what we now know of as the Korean Bubble. The rotating blades could be used to generate stimulation in a number of ways, whilst the device is skinned as military vehicle of the time thus encoding power relations in the moment of sexual stimulation. It is not very old having been produced in 2035 in a factory in the former DMZ between North and South Korea. Bob Last

Index Number: 0507-2315
Date of entry: 02/03/2076
Location: Hebron, Boone County Kentucky 39°3′57′′N 84°42′4′′W
Date of manufacture: approx. 2069
this blue cylinder is of a type most often found in former religious buildings known as “Atelier”, here mendicants attempted to use scavenged writing implements to recapture the lost art of physical mark making, entire Atelier’s would be dedicated to laborious hand drawn reproductions of digital captures of iconic “Graffiti” or “Tags”. Mendicants saw themselves as continuing a medieval tradition of illustrating holy manuscripts. This particular cylinder is not especially rare as the “Blue” Atelier which hoped to move its members closer to the sky was for a brief period a global phenomenon. None of the actual hand drawn reproductions have survived. Bob Last

Index Number: 0515-2000
Date of entry: 7.4.2055
Location: Azerbaijan
Size: 6.5cm
Date of manufacture: 1992
Notes: To me, this thing looks priceless, but I know, from my research, that this bracelet was once of absolutely no value, aside from its extreme kitschiness, that it was worn by “rednecks” and “dead end kids” and could be bought for what is now .005 Yuan, a laughable amount. An image comes to me, unbidden, of three teenagers in a red pick up truck at sunset, heading down the Wulumuqi Highway, flirting, shouting over the noise of the tires, the engine—one of the girls is wearing this bracelet. Hardly responsible archiving, to write your own association, the fragment of a dream you had this morning. Nonetheless, it is now documented. old friend

Index Number: 0412-2101
Date of entry: 11/23/2040
Location: Creative Bakery 2.0 / 52° 22′ N, 9° 44′ O
Size: 85 mm x 45 mm x 20 mm
Date of manufacture: 11/22/2050
Notes: The object comes from a priestess of the post-Miasma Shining Goddess cult. They believe the rays of the sun and moon circle around adepts heads like halos and give them the power to read the minds of others. Victoria Nelson

Index Number: 0535 2032
Date of entry: 04/01/2032
Location: Developed Lands
Date of manufacture: 2024
Notes: Primitive signs. Representation of the uncertainty principle, and motion detectors. Used as illustrative model in schools in the late thirties and forties of our century. Obsolete. Kerim Seiler

Index Number: 0404-2034
Date of entry: April 8 / 2072
Location: 234 Meter in the air at 52° 5′ N, 23° 42′ O
Size: 142 mm x 110 mm x 0.8mm
Date of manufacture: approx. 2047
Notes: In the 2040s, the years following the collision of the asteroid Apophis with earth on April 13, 2036 (commonly known as A-Day), the surviving inhabitants of Delhi developed a memorial ritual to commemorate the destroyed city and the victims of the impact. This ritual was founded on the discovery of the mobility card at hand, one of the few intact relicts found under the city’s rubble. The RFID chip of the card still contained the records of its owner’s daily route through the city, up to the day of the fatal impact. Even though none of the bus stops, metro stations or any of Delhi’s landmarks had survived – the asteroid having flattened 99% of the city – a growing number of people met each April 13 and spent the day retracing the anonymous commuter’s trajectories. Meeting first at Peeragarhi, they walked along the Green Line to what used to be Inderlok Metro Station and “changed” to the Red Line, continuing eastwards along the ruins to the no longer existent Tis Hazari. With a short detour south to Sadar Bazar they would then turn around and retrace their steps along the imaginary tracks until they had reached the anonymous commuter’s home in Peeragarhi once again. Eva Wilson

Index Number: 0406-2005
Date of entry: 11/12/2069
Location: Grand Canyon
Size: 4cm
Date of manufacture: 2069
Notes: Talisman (people believed that energy meant power)
Robot Makeup. This must be robot makeup, right? This was the year irony reached its heights, when everything was an inside joke. “Chromatic Pitch Instrument” “Pyramid” “Made in”— everything written on the outside– these were only clues to what it definitely was NOT. All we could do was look at the thing and draw our own conclusions: the boxy shape, the clasp, the utilitarian aesthetic. Robots were crazy about all that shit. That was the year robots wanted to look like robots, and humans made holes in their cheeks using robot-blush, made of silver polish. Ludwig Engel

Date of entry: 01/01/2006
Location: USA34° 32′ N, 69° 10′ O
Size: 60 mm x 90 mm x 11 mm
Date of manufacture: approx. 2046
Notes: Safety Matches Inc.‘s SSKIA (‚Sharp Shooter‘s Kit for Instant Assassinations‘) Ludwig Engel

