By All Means Necessary

Hangover

2012-01-23T15:27:00.000+05:30

She has not left me alone till now

After hours of nagging, biting and caressing

She clings on me like a dead dream;

Long fingers hide the world from me

While her chin presses on my head

Soft breasts pump against my back

Pincer-like claws crush my nipples

Till I moan, thrash and struggle.

Love bites burn my stomach and neck

Absurd words belch out.

Don’t worry, she has promised to go away

Once I sleep with her without resistance.

To Speak or Not to Speak: Is Vocalizing Necessary to be Successful in Art?

2012-01-14T13:54:00.000+05:30

“Dear Sir, I do not speak well, nor do I write well. Would this be a hindrance in achieving success in the art scene?” Almost a month back a young woman artist wrote to me. “Recently I was talking to a few friends who are not good with words exactly like me and they too said that they were anxious about this ‘muteness’. We were discussing the success of some of our friends who are very good in expressing themselves as well as explaining their works both in public and private spaces. They have a way with words that ensures their success. I am depressed to the point of losing all my confidence. Advice me, sir, would I ever make it in the scene?” She concluded her mail.

I did not reply to her plea for two reasons; one, I was busy. Two, I thought she should find a way out on her own. Two days back she sent the same mail again, asking me to help. It was then I thought it was not her problem alone. This linguistic inability of an artist is considered to be a major stumbling block en route the social and economic success of a young artist. Today, those who dress up well, package their personalities in a spectacular fashion, speak well in social situations and vocalize the qualities and concerns of their works in an elaborate manner find easy access to the platforms that would help them to become socially and financially successful. This is the tendency of the changed and changing times. Also it reflects the changes that have been taking place in the very ‘language’ of art itself. Art turning more and more conceptual, more and more experimental and above all, more and more (new) media based, it becomes quite pertinent for the artist to become vocal not only as an artist but also as a presentable and intelligent individual in the society.

Having said that I do not intend to disown and overlook the concerns of my young friend who sent that mail to me. On the contrary, I would like to flag out the issues that have made the ‘vocalizing’ the artistic and individualistic concerns quite pivotal and central in our art scene. Also I would like to look into the kind of hypocrisy and snobbery that rules our art scene. During 1990s when Post-modernist theories and practices made their presence in the art scene, subaltern expressions that defied the notions of the ‘acceptable art’ in the gallery-museum circuits, needed to make self explanatory comments in order to justify their ‘alternative-ness’. Post-modernism allowed the space for poly-vocalism in art; in a way paintings could move out of stretchers and the sculptors could jump down from the pedestals. Art made out impermanent materials and art that came out of off the centre ideologies and ideals claimed their rightful space often through supplementary words. That’s why artists like Vivan Sundaram, in 1990s told the then art students to ‘speak up’.

(Talk- Still from a video by Manjunath Kamath)

That was a great move because artists thought it was a great idea to talk. Speaking about art and being vocal about one’s own concerns about art and aesthetics in the public domain fundamentally differed from the adda cultures in which artists and critics ‘debated’ art and culture in the lines of formalism and certain abstract idealism. Good, bad, ugly, right, wrong, acceptable, objectionable, original expression, copying and so on were the defining points in the adda debates. Such debates often positioned for and against the idea of ‘progressivism’ in art and society. However, with the advent of post-modern debates in the 1990s, speaking on and about art became more political and personal. These debates could interface the personal and the political in the multifarious vocalizing of concerns of the individual artists while justifying the ideology, material and form of their concerned works of art.

Today, ‘being vocal’ about one’s own art has moved away both from the adda debates and the ideological debates of post-modernism. With the conceptual art movement jumping over the gap of three decades from the west to our country, and with the works of art and artists tend to become exclusively specialized, being vocal has gained a different meaning. Artists who work in/with new media and certain exclusive issues are expected to gather ‘communication skills’ to explain their art not only to the gallerists but also to the critics and viewers. In that sense, most of the conceptual artists become specialists of their own art in their own special ways, almost debarring multiple entries into their works of art. Their words become the ‘sole clue’ and their words carry them ‘ahead’ in name, fame and fortune. Slowly these communication skills instead of being the explicatory modes became desirable ‘social skills’. The result of this transformation today is such that just by acquiring these ‘social skills’ of communication, one could become a ‘good’ artists.

