This morning we received a call from a friend who said when he first saw the name Do Din, he thought it must be some complex French concept or a play on a passionate slogan like Do or Die or the name of a Russian playwright. The coin dropped only after he heard it pronounced.
Then he said, “but this is so simple and ordinary! Some times we don’t see the ordinary, obvious thing because we are expecting complexity and complications all the time.”
Do Din, is the Hindi word for two days. That is what we are calling the event. What we intend doing in those two days is to think, talk, dream and experience the city in all different possible ways. You may ask but that is what we do all the time. The truth is that that is precisely what we do not get time to do ever. We go through the city without thinking and reflecting on how it came to be what it is and where it is headed. We don’t connect with the city.
So the idea is that during those two days, we will create several occasions where people can sit down, think and talk with other people who are also doing the same. So, there it is folks. It is a very ordinary event. For very ordinary people for a very ordinary city (with thanks to Ash Amin, who first popularised the expression the ‘ordinary city’ as an alternative to all the academic and policy taxonomies)