“The impressive urge to view cities floating above its mass and masses is the urge to freedom, the urge to comprehension, the urge for the fraction of a moment to believe that I know the city. A walk is every tourist's, every visitor’s urge to know the city. A grasp of that object, we believe, is the city. Like the claws of a descending eagle,” Mumbai-based architect, writer and educator Kaiwan Mehta reads aloud from his book Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood before a transfixed audience gathered at the National Centre for the Performing Arts’ Little Theatre on January 11, 2025, during the ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025.

In a session titled Waymarkers and Waystations in the City, hosted as part of the festival’s special talks programme called ~log(ue), Mehta was joined by poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote on the stage in a performative ~monolog(ue). The two creatives engaged in an immersive reading session, unravelling memories of a colonial Bombay and its remnants that continue to overlap with the city’s evolving landscape. While Mehta picked excerpts from his 2009 book that walks through the historic neighbourhood of Bhuleshwar, Hoskote read from some of his his evocative works, including Hunchprose (2021) and Jonahwhale (2018), touching upon themes such as identity, history, ecology, ethnicity, mythology and architecture.

A walk is every tourist's, every visitor’s urge to know the city. A grasp of that object, we believe, is the city. – Kaiwan Mehta

The session, in Hoskote’s words, brings forth “two different but overlapping perspectives and experience of what it means to live in a city, to see it as a stage for strife and conflict and violence and solidarity and also to look at it as a place of fantasy; of the extension of the imagination and the creation of new identities and really to see how—against all the forces of flattening that are now in place—we might still retrieve the histories of the city in different ways.” The readings traverse neighbourhoods and streets, landmarks and interstices – unpacking stories peeking from under the rubble and of edifices that seemingly do not exist anymore.

Both Mehta and Hoskote—distinguished practitioners in their respective fields—spent substantial years of their youth living in the city and have been sufficiently exposed to its eccentricities (and continuous transformation). The dialogue, in that light, felt closer to home. The negotiation, perhaps, is more urgent than ever.

With ADFF:STIR Mumbai geared to return to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2026, we look back to key conversations from the ~log(ue) programme and highlights from the 2025 edition. Stay tuned for more throwbacks and exciting updates to be released in the coming weeks.