Olfactory Provocations: To exist in a space is to inhale it (Online)
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Join Yati Sharma in exploring how Mumbai taxi drivers navigate smell and shared air in the micro-lived-environment of a taxi cabin.
“बाँस, त्रास और साँस ”: Smell, Endurance, and Breath in Mumbai Taxi Cabs.
This session reflects on how smell operates differently from other senses. While interviewing taxi cab drivers in Mumbai to understand how smells interact within micro-environments, one idea kept returning: to exist in a space is to inhale it. In a taxi, before any conversation begins between driver and passenger, there is already a sensory encounter through shared air. Unlike sight, touch, taste, or sound, smell is difficult to avoid once we are exposed to it. One can close their eyes, cover their ears, or avoid touching something, but smell is tied directly to breathing. To exist in a space is to inhale the shared air.
Inside a taxi cabin, this shared air carries a constant layering of smells. Drivers described how perfumes, sweat, food, incense, rain-soaked clothes, tobacco, city pollution, and car fresheners accumulate and overlap over the course of a day. Each passenger leaves behind a trace, which blends with the next, creating a shifting olfactory environment that the driver must continuously inhabit. And how these smells are often signifiers of cultural and socio economic identity of a person.
Image Credits: Yati Sharma
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