www.pagesmagazine.net/2006/daily_pages.php#index

Jeebesh Bagchi: In these neighbourhoods the conflicts are on how much you can expand your territories, and what you can call your own legitimate expansion, and what is the common agreement on what the limits are. The question is always if its a take-over of the land or an extension within one's own territory?

Azra Tabassum: There is a kind of fear of the expansion among the people: "once you continue expanding more, you may eventually enter my house!"

Lakhmi Kohli: There are two aspects to this. One is the overflow of 'things', and the other is the structure that holds these 'things'. The 'things' overflow and ask for more space. And to expand the structure accordingly means 'conflict'. This is the kind of tension that is there within each structure that we see. This is an inherent tension of structures around us.

Nasrin Tabatabai: Do you mean this is generally the case with all structures?

Lakhmi Kohli: If you have a shop, the goods in the shop grow. But if the shop itself grows accordingly, it starts to occupy something else, something outside it, and then there will be a clash. It’s a similar case when the house grows. There are two kinds of growths. One causing the conflict and the other is the propensity for growing: things in the shop have the propensity for growing. But the structure, if it grows in that propensity it will start causing conflicts. The person who is in the middle of these two tensions, between the outward limits of physical expansion and the growing propensity of things inside, somehow lives that tension as something that is not outside him, but what is inward. It is not that I can step outside and look from distance to these two tensions; I live in it and see life as that tension. I narrate it or act upon it, I am infused with it. And that is why in their narration you will find this tension.