This change over becomes detrimental for many because we don’t have a ‘uniformly’ ironed out art scene. Artists coming from various states with different linguistic orientations, classes and modes of expressions are not a lot that works always conceptually. Some are ‘purely’ painters, some are sculptors, some are landscape artists, some takes pleasure in painting objects and images from photographs. Internally all of them know what they are doing and why they are doing. But in the given ‘acceptable and necessary’ context of vocalizing, they find it difficult to speak in volumes about their art, interestingly or impressively. Perhaps, without jargons or ‘concepts’ they could tell you why they do their works. Even many of them work with new mediums such as video, digital imaging, clay-mation, animation, sounds and so on. And from inside they know why and how they do it. But the social skills to communicate become a hindrance and the inherent muteness or the incapability to vocalize gnaws their confidence from inside only to push them to the sidelines of the great spectacle called contemporary art.

(The Thinker by Rodin)

I would say the inability to talk or the lack of social communication skills comes from a fear infused in many of the artists by different social systems. There are certain definitive socio-cultural and economic contexts that determine the linguistic skills of the people. First of all our education system of art as well as the systems in which the art operates predetermine that English is the only language in which artistic ideas could be effectively communicated. While many artists are able to express themselves and their concepts well in their mother tongues, in a different context where they feel that ‘only’ English would do the magic, they force themselves to take the backseat. They imagine that their inability to speak in English naturally makes them ‘lesser’ artists compared to those who could express well in English even if their works do not carry what they proclaim in/through English. The supremacy of English and the complex that this language imposes on the artists are so heavy that only when the artists become light with ‘spirit’ they open up. You may notice how some artists once they are ‘high’ on alcohol suddenly become very vocal in English. That means, the fear of English is so ingrained by the system that they need to shed all the inhibitions through the consumption of liquor in order to open up and talk in ‘English’.

In the class and caste ridden society of India, class predominantly determines the ‘confidence’ to speak in whichever language including English. An artist who is quite aware of his/her class naturally takes a social position through the exercise or non-exercise of his/her linguistic skills. Some artists coming from the upper class, even if their works are not ‘up to the mark’, make it a point to speak about them vehemently, imposingly and convincingly so that none could miss their works. In the case of an artist coming from regional zones, class awareness intricately mixes up with the fear of/for a particular language rendering him/her totally mute. This mainly happens because of the predetermined and politically-socially-culturally imposed idea that English is the language of the ruling class therefore it is the language of the upper class and the successful. I would say the artists who assume muteness in the urban public domain prefer to do so because they believe that even if it would not bring any success to them at least it would save them from socially embarrassing situations.

I had undertaken a research trip along the central India region in 2009 with an idea to visit the regional art colleges in order to know how they are taught art and art history. I visited around eighteen regional fine arts colleges spread across the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Maharashtra. Everywhere I found interesting students with interesting ideas but shy in coming forward only because they thought they would not be able to communicate with me in English. After much prodding, they opened up in Hindi and to my horror I found out that most of them even did not want to become ‘full time’ artists after their graduation. They either wanted to get into the local industries as designers or craftsmen. The girls told me that they would continue painting till they get married. At the BA Mehta College in Amalsad, Gujarat, I got introduced to a young man who ran an omelette shop just outside the college. He was a BFA in painting from the BA Mehta College and had an MFA in applied arts from the MSU Baroda. I asked him why he left his ‘profession’. His answer shocked me. After his MFA, he was working with an advertising firm in Baroda and was drawing a good salary. After working for six months, he realized that he was a misfit in the organization because he was not able to speak in English. He told me that even in the fine arts faculty in Baroda, he was mute throughout and his only companion was a Manipuri boy who also suffered from the lack of ‘English’.

If at all I would advice my young friend who wrote to me the mail, I would insist that one should be vocal and vocal enough to express the concepts and ideas before a larger audience and in specific contexts irrespective of the language abilities. It is not necessary to speak in English. Develop skills in one’s own mother tongue and prepare that language to be capable enough to express your complicated concepts and ideas. And make the listener to follow you as you show pride in your own language. Off late there have been concerted efforts from certain galleries, artists and intellectuals that one day the world art will be dominated by text/word based art and vocalizing will be the prime vehicle of communication. One should not get depressed by such hollow declarations. Perhaps the dominant and hegemonic forces might support the text/word based art. But it would be foolish to think that a country like ours will be filled with artists who would only work with text/word. Take pride in what you are and in your language. Look straight into the eyes of hypocrisy and smile.

Flaneurs in the Networking Streets

2012-01-13T08:29:00.000+05:30

This has been going on for quite some time; different days, different people, different moods. They send me mails, ask for opinion, express their private fears, declare their love and reveal their private fantasies besides asking for suggestions and directions about their creative works. Often I diligently reply to their queries without getting into their personal zone, either fanning up their passions or drenching down their excitement. Some are quite persistent and as a human being I too am vulnerable to such insistence. Some stalk me and in turn I stalk some. We fall into mutual bondage. We become peeping Toms in each others’ lives.

