Thursday, 1 November 2012

Rare Finds


I was walking through the busy lanes of Chor Bazaar in Mumbai, looking for some good shots when something interesting caught my eyes. "We recycle the past", read the board outside one of the shops. Upon inquiring from the shop owner, I found out that most of the vendors in the market are in the serious business of creating antiques. They deal with factories in the small, lesser-known parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan which manufacture replicas of vintage furniture and give a lost-and-found antique look to shiny new objects by scraping the paint off them and touching up the look with the right amount of dust. 

Nothing automatic about these machines, and they work too !!!
   

Palatial doors like this one, are taken from ancient, inhabited and dysfunctional havelis in Gujarat and Rajasthan.




This old radio set, bulky telephones and camera that must have seen better days, remind me of my ancestral house in Chandani Chowk, Old Delhi.

A breeding ground for thugs to sell off their catches, this 150-year-old market is a haven for antiquarians, historians and people scouting for quirky curios and odd stuff. The seemingly hole-in-the-wall shops are stuffed with Victorian lamps, palatial gates, antique furniture, old coins, vintage cameras and heaps of abandoned things. The experience of rummaging through the cacophony of trash is close to hunting for some quaint treasure in a thriving souk. If you can brave the maddening crowd and the oddities of a flea market, a visit to Chor Bazaar can be an exhilarating journey. If not for its antique cache, the place will bewilder you with its sheer randomness.      


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