Claustrophobic Cubicles

It is not really possible to adequately describe my interaction with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi [MCD], beginning in October 2008, during the process of acquiring an official lease that would enable Ankur Bal Club to intervene in the park in Dakshinpuri as part of a public art project.

The encounter with the municipality took the shape of a series of Kafkaesque recursions within the gloomy recesses of the three-storey MCD office in Green Park.
This struggle continued for eight months. Later I received the agreement letter from the MCD.

But by then I was too exhausted to appreciate the miracle. All I could remember was months of rushing from one desk to another, pleading for appointments and signatures. Consumed with anxiety over the fate of our file among the thousands of others being arbitrarily resuscitated and obfuscated in the labyrinth of the municipality office, I forgot who I was; I relinquished my self-image and cherished identity as an artist. I became just another insignificant, irrelevant, invisible cog in our local government machinery – a cavernous, apparently unmoving mill that, however, does indeed grind slow and exceedingly fine.