Some sort of anxiety grips you when you know that you are virtually stalked. Some sort of energy flows through your veins when you realize that you are following someone like a shadow, virtually scrutinize their activities, public behaviour and their shameless flaunting of passions. You feel depressed for you think that the person you are hooked up with is not there just for you; he or she is for others too. You try to discourage yourself. But each time you sit before your computer, you tend to walk into those alleys where he or she is expected to frequent. You stand under your own profile picture, partly hidden by its shades and wait like a lonely and lost lover. You see him or her walking down, with a green light in hand and gloriously ignoring you. You fall down in the dumps. Let me tell you, these social networking sites are the cumulative fields of private anxieties and fears.

There are days together when you feel that you would take revenge on those people who have put you into throes and you go away and hide elsewhere. You tell the world that I am going away. You even remove your profile picture. You put a flower there, thinking that your imaginary rivals in the private battle of emotions would get seriously hurt by feeling your absence. You think that they would pine for your presence again; they would come and hang out in those back alleys where you often stand under your own profile picture partly clouded by the shadows of your own fear. But you know nothing happens and that puts you in pain more. Sitting far away and so close to your computer, without logging in on to the social networking sites, you try to do something else, read or write or get into tiring fantasies. And you imagine that you have put them in shame and angst. And look, what are you paying for that; your own happiness.

And you have ways to sneak into the back alleys only to check whether they are still around and feeling excited as usual. You choose your hide button and hide behind that. And of course you see them their having fun with their friends and acquaintances. They seem to have completely forgotten you. Then you play some music on the youtube. Something hits you and you feel a momentary happiness. Yes, you have found out a way to tell them that you are around but you just don’t care, and above all you are happy. So you post a youtube link of the same song that you are listening. You imagine that when they listen to it, if at all they care to do so, they would read the subtext and crave for your returning. And you wait and wait, just to see whether someone has liked it and showed the thumbs up. You go and check your message box to see whether someone has sent you a private message. When you find nothing, you log off.

Surprise!! You tell the world by logging on and putting up a status like ‘I am back’. Somebody, who has been equally trying the same one someone else would suddenly feel a compatriot in you and would jump up to say, ‘I like it’. But that is not what you expect from those people whom you have been stalking all these while. The game goes on and then suddenly people start poking you and you wonder what exactly is going on when they poke you. You counter poke them and that too goes on for a while only to lose steam after few days.

Networking sites are the streets for the contemporary flaneurs. But that needs a bit of explanation; flaneurs are those street walkers who do not want something from the streets. They do not particularly invite anybody’s attention nor do they want to attend somebody in particular. The whole idea of moving around the city streets is all about celebrating one’s own freedom. One need not be particularly controlled by one’s social status, gender or age. Here in the streets he/she is an incognito, someone who is having all the rights to be there. In fact streets belong to the people. The first streets came up when people walked and cleared the thickets, the vehicles followed. Today, the streets are invaded by the vehicles. So the people are pushed to the pavements that too are cramped by the peddlers and idlers. Hence, the social networking sites are the new streets where people just walk and show their freedom. However, unlike the flaneurs, they expect a bit of attention from one and all in walking in the same street.

The Fault Lines in Geeta Kapur’s Support for the Biennale: An Open Article Addressing Geeta Kapur

2012-01-12T07:31:00.000+05:30

(Geeta Kapur)

This note addressing mainly a statement made by the noted art critic, historian and theoretician, Geeta Kapur in the latest India Today (Malayalam) Weekly, is meant for clearing certain confusions that linger around in our scene of art criticism and history and the possibilities of their intensification thanks to the statements like this one made by Geeta Kapur. In her Indian Today article Geeta Kapur welcomes the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and she is full of praise for the two artists who have initiated it with the support of the ‘progressive’ LDF Government in Kerala.

I am so happy that Geeta Kapur supports such a wonderful initiative like Kochi-Muziris Biennale because we all are waiting for it to happen, of course not in the way that Geeta Kapur sees it but in a way that the politically and culturally conscious people from Kerala think/want it to be.

