start

"You want to see the goat?"

Pasolini nodded. Salman Khan motioned to a black one tethered near the stall. Its eyes, unreadable, caught the flickering neon from a distant sign.

"For sacrifice?" Pasolini asked.

Salman laughed, shaking his head. "For eating. But it is the same, no?" He pulled the rope, guiding the animal closer. "In your country, the goat wears another face. Tragedy—trágos, the goat song." [1]

Pasolini crouched, watching the animal breathe. "A scapegoat," he murmured. "To cleanse the sins of others. The ancient Greeks dressed in goat skins to perform their plays—the tragic mask of sacrifice." [2]

Salman wiped his hands on a rag. "In our world, it is purity. A gift to the gods. But tell me, in your world, do the gods still accept sacrifices?" He did not wait for an answer. "This is the contradiction, isn’t it? The same act, but two meanings. A common body, yet divided." [3]

Pasolini stood, brushing the dust from his knees. "Indifference, between ways of thought, is much more difficult to surmount than difference." [4]

Salman nodded. "Because the same thing can be bitter to one and sweet to another." [5] He patted the goat’s back. "Even a broom is different in the hands of two men." [6]

The neon flickered again, catching the blade of a butcher’s knife as it slid through muscle.

"Your people say tradition must be preserved, unchanged," Salman continued. "That pollution is dangerous." [7] He gestured around. "But look—this is not the same India my grandfather knew. These streets, this city, even the way I speak… all of it, touched by foreign hands. And yet, it is ours."

Pasolini exhaled. "Cross-breeding—that’s my cultural ideal." [8]

Salman laughed again. "Then perhaps you understand. This is not contamination. It is something new."

"And what do we call this alloy?" [9]

Salman shrugged. "Mumbai"

Barber, A Companion to World Mythology [1]; Girard, The Scapegoat [2]; Serres, The Incandescent [3]; Jullien, The Book of Beginnings [4]; Campanella, The Book and the Body of Nature [5]; Serres Latour, Conversations on Science Culture and Time [6]; Girard, Violence and the Sacred [7]; Noble, The Music of Life [8]; Serres, Variations on the Body [9]

Taxi Uncle (grinning): Azad Maidan, sahab. Where the British once ruled. They called it civilization. Railways. Parliament. The right to vote. Such fine gifts—wrapped around cannon fire.

Pasolini: And odd-looking Indians in British sportswear. But also... “because Black Africa was without a practical system of writing, it has nurtured veneration for the spoken word, of the ‘life-giving word.’”[2]

Taxi Uncle: Still, sahab, we play their games. We govern with their laws. The line between pollution and property—blurred. “By generalizing or globalizing dirt and so erasing the borders where polluting starts or stops, the right to property suddenly reaches an intolerable threshold and becomes literally unbearable.”[3]

Pasolini: A poisoned gift. “While colonial structures imposed foreign epistemologies and value systems that polluted local knowledge frameworks...”[4] They also cracked them open. Freedom twisted through chains.

Taxi Uncle: And still we worship the tools they left us. Parliament. Flags.

Pasolini: Maybe worship is the only way to survive. The artifacts... “The things they left behind—become vessels for cultural revitalization.”[5]

Taxi Uncle: How can we leave it behind, sahab? Even rebellion wears borrowed shoes.

Pasolini: We don’t leave. We live inside. “It’s that tension—between colonial pollution and its repurposing as vessels for cultural revitalization—that shapes our struggle today. This reveals the complex dialectic at the heart of postcolonial identity formation.”[6]

Taxi Uncle: Azad Maidan, sahab. Once, they tied rebels to cannons. 1857. Now—2019—we sing "Hum Dekhenge" and wave flags at Modi.

Pasolini: Maybe voices are all that’s left. After empire, after fire, after forgetting— only breath remains, breaking against the dust. "Suddenly a [Square] in Bombay becomes a place from which a Marathi poem is translated into English by a poet who speaks both the ornate language of a devotional dialect – an abandoned spark of the world’s lusty fires – and the demotic slang reminiscent of the Black Panther poets who had a lasting influence on Dalit poetry."[7]

Colonial cliché, often repeated in colonial propaganda [1]; Amadou Hampâté Bâ, _A Spirit of Tolerance_, p. 16 [2]; Michel Serres, _Malfaisance_, p. 19 [3]; Zimring, _Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste_, Vol. 2 [4]; Michel Serres, _The Incandescent_, p. 113 [5]; Thomas Piketty, _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_ [6]; Homi K., Bhabha. The Location of Culture [7]

New data sets of foreign assets

Pasolini stirred his espresso; the spoon clinked like a church bell.

