104_ASHOK CCTV

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There is a difference between what you see and what you know.

But these 2 things, what you see and what you know can also dance with each other,

encourage each other, replace each other, update each other

and invite into the room the hidden sisters, what you cannot see, what you don't know, or what you have forgotten.

Our story begins in the sky behind the ITC Grand Central.

The site of an old tobacco factory of ITC,

and the cluster of hospitals that strangely enough surround it in what is called Parel

KEM, Wadia, Tata Memorial, Maru, The Petit Animal Hospital, now Global Hospital.

We could say that the spiritual centre of this early techno capitalist scientific cluster was the Haffkine Institute.

Which you cannot see but lies behind this tall building over there...

And its named after - its a laboratory named after Waldemar Haffkine who discovered the plague vaccine.

And it is in his honour that the institute was named after the great Bombay plague of 1896.

But before the plague this thing that you cannot see was a very important site, it was the British Governor's Bungalow and as such the seat of British power in Bombay and in the region.

And before that it was a Jesuit church, and before that even they say a Baijnath temple.

So, it was from the British seat of power that one day 1877, rose a strange object.

A round, silk balloon, filled with the same gas that lit up Bombay streets at the time - Coal gas.

And as it slowly rose from the grounds of the Governor's Bungalow in Parel hundreds of people below it tried to imagine the view of the balloonier who for the first time

literally for the first time in history - could see Bombay from the sky.

In 1891 a balloon carrying a lieutenant Mansfield developed a leak at 1000 feet, and he fell with the balloon.

Let's call this the descent into Lower Parel...

Parachute didn't open, the fall continued.

He remembered his gods.

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