First of all Geeta Kapur, one of the rare personalities whom I revere in the Indian art scene, writes this piece not because she is so much impressed by the works (read organizational activities) of these two artists who have ‘initiated then educated themselves’ (about) this project, but because the project has gone into some troubles that include public fund abuse and non-transparency and she is ‘invited’ to speak on behalf of it so that the sagging image of the proposed Biennale could be revived and re-energized. Hence, Geeta Kapur’s statement has a very pertinent and contextual relevance. She does not volunteer to write it but she is ‘requested’ to write it. The tone of the statement is self-evident. (I reproduce her statement as an appendix in this blog)

Geeta Kapur has always had a very strong relationship with the Kerala artists. It became a bit more focused and patronizing when in the mid 1980s, a group of artists came around in Baroda and formed the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association. The camp in Kassauli under the leadership of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram earlier and the association with Vivan Sundaram when he curated ‘The Seven Young Sculptors’ in 1985 and so on had strengthened her relationship with the Malayali artists. It continued in 1990s only to end abruptly with the advent of market boom in the new millennium. Though, it is not relevant to this context, I found it quite surprising that Geeta Kapur kept quite when a group of critics and artists organized a seminar in JNU on the ‘Radical Group’ and made a concerted effort to make it a ‘Kerala Radicals’ group. Geeta Kapur by not responding to this effort was in fact supporting the move it to make the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors Association, conceived as a national movement against the retrogressive art practices then prevalent in India, a very localized movement. By calling it ‘Kerala’ specific, these critics and artists were denying its due place in the contemporary art history in India.

(Geeta Kapur in India Today Malayalam)

This is one of the reasons why I was surprised when I saw Geeta Kapur’s statement in India Today. She calls Kochi-Muziris Biennale a ‘miracle’. She says that both these artists ‘set time apart’ to travel the world to make it a reality. Also she says in a way of lamentation that most of us have failed to fulfil such a dream. And Geeta Kapur observes, “by linking the biennial event to the real/mythical site of Muziris, a flourishing port-city that ‘disappeared’ in the 14th century, this Biennale claims a cosmopolitanism of past and present civilizations and thereby gives avant-garde art a historical scope.”

One can discern how Geeta Kapur has carefully chosen words so that she would not challenge the historians’ position on Muziris (as it is still a controversial topic amongst archaeologists and historians) whether it was a real or a conveniently generated city of the 14th century, and put those who ‘requested’ her to write this statement into trouble. Also Geeta Kapur thinks that she has failed, along with Vivan Sundaram in realizing the Delhi Biennale dreams. She cites government apathy as the major reason and the lack of support from the government agencies. It is against this context of an assumed failure that she says the Kochi Biennale is a wonderful opportunity.

Now, what Geeta Kapur does not address or does not want to address is very much evident in her own statement. She says she was a part of the initiative to set up Delhi Biennale with Vivan Sundaram and ‘with the support of an exceptional set of artists and art historians’. This is exactly what the people who oppose the Kochi Biennale demand by calling it ‘transparency’. Geeta Kapur conveniently forgets that the major movement in Kerala going on today against the Kochi Biennale demands only two things, ‘transparency’ through the involvement of an ‘exceptional set of artists and art historians’, and if there is fund abuse, a legal probe into that. None demands the complete stoppage of the Kochi Biennale.

In this context, I would say, Geeta Kapur is either kept in dark regarding facts and the oppositional move or has been given a totally lopsided picture, which is convincing for the veteran historian. Now coming to Geeta Kapur’s stance on Delhi Biennale; after a series of seminars and debates in Delhi early last decade, on the last day of the seminar, Geeta Kapur declared that Delhi Biennale would remain not as an exhibition platform, but as a ‘platform to debate and theorise the future biennales’. She had not specified that she was speaking this out of frustration. We, then young people in the crowd, thought that she was theorising the positioning of Delhi Biennale and we would like to believe it in that way.

(IAF 2011, Delhi)

Why? Because, if we look at the bio-data of Geeta Kapur, we will come across that a majority of the projects that she has done so far are done in collaboration with the state and central governments, some of them with international collaborations through various Indian ministries. If so, it is quite unclear why Geeta Kapur and the powerful voices like her did not demand changes in the bureaucratic apathy? She cites that the Triennale went into trouble thanks to red tape-ism. But my question is why everyone took a desktop academic position throughout in their lives and never came out to fight it along with the thousands of artists who really want/ed positive changes in the bureaucracy? They are powerless people, whereas people like Geeta Kapur could speak on behalf of them. But they have never.

Yes, Geeta Kapur has protested when M.F.Husain was ostracised and Surendran Nair’s work was attacked in the National Gallery of Modern Art. But, she still holds a Padma Award. She could have returned the Padma Award to negotiate with the government of India to bring Husain back to his own country. I always wonder why.

