January 22, 2025

Blueprints and Blockbusters

The day started the way most days do, the routine GCIL run-through: breakfast, blogs, and a bus ride. But today was special since we were having our first official meetings with our Partner Organizations in the afternoons to find out how we’d be spending the next seven weeks. The stakes felt high and there seemed to be varying amounts of nerves. My roommate shrugged and laughed when I asked if I should wear a button-up shirt. Her meeting was on Zoom, and she seemed super chill. Meanwhile, another group was deep in strategy mode, plotting how to convince their organization to assign them anything besides social media duties. I was a bit nervous, doubly so since today’s morning NGO visit was ours, and would be our first meeting in person, whereas most other groups got a trial run earlier in the program.

We arrived at Sensing Local, which is tucked into a pleasant little neighborhood, up a few flights of stairs. It looked like the kind of place where people drink chai and talk about big ideas like “implementation modalities” or ” the democratization of urban planning.”

Sensing Local is an “Urban Living Lab,” which means that they care about user-driven design. They help governments and private companies with strategy, planning, and mapping through consulting. They run a Citizens’ University to teach communities how to solve their own problems. And they work with neighborhoods to make local spaces better through their Neighborhood Living Lab. They showed us some of their participatory methods: getting volunteers to collect data, asking the public for input, and roping in experts from different fields.

After a quick lunch, we went back to Sensing Local to meet in our smaller group. Sobia and Ankit, our project leads, started by asking us what we thought “urban planning” was. Naturally as engineers, we said, “You tell engineers where to put things.” They laughed, kindly but firmly, and corrected us. That was only part of it and was called spatial planning, to be precise.

Then they explained our project: gathering ideas from architects, urban planners, and the community to turn underused spaces into something useful. Real urban planning, they said, wasn’t just about deciding where to put houses or water tanks. It was about creating spaces that are usable, feasible, and, if possible, even beautiful. On the Uber ride back, my group went through the 16 questions. By the time we got home, we were starting to feel like we had a handle on what we were going to be doing for our project.

I had barely slipped into my comfy clothes and sat down to work on this blog when I got roped into a trip to the movies in an attempt to familiarize ourselves with Kannada Cinema, also known as Sandalwood. Our first attempt at a theater didn’t go well. We were told that none of the movies had English subtitles. The second theatre wasn’t much better; once again, no subtitles. At this point, most reasonable people would’ve given up. But we were determined. Armed with chili-coated potato chips, we decided to watch the movie anyway and hope for the best. And then, miraculously, the movie did have English subtitles, despite what everyone had told us. The next two hours were a rollercoaster. Choo Mantar started as Poltergeist meets Ghostbusters. Then came five jaw-dropping plot twists, two catchy songs, some unexpected religious sub-plot, and acting that wasn’t half bad.

I won’t bore you with a full analysis of why I find modern horror bland—too much CGI, not enough dramatic color grading—but this film was solid. We gave it 3 out of 5 stars. It was the kind of horror movie that makes you laugh so hard you forget it’s supposed to be scary, a great way to end an otherwise serious day.

By,
Inessa