Buddhas made of ice and butter : mimetic visuality, transience and the documentary image

At the first step into the Mumbai subway a bolt of heat shoots up from the swirling crowd like a blast from a furnace. You keep walking. It is peak hour, and a few million people converge on the two central terminuses of Mumbai Metropolitan Railway. You are walking against the crowd. A mass of steamy bodies surges toward you. Even as you move precariously forward, the energy of your momentum is overpowered, tugged backwards by the crowds streaming in the opposite direction. Dizzying rhythms pulse through your body in waves of heat and energy, cross paths and tug you in contradictory lines of force. The centre cannot hold, it threatens to fragment and drag you backward with the vectors of the crowd.