Geeta Kapur in her statement forgets one basic factor: the preparedness of a land/country/region for receiving a grand project like biennale. I would like to cite the success of the India Art Summit (Now India Art Fair) in Delhi. Had it been in any other place, it would have been a huge failure? Why, because Delhi, after several international expos, exhibitions, triennales, film festivals and so on, was prepared to accept an art fair like this. It had/has the infrastructure. Last year IAF was the classic case for India when people got down from the metro at the Pragati Maidan metro station, walked down to the Pragati Maidan, queued up for hours to get entry ONLY TO SEE ART!!!

(M.F.Husain)

Did Geeta Kapur, a person who has been vocal about the subaltern issues and fringe problems and also very vocal about impermanent art, every think of Kochi’s preparedness? When the market was brutally invading the art scene, Vivan Sundaram stopped painting and turned to impermanent art and installations (which were then ignored and hated by the galleries) and Geeta Kapur was the one who theorised such activities. Now she fails to understand how the onslaught of the gloomy European and American art would affect the local artists and their thinking. Do we need to create more Krishnakumars? Then welcome to Kochi which still needs a lot of preparation and ground work for receiving and hosting the proposed Biennale.

To prevent the death and decimation of an existing culture and art practice, we need to prepare the artists living locally and working humbly from these places. A biennale would function as Hurricane Katrina otherwise; it might help the place to clear out and evacuate the squatters and bring realtors in place but it would be one of the greatest politico-cultural crimes. Abhilash Pillai, theatre activist and Professor in the National School of Drama says that the Bharat Natya Munch Mahotsav took more than a decade to consolidate its position as a world event. It grew slowly but in the process a tragedy occurred. The group theatres and their activities in Delhi slowly died out. Now even the group theatres work only for showcasing their dramas in the Bharat Natya Manch Mahotsav. Has Geeta Kapur perceived such an eventuality while writing the India Today statement? The eventual decimation of a local culture.

Geeta Kapur fails to understand one crucial thing in her statement. This proposed Biennale is hailed to have been marked as one of the major tourist destinations of 2012 by the New York Times. Also Hilife says that this is one of the five best biennales. Now, as a cultural critic, I expect Geeta Kapur a bit more perceptive about these things. She overlooked such promotional activities and its politico-cultural and economic implications. First of all, New York Times does not say that it is one of the best Art destinations. Instead, its Travel and Tourism section says that it is a tourist destination because a biennale is going to happen. The other promo is that the Kochi Biennale is one of the best five biennales. How can one biennale be (or in that case anything) adjudged as the ‘best’ when it has not even taken place or shaped up? This is sheer advertising strategy. Michelangelo Bendandi, who is the communication head of the proposed Biennale is a well known Public Relations Manager for the world corporate houses. If he wants, even the newspapers will declare that the Kochi Biennale ‘was’ a great success, many months before its actual commencement. Geeta Kapur fails to see finer details like this and the ‘pressure’ she has (which is quite clear when she says the progressiveness of the LDF Government) is so high that she cannot write otherwise. She does not even ask a logical question, why the previous LDF Governments could not allot so much of funding to the LKA and other academies so that at least the local artist would have been benefitted. Even when a progressive secretary and staunch Marxian thinker like Ajaykumar was the secretary of the Lalit Kala Akadey of Kerala, he could not do much thanks to the fund crunch. Where was the progressive thinking then? Why was this urgency to allot funds to a private agency which when the funds were allotted did not have ‘exceptional support of artists and historians’? Why Geeta Kapur did not raise such questions? We do not expect such flattering statements from the former editor of Art and Ideas and the former contributing editor of Third Text.

(N.N.Rimzon)

Towards the end of the statement Geeta Kapur speaks of the opposition that the biennale facing today in a facile way. She says that the opposition wants things to be mediocre (via LKA). And the suggestion is that those who lead struggle in Kerala are mediocre. Now, N.N.Rimzon is one of the leaders of this anti-biennale movement. Geeta Kapur has always been a promoter of N.N.Rimzon. Her book, When Was Modernism, ends up with the elaborations of Rimzon’s works. And beyond that Geeta Kapur does not speak anything of contemporary artists from Kerala. How can Rimzon be mediocre when she herself in her book says that he is the best? And interestingly, Geeta Kapur does not speak anything about any Malayali artists in her works after When Was Modernism book.

Also I would like to ask Geeta Kapur, as she is looking eagerly forward to the biennale, how many of artists from Kerala have found place in her shows after 2000 AD? How many artists from Kerala have found mention in her articles? Forget all, please show us a few lines that Geeta Kapur has written on the works of Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu.Why suddenly Geeta Kapur feels so much for the Kerala art scene?

I need not remind Geeta Kapur of the famous Marxian statement: “History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce.” It is ironically interesting and interestingly ironic that Bose Krishnamachari launched himself as a curator with ‘De-curating’ in 2003. The theoretical pitching of the show was against the then prevalent curatorial practice in India led by Geeta Kapur. Bose’s immediate provocation was his exclusion from the ‘Century Cities’ (2001) at Tate Modern jointly curated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyksha. Bose’s resentment against Geeta Kapur made him a curator. Today, in a way, he needs Geeta Kapur’s endorsement to keep his claims right in place and high.

Appendix

A Note on the upcoming Kochi Muziris Biennale 2012:

- Geeta Kapur, Art Critic/Art Historian, Delhi

In conceptualizing and advancing the 2012 Kochi Muziris Biennale with the progressive political support from State of Kerala, the two artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu have achieved something of a miracle. Two very busy, very successful, very important artists from the state who live in Mumbai and are widely traveled have set apart the time to fulfill a dream many of us have nurtured, tested—and failed to realize. That is, to host an international exhibition that reflects the contemporary strength of the Indian art scene and, on that basis, dialogues with international artists on home ground. The Kochi Muziris Biennale purports to this and adds yet another dimension by a sheer act of brilliance: by linking the biennial event to the real/mythical site of Muziris, a flourishing port-city that ‘disappeared’ in the 14th century, this Biennale claims a cosmopolitanism of past and present civilizations and thereby gives avant-garde art a historical scope.
I personally speak in such admiration for this project on several counts. One, because for decades many of us belonging to what is now the older generation tried to rejuvenate Triennale India begun in 1968 with such a keen vision by Mulk Raj Anand under the aegis of the Lalit Kala—trying to save it from bureaucratic decline that began in the 1980s. The Triennale, which takes place right under the nose of the central government has never revived—and is known only for its state of permanent delay if not also permanent decay. On a second count I speak with special admiration for the Kochi Biennale because I was very recently part of an initiative to launch a Delhi Biennale initiated by Vivan Sundaram (and he has long experience at collective/organizational activities over the decades) with the support of an exceptional set of artists and art historians. The Delhi Biennale project failed, among other things because of a lack of support from the city or state governments and their related agencies. For it is fact that however much one may elicit private finance, such projects every where in the world flourish only when state agencies support them.
When we heard that the Kochi Muziris Biennale was now launched and become a reality on a scale and style we could not have imagined even in Delhi, it was as if many decades of lethargy had been challenged and a creative vision redeemed by, and on behalf of, the Indian artist community. And it is no surprising that Kerala should have been the place to realize this. The LDF government saw its progressive and visionary possibility and most fortunately the succeeding government has seen this clearly as well. After all Kerala hosts the best conceived and organized international film festival and it now hosts a major international theatre festival; it is a hub of creative and intellectual enquiry-- and thus now the visual arts Biennale.
There are always detractors to be found in every such project and these include not only narrow-minded bureaucrats, but sulking artists who would much rather see an initiative turn mediocre (in the hands, say, of the Lalit Kala Akademi) and even die than bring credit to some other more energetic art practitioners among their midst. Everywhere in India we await with the greatest eagerness the realization of the Kochi Muziris Biennale as conceived by its two exceptional artist initiators who have intuited and then educated themselves into this project by evaluating what happens in the rest of the world and especially as it happens with such vigour now in Asia.

The Dhanush Feel of Events: Reading Kolaveri Di in the Cultural Context of India

2012-01-11T15:02:00.000+05:30

(Dhanush)

While walking down one of the metro junctions in Delhi, I saw a neon-lit billboard of some mega star night slated to be aired by one of the major television channel. What I noticed was the presence of a young man who apparently does not have any features that would catch the eyes of the people had he not been featured in that advertisement piece. But today none could have missed him even if he comes out of a metro train along with the thousands of frozen Delhi-ites who hustle and jostle for foot space both inside and outside the metro coaches. His name is Dhanush, yes the Kolaveri boy/man.

The song that has taken India by force initially and later the world by making the international professionals and amateurs to mimic, recreate and re-jive it also has made the man who sung it a world star. When the ‘Kolaveri Di’ song hit youtube and viewed by millions of people in a few days’ time, people where wondering from where this lean, thin and smiling fellow dropped into the field of pop music. By word of mouth, by excitedly written journalistic pieces, by magazine articles, by innumerable blogs that analyzed the song, by sharing of the enthusiastic fans and those got hooked by the song irrespective of their linguistic affinities in the networking sites and above all by several skilled and naive imitations of the songs from various countries circulated through the youtube, this song became the song of the New Year, perhaps Kolaveri Di was ‘the’ song of 2011 which could hold push it magic into the new year.