Index Number: 0509-2080
Date of entry: 08/19/2080
Location: Puerto Soledad, 51°42′S , 57°51′O
Size: XXS
Date of Entry: 10/11/2021
Description: City Kit
This photograph is deceptive. The blue background is sky, and a helicopter crane is out of shot. The helicopter crane is carrying a massive bag by its yellow electromagnet. There is a master plan stitched onto the bag. The black circles are round parks, the red circles are round towers, and the blue stitching is a canal. Inside the bag are the building materials, which have been factory-packed, and are now on their way to a lunar site.
OR
Osmia ribifloris coccinellidae
This is the world‘s newest, and smallest, species of water insect. It was unexpectedly bred by a group of scientists in East Timor, laboratory-cultivated and grown to full-size in just three days. The animal is a mongrel – a cross between the honey bee and the ladybird. Osmia ribifloris coccinellidae have distinctive pearl-like yellow antennae, and hundreds of black, red, and blue pollen baskets all over their almost-orthogonal bodies. The wax produced and secreted from mirror glands on the inner sides of the sternites on their abdomens has been shown to cure a host of human diseases. Jack Hogan

Index Number: 0522-2060
Date of entry: 8.8.2035
Location: Georgia Size: 5cm
Date of manufacture: 2035
Notes: The year before the men were excluded was when things really got phallic. Penis- shaped kids’ cereal, dick-shaped snowmen, every cloud shaped like you-know-what. Psychoanalysts went out of business, the subtext of everyone’s dream was clear. Later, huddled in cellars, under dripping bus stations, trying to keep one another warm, the men agreed things had gone too far. That perhaps if they had abstained from that final thrust, no pun intended, they would have remained on top, no pun intended. Regardless, witnessing this object, a flash of nostalgia for the Other private part, no longer hidden in underwear, but objectified and demeaned. As I write, a flash of regret, of apology. Store it away. new friend

Index Number: 0536-2719
Date of entry: 7/02/2058
Location: Trash Can, Apartment 89, 52° 31′ N, 13° 24′ O
Size: 45 mm x 11 mm x 11 mm
Date of manufacture: approx. 2012
Notes: The earring originally belonged to the mayor‘s daughter‘s best friend Sophy. When Ralf found it on the playground he was 7. He kept in his special box for another 8 years and gave to his first girlfriend. She wore it during her teenage years in her right ear. She gave it to her goddaughter many years later during her law exam for good luck. Martin K.

Index Number: 0534 2820
Date of entry: 06/15/2044
Location: Rockport, Maine, Southern Lands
Size: square with edges of approximately 30cm
Date of manufacture: 2028
Notes: This fabric was found wedged into a tight knot between two rocks on a beach in the Northern Lands. In the Age of the New Old, the manufacture of nostalgia extended to fabrics like this one. Ancient cloths of India had been shrunken to squares in the time of the great American West, and this age of freedom was now mimicked again for a brief intense period from 2027 to 2029, with square dancing, phrases like ‘Howdy’ and ‘Partner’, and squinting without speaking like John Wayne, becoming commonplace. Hobo-ing, and Riding the Trains , became the new surfing, more than a fad, it was a last desperate gasp for autonomy, for authenticity, for “spontaneity”. hmm

Index Number: 0524-2077
Date of entry: 06/15/2077
Location: Waset New Empire 25°41′N 32°39′E
Size: 185 mm x 185 mm
Date of manufacture: 2046
Notes: Fragments of envelope lining of the numerous letters Bai Ling wrote in an attempt to reconcile with Wang Jin Wen. After Bai Ling moved to the New Empire, Wang Jin Wen moved back into 2046 after returning from the mental hospital. She was a shell of a former self, and was still very depressed over the loss of her Japanese boyfriend. old friend


Index Number: 0409-2041
Date of entry: 09/11/2041
Location: Apartment 209 / 40° 43′ N, 74° 0′ W
Date of manufacture: identified numbers 8410 288 072 / 03/2013
Notes: The card belonged to Mr Bob Last. Manager Of Gang of Four and Human League. Bands that composed and performed Synth-Pop, sounds that have little to do with Rigveda, Samaveda and Yajurveda. The music has been deleted from the Server in 2028, and Mr Last lost a part of his brain, the pons. He could neither control his bladder function nor his sleep. The golden card gave him access to a zero gravity hub where the physical disabilities were compensated. Victoria Nelson Index Number: 0523-2079
Date of entry: 06/06/2079
Location: not identified Size: 85 mm x 39 mm x 10 mm
Date of manufacture: approx. 1998
Notes: The keys do not unlock locks. Sam

Index Number: 0501-2041
Date of entry: 05/07/2041
Location: Pacific Nuclear Wastelands, 35°41′22.22′′N, 139°41′30.12′′E
Date of manufacture: Serial Production approx. 1979-2001
Notes: Medi-technical instrument used by male humans in the second in the setortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time. Engel Ludwig

