What is Do Din

Do Din, simply means ‘two days’. In December every year, Hyderabad Urban Lab hosts a two day long open event at Vidyaranya School, Hyderabad for everyone interested and invested in the urban. In its fifth iteration the event has attempted once again to bring together diverse urban dwellers to share, participate, learn, teach, discover and perform around a theme. The theme of Do Din 2019 is: Incomplete Cities: Multiple strands emerging from the core city keeping it fluid, flexible

Who Owns Do Din?

The organising committee of the first Do Din (2013) was an organic collective of individuals and groups of people who met under the aegis of HUL. When the question arose, “who owns Do Din?” the unanimous response was that the city and its people and all those who are part of Do Din own it. However there needs to be a core team that can organise the event and host it. HUL gave itself the mandate to fulfil this role. Over the years HUL also began to integrate its own work in research, engagement and pedagogy into the annual event alongside the work of guest organisations and individuals.

HUL maintains that Do Din belongs to everyone who chooses to be part of it.

Do Din turns six

Do Din has always been about our shared urban pasts, presents and futures. Do Din has always been about a sense of urgency (as much as it has been about exploration and pausing); about a sense of junoon (as much as it has been about awargi). It has been about Hyderabad, but also about all other urban places.

The events of the past year, necessarily show up in our discussions even as the portents of the coming year foreshadow it.

Do Din 2019 is themed around the idea of incompleteness – adhoorapan, asampurnata. The urban as a site where things happen, a medium through which things happen, a beginning and a culmination – where dreams are shattered, come to fruition and start anew.

We have, as usual, a number of workshops, performances, lectures, panels and just plain and simple hanging around planned. As we move closer to the dates and as we begin to reflect on the agenda, we are becoming acutely aware of the special circumstances of this year’s do din. For us at HUL, this urban homecoming event now appears with a certain maturity of ideas, practices that belong to its own. It belongs to Hyderabad, it belongs to all our cities.

It is also clear to us now, that Do Din was never exclusively about cities and the urban – certainly not in the technical and jurisdictional sense. The urban at Do Din has never begun in the city, nor did it end in the city. Its boundaries have been fluid, stretching and shrinking, rising up in scale to the global and collapsing down into the neighborhood. Through stories, and performances we travelled with the watchman, and IT professional, the dhobi and the surgeon, the safai karmachari and the transportation expert, the postwoman and the surgeon, the bus driver and the lawyer. We felt the pain and the confusion of blurred identities and sexual orientations at home and at work, and we were elated by the assertion of the girls who took the football ground.

As we gather for Do Din this year, we are aware that this year, the national scale and the regional scale, the question of our identities and our citizenship their provisional closures and the universal openness will cut through all our discussions. We will talk about design and digital data, water conservation and incremental housing. We will talk about the banta aur bigadtaa shehar – the adhoora shehar. This place called the urban where our dreams are take wings and get broken. We will resist forced closures. We will feel our way through multiple scales.

As we gather for Do Din this year, we are aware of the fact that, India is a place for young people like never before. The demographic pyramid has acquired a distinct bulge at the middle – 65 per cent of Indians today are below 35 years of age. The idea of India will be your idea of India. You are the people we want to listen to and speak with. Hope to see you all there.