Considering the phenomenal success of this song and the ‘national’ star status and appeal that Dhanush gained after the release of the song as the taking of points in this blog I attempt to analyse the socio-cultural and politico-economic and linguistic factors that made this song an overnight hit and the singer and the producers, national stars. Most of the film albums get a formal launch in our heavily ogled at film industry; television study experts like Nalin Mehta say that despite the 24 hours of news and political debates, the TRPs are maintained at a higher level through the programming of filmy (read Bollywood) news and programs. Often the music launches are held in five star hotels with the star cast of the movie very much present and smiling at the flashing cameras. There are pre-launch and post-launch promotional activities through FM Channels and television channels. To put in nut shell, we could say that the Bollywood songs often fill up our sonic scapes not only through the playing and replaying of it but also through strategic promotional literature, glamorous star presence and interviews. Filmy music, whether one wants it or not enters into our mindscapes initially in trickles and then like the proverbial camels occupy our minds.

Such promotions are done without any ambiguity. For example when Akon came to sing ‘Chamak Challo’ number for Shah Rukh Khan in Ra-One, his arrival, his rehearsals with Vishal-Shekhar and then the actual mixing of the songs in bits and pieces were promoted through well edited videos in the internet space via youtube. This causes a fair amount of disambiguation as in the last scenes of a Jackie Chan movie where along with the credits rolling, Chan shows how the actual stunts are done and the highlighting of the follies make the viewers laugh and what this kind of revealing does exactly is not the enhancement of rational disengaging with the film that they have just seen but the accentuation of the temporary suspension of disbelief. This disambiguation in fact helps the fight scenes of Chan register further deeply in the memories of the viewers. The follies facilitate the viewer to ‘love’ the ‘falter’ more than hating him. That’s why when we listen to Akon singing ‘mera picture ka tu hero’ (you are the hero of my picture) and see him faltering several times and see the loving exhortations of Vishal-Shekhar, we love not only Akon and his silky voice but also Shah Rukh Khan who lip synch the lines in the film or even we combine the images of both Akon and Shah Rukh Khan when we listen to the song from an FM Channel.

(Akon with Shah Rukh Khan)

This disambiguation happens in thoroughly in Kolaveri Di. But I would like to argue that this disambiguation comes from several ambiguities already set in place through this song, its quick interpretations in the press, its quick acceptance across the nation and it’s various emulations. The success of Kolaveri Di, unlike the other film music was in a reverse order; as suggested earlier, film music is generally promoted as carefully devised promotional activities where as in the case of Kolaveri Di promotion comes after its ‘official’ release in the youtube itself. If we analyse the quick success of the ‘cultural activities’ in and through youtube, we have some precedence; from my experiential zone let me cite a few examples, knowing that as readers you too will have many other examples to discuss and debate. In the first half of 2011, a Punjabi girl in one of the backstreets of London playing drums along with a western pop became quite popular in youtube. With all ease and happiness she plays the ‘dol’ of Punjab and interestingly this post in youtube has received quite a lot of racially abusive comments. The girl became famous after this video. ‘Akkarakazhchakal’ (Sights of the other Shore) was another television serial that became a hit in television first, a super hit in youtube and a mega hit when it made into a film. This television serial in Malayalam takes place in the USA. It captures the lives of the diaspora Malayali and their efforts to survive in an extremely different culture. Produced in a shoe string budget this serial became a gross earner when it was youtub-ised and later made into a film. The success of this youtub-isation of programs repeated in the case of Harishankar, a painter who one day decided to sing some absurd songs (sil sila eh sil sila) and Santhosh Pandit, a young amateur film maker who claims to handle eighteen departments of a movie production including direction and lead acting. Like it or not youtub-isation of the non-sense songs of Santhosh Pandit brought him stardom.

Like these examples, Kolaveri Di also happened in the youtube first. When the hit crossed a million or so in a day’s time, major newspapers in this country decided to write about it. This helped it to become a mega hit. Interviews with the artists, musicians, singer and so on happened in the public spaces. All of a sudden Dhanush became a national star. It is exactly in this process I would like to flag out how acts of disambiguation become in fact and ambiguity in itself and vice versa. Primarily, let’s say that Kolaveri Di was seen, listened and enjoyed by the Tamil youngsters. The initial success of the song therefore is a linguistically localized success within the virtual zone of aesthetic production. On the second day, the national English dailies take up the story of this ‘localized’ success and transcend its boundaries. Soon in the networking sites too the sharing becomes cross border and cross-cultural and cross-linguistics. One cannot expect the Tamil boys only have Tamil friends in their facebook or other networking sites. However, I would argue that the newspaper reports and the television reports that ensued helped the song to overcome its own localization and to become a national and later an international hit through the virtual sharing.