“You build things here,” he said gently, “but they're built on something already broken.”

Akshay smiled. “The British, again?”

“Not only them,” Pasolini said. “Internal migration too. Waves that never started, never end. Without migration, urban life cannot sustain itself.”[1]

Akshay leaned back. “I migrated from the south myself. No colonizers pushed me—just opportunity.”

Pasolini nodded. “Yet even opportunity leaves residues. Bombay has more than 100,000 scavengers scrounging daily at the world’s largest open dump.”[2]

“Better to scavenge dreams,” Akshay countered, “than be stuck where nothing moves. Migration intermixes people continuously.”[3]

Pasolini smiled faintly. “You philosophize your spreadsheets.”

Akshay shrugged. “But it's true. Mumbai is a networked city, defined by those arriving daily. Why exclude the Bombay consultant subcontracted to program this very design?”[4]

“Migration isn't neutral,” Pasolini replied softly. “It carries old contaminations into new places—a kind of internal colonialism. The immigrant is first a worker who lost his name, no longer perceptible as such.”[5]

Akshay sipped water from a steel tumbler. “But isn't anonymity freedom? No caste name, no village pressure. Just labor, movement, data.”

Pasolini looked out the window. “Freedom bought through forgetting… is that true freedom? Or another face of colonialism?”

“You sound nostalgic,” Akshay smiled.

Pasolini shook his head. “Not nostalgia. Recognition. Mumbai thrives precisely because it's contaminated, multi-ethnic, multi-layered—constantly rewritten by those who arrive.”

Outside, a child chased a mango rolling through traffic. Pasolini murmured, “Migration separates the different molecules.”[6]

Akshay tapped his temple. “Still, we grow. '432 million middle class by 2021—up from 14% in 2005.'[7] We even plan vacations now.”

Pasolini laughed softly. “You dream in spreadsheets. 'As long as things are experienced as a source of wealth or satisfaction… they are bearable.'”[8]

Akshay leaned forward. “And your alternative? Another rebellion, another goat sacrificed in Crawford Market?”

Pasolini considered quietly. “Maybe there is no alternative—just recognizing the cycles. Comfort is the new justice.”[9] He paused at the door. “And justice has never been so well-coded.” Pasolini paused, then added softly: “In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level crossing feedback loop.”[10]”

References [1]; Greenspan, Shanghai Future Modernity Remade [2]; Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste [3]; Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop [4]; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society [5]; Easterling, Extrastatecraft [6]; Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste [7]; Sandhya Krishnan, Understanding India’s Evolving Middle Classes [8]; Marx, Collected Works [9]; Koolhaas, Junkspace with Running Room [10]

Chained by Legacy
Crawford Market rose before me, a wound dressed in red brick, a hand still gripping the city’s throat. History gnawed at it, and now it stood feverish, neither dead nor fully alive. Colonialism was pollution—psychological, cultural—seeping into a city’s bones, corrupting its rhythms. The West had left, but its shadow remained.

Inside—flesh and fruit, the raw matter of survival. Goats’ throats slit behind plastic drapes, their heads stacked in trays, eyes blank in death. The air thick, unbreathable. Luckily, a wide avenue was cut clean across the island, allowing breezes from the Arabian Sea to reach Crawford Market, whose butcher shops and produce stalls badly needed the ventilation. [10]

State of affairs
Outside—another world. The market spilling over itself, metastasizing onto footpaths, choking the roads. Street dwellers, hawkers, and scavengers are the worst sufferers, as they spend most of their days in congested intersections where the air pollution is most concentrated. [9] The blueprint had failed; the city had redrawn itself. Like Shanghai, Mumbai has become a city filled with street-level entrepreneurs, many of whom operate in a shadow economy where the line between the formal and the informal is deliberately blurred. [8]

Above us, neon signs flickered, their promises already peeling at the edges. Vodafone banners and Bollywood posters [4] warped in the heat, selling fantasies I could never believe in. Famous for producing […] glittery melodramas… […] It was an odd scene. [5]

And beneath it all, the pulse, the friction, the machinery of a city devouring itself. A hidden frequency, a rewired metabolism. This toxic waste and this acid rain generate conditions in which mutant Rhythmachines thrive. [3]

Mumbais unfolding Paradoxes
If colonialism was pollution, then the city had learned to breathe through it. The market, the language, the very rhythms of Mumbai—corrupted, yes, but also reclaimed. Here, beneath the shadow of empire, new forms emerged, neither wholly free nor wholly bound. What if I wasn’t witnessing contamination, but a chemistry of survival, a process still unfolding?

Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun Adventures in Sonic Fiction [3]; Hollis, Cities Are Good For You [4]; Koolhaas Obrist, Project Japan [5]; Greenspan, Shanghai Future Modernity Remade [8]; Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste [9]; Brook, A History of Future Cities [10]

Crawford Market's winding alleys closed around him, past overflowing cartons and fermenting fruit under tired neon signs. Each corner revealed a tableau: discarded toy cars, idle laptops glowing faintly, black goats tethered in the dust. Objects, layered with unspoken histories. "Discarded objects may become antiques, embarking on a journey from valued new object to disvalued old object to newly valued vintage object."[1]

The fountain, once a gathering place, stood silent and dry, lost behind pet shops and vegetable crates, reachable only through a maze of encroachments.[2] Around it, matter accumulated, shifted, decomposed, reassembled—a slow combustion of forms. "The relationship to history is resolved as a scenario in which the object is perceived against a background of other objects, and in relation to them."[3]

A laptop pulsed with a soft, failing light; a toy car lay overturned; a goat blinked into the heavy air. They spoke of contamination, of migration, of endless recombination. Here, pollution was not the opposite of creation, but its mechanism. Every object was a container of shifting meaning, a provisional vessel in a tide of use and disuse.

"To it falls the work of assembling the heterogeneous in order to make what disparate local situations have in common visible—that is to say, to give them meaning."[4] The market, the city, the world itself, emerged as a collage of accidents and intentions, of things discarded and things revered. A rewired metabolism, endlessly recomposing itself.

The market moved around him and through him, not noticing. The smell of coriander, the pulse of neon, the soft heat of goat fur brushing past—folded him into a memory not his own. His breath, indistinguishable from the dust, disappeared among cartons and mangoes.

Each new [Mumbai], compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient [Mumbai]. [6]

Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste [1]; https://victorianweb.org/art/architecture/emerson/4.html [2]; Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968[3]; Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism [4]; Wittman, Architecture Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century France [5]; Calvino, Invisible Cities [6]

loop of randomized mechanisms

the bootstrap loop in rewriting origins

“References to individuals, events and real places described in this book are the fruit of invention. At the same time, I would like to make it quite clear to the reader that everything he reads in this novel really happened, substantially, and continues really to happen.”

– Pier Paolo Pasolini, A violent Life

Hidden Frequency
Rewired Metabolism
Frank Ghery – The Tower of Arles, Arles
Paul Rudolph – Yale University Art and Architecture Building, New Haven, Connecticut
Yona Friedman – Spatial City
Yona Friedman – Photomontage Train Tracks, Ville Spatiale
Atelier Deshaus / Tian Fangfang – Su Yuan House and Garden, China
Atelier Deshaus / Tian Fangfang – Su Yuan House and Garden, China

Updating Alloy
Kazuo Shinohara – Tanikawa House, Japan
Liftbuild – Top-down Skyscraper, Detroit
Yona Friedman – La Ville Spatiale, Paris (Courtesy Yona Friedman Archives)

Decoded Maidan
Antonio Gaudi – Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
McKinnell & Kallmann – Boston City Hall, Boston
Aldo Rossi – Città Analoga
Arata Isozaki – Spring-Fall Bedroom, Joshua Tree palazzo del Bo Anatomical Theater 1594

New Data Sets of Foreign Assets
OMA – CCTV Headquarters, Beijing
Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
Globe Tower – Coney Island, New York

Loop of Randomized Mechanisms
Vladimir Tatlin – Tatlin Tower, Russia
Jean Nouvel – National Museum of Qatar, Doha
Andres Larin – Lotus Temple, New Delhi, India
Santiago Calatrava – Turning Torso, Malmö
Coop Himmelb(l)au – BMW Welt, Munich
HOK – Dali Museum, Florida
Snøhetta – Opera House, Oslo
Gensler – Shanghai Tower, Shanghai
Constant Nieuwenhuys – New Babylon
Bjarke Ingels Group – The Spiral, New York
Studio Libeskind – Vanke Pavilion, Expo 2015, Milan
Anish Kapoor & Cecil Balmond (Arup) – ArcelorMittal Orbit, London
Luigi Manini – Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, Portugal
Donato Bramante – Bramante Staircase, Vatican Museums, Vatican City
Frank Gehry – The Tower of Arles, Arles
Fujian Community (Traditional) – Hakka Tulou, China
Peter Cook – Plug-in City: Maximum Pressure Area (Section), 1964, MoMA
Studio Wellington – Athfield House, New Zealand
Unknown – Neighbour Building
Leon Ferraro – The Architecture of Madness