Archivists: Victoria Nelson, Anh-Lihn Ngo, Kerim Seiler, Eva Wilson, Bob Last, Ludwig Engel, Hugh Stockton, Jane Clark Chermayeff, Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge, Marta Fernandez, Bettina Kraus, Carson Chan, Liat Lavi, Avigail Reiner, Leah Abir, Moritz Kung, Bec Brittan, Felix Burrichter, Jack Hogan, Jessica Chermayeff , Jesse Levine, Peter Christensen, Paul Feigelfeld, Anna Hanson, Martin Klosterfelde, Matthias Boetteger, Arno Brandlhuber. Organized by Sam Chermayeff



New Delhi TALK

Suman Sridhar’s first pieceThe host Mayanka Davemukherji:
Ladies, welcome to the year 2081.
We just experienced a performance by the musician and performance artist Suman Sridhar who will be back soon.
Today is the 2nd of March 2081
Today we know.
Today we celebrate.
It is 100 years ago.
Today is the anniversary of the Grand Transition.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Because we celebrate these events we have met here to reconstruct what happened.
Memory is lost.
Knowledge is lost.
We have to reconstruct the past.
We have to put the pieces together.
We meet today to celebrate and to find some answers.

Our first speaker is Gurmeet Rai, a conservation architect who does research about a road of knowledge.  She looks for stories on buildings.
These stories were lost. Welcome Gurmeet.

We call now Johannesburg.
Gabi Ngcobo from the Center for Historical Reenactments was part of the Joburg conference. She meditated on the speculative death of Nelson Mandela and on archives.
Hello Gabi…

Our next performer is the artist Sheba Chhachhi.
Sheba is presenting fragments of her archive on women’s protest.
It all started a hundred years ago, in 1981.

Now please welcome back Suman Sridhar for her second performance:

Suman Sridhar and Sheba Chhachhi.
Now to Geandre Tomazoni from Bijari, the artist group from Sao Paulo.
Sao Paulo where the mayor prohibited in the beginning of the century any form of public advertising.
It was an act of resistance.
Welcome Sao Paulo.

Our next guest is Seline Baumgartner.
She was an artist from Switzerland.
Now her clone Seline Baumgartner has found fragments of a project on hope conducted by the original Seline Baumgartner.
Welcome Seline 5.4
Now please follow me outside where Maya Krishna Rao is expecting us with a story recorded by a man:
Amitesh Grover.
Is it true?
Everything is true and nothing is permitted.

  Suman Sridhar and Samara Chopra







Contributors so far for the 2081 New Delhi TALK on March 2, 13:00

actress and yoga teacher Maya Krishna Rao + musician and producer Suman Sridhar + literature and theatre specialist Dr. Anita Cherian + Cybermohalla’s & Trickster City’s Shveta Sarda + the conversation architect Gurmeet S. Rai + artist Seline Baumgartner + artist Sheba Chhachhi + Amitesh Grover will organize a third performance in New Delhi + live from São Paulo via skype: the artist group Bijari + from Berlin: singer and actress Julia Hummer + in collaboration with the architects Sam Chermayeff and Arno Brandlhuber from Berlin we will present an archive at 18:30 + on film: Anne Tismer, the Children Chorus of the Bayerische Staatsoper, Veruschka Lehndorff…

Goethe-Institut New Delhi Max Mueller Bhavan
3 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-110001



New Delhi

New Delhi is a city like an architect’s day dream – what Mahandra Raj constructed around 1981 could easily be seen from the future as a machine created to save world knowledge. We will have scientists, archeologists, medical experts, artists and mystics, all women, to explain: What happened, between 1981 and 2081? The event will take place on March 2 & 3, with the support of the Goethe Institute. There will be a one-day conference and a city walk.

2081, What Happened? The New Delhi Congress
is generously supported by the  Goethe Institute Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi





Amitabha Mukhopadhyay’s Megalopolis One 2080, A.D.

A Science Fiction Tale of a Futuristic Society and Economy
Welcome to Megalopolis One, a mega-city that has cutting-edge technology, a thriving and abundant ecosystem and planet, and responsible citizens who care about the greater good.

Anirudh Mukhopahyay is the chief executive officer of Universal Developers, a world-renown corporation that is the technology giant of 21stcentury. Mukhopahyay and his dedicated team of engineers have created and cultivated a mega country club atmosphere that is the norm for countries worldwide. In the pipeline, are similar utopian-like satellite stations on Mars, Jupiter and the Moon.

There is no such thing as hard physical labor as the world population has evolved to a thriving, technologically-advanced environment. Floating cities, enormous skyscrapers and a high-speed tube that carries the public quickly and efficiently to their destination is what makes up this buzz of efficiency. The economy thrives and the planet is a growing, living, green garden of abundant flora and fauna that supplies an endless food supply. Hydrogen fuel has replaced less inefficient and pollution-making energy sources. No one leaves a carbon footprint anymore.

Sound like a dream world? Wait until you read the ending–you’ll think differently about your environment and appreciate the steps those in the technology and engineering fields will be doing those days to better our future. Mukhopadhyay writes a sharp, intelligent novel filled with richly developed characters, dynamic, descriptive narration, and a very believable look into the future. This is one novel that brilliantly pushes the threshold of conventional thinking and one that you’ll remember for quite some time.