True, that these newspaper reports and television reports helped the song to become a hit. But there is something more to it; they helped the ambiguity of the song to grow further by carefully suppressing or avoiding the exact meaning of the lyrics. Instead, they overplayed what the song writer and singer, Dhanush had to say about it. Dhanush said that the music came first (as the young musician from Rajnikant’s family did the music) and he and his team comprising of the young musician, Aishwarya Dhanush, the singer/actor’s wife and producer/director of the movie ‘Moonru’ (Three) for which this is said to have been produced, and Shruti Haasan, the heroine of the movie, just came around, jived, jammed and worked over twenty minutes and finally the song was done. It sounds quite easy, especially when we consider the super success of the song. Invariably, Dhanush’s explanation on the production part of the song tells the world that ‘yo boys, you can do it.’ This is simple. Just do it. Yes, you can do it. Do it yourself. Sounds like corporate themes, right?

Coming back to our core theme of the lyrics and its meaning, the opening expression, ‘Kolaveri Di’ was not interpreted by the journalists nor, as I said in the previous paragraph, was it elucidated by Dhanush or his team. Hence, Kolaveri Di was taken for a phrase, that’s quite catchy, alien and above all something that would help the listener to feel attached and detached to the rhythm of the song at the same time. Some people thought, as I talked to many about this song, that it was something like a ‘Cola Very’, something thought it was Spanish and many thought it was just a sound that would sound catchy when repeated rhythmically. ‘Cola Very’ was an easy, logical and feasible interpretation mainly because in our corporate saturated world, Cola is one drink that the young boys and girls prefer to drink. Hence, Cola Very, especially when sung by a young-looking guy, should have something to do with the corporate culture. As the video has lyrics as sub-title throughout, one cannot easily come to a conclusion that this is a loser boy singing a song for his winner girl; in contemporary times losers are often seen in malls and boulevards sipping Cola if not sucking thumbs. Those who thought that it was Spanish must have seen it in the context of Zindagi Na Mile Dobarah, a multi-starrer movie which has a Spanish song that became a huge hit in India. Those who thought that the phrase was just a sound obviously have the songs like ‘Dhinka Chakka’ from the Salman Khan starrer, ‘Ready’.

(Dhanush with wife Aishwarya Rajnikant)

The ambiguity thus set by the non-interpretation of the starting phrase of the song became a vehicle of communication for the rest of the song. When the initial phrase is not interpreted, therefore an ambiguous zone is created as an a priori of understanding the rest of the comprehensive act could take place without much political or cultural emphasis. The meaning of ‘Kolaveri Di’, murderous rage, came much later as people started wondering what exactly this young man was singing about. Only after a few weeks of its becoming a huge hit, Kolaveri Di was given its actual meaning in the public space. Though there were attempts by blog writers, facebookizens and so on to tell the world that ‘Kolaveri’ meant murderous rage, those were not heeded as the video itself was not hinting anything at murder or rage.

Riding on a happy note and the success that it assured Kolaveri Di spurred up a series of imitations and mimicry in the virtual world. First came a ‘girl’ version, then came many protest versions, then lately even one could see a ‘feminist’ version besides having a host of Mexican, Brazilian, Japanese and other linguistic versions. What we see in the process of this mimicry is the globalization of the local. As I argued earlier, the localized success of Kolaveri Di transcends and becomes a global success mainly because its self-disambiguation process through the video in itself produces a sort of ambiguity that draws the viewer irrespective of the linguistic or national barriers towards the team and the singer who have done this song as in the case of the stunt scenes of Jackie Chan.

Now, let’s us analyse how this video works in zone of cultural production as quite confirming therefore inherently possesses the qualities to become popular amongst the public crossing all the language, age and gender boundaries and limitations. Generally, popularity, despite the notion includes the majority of people liking or disliking something, cannot be measured using the common standards of acceptance. Popularity and success could be quite ambivalent in the scale of proportion and defy the common rules of success charts. What I mean to say is that popularity cannot always be equally distributed amongst the receivers. For example heavy metal rock music may be popular and successful but most of the people do not like their children to blast them off in their homes. Munni Badnaami may be successful and popular but might not be catering to the elite sections of the society. The vulgarity of a scene could only become appealing when the actor or actress represents a different set of values in person life; for example Katrina Kaif’s item number in Agneepath or Bipasha Basu’s item numbers become appealing unlike the ones done by Rakhi Sawant as these actresses in their real life represent (or apparently we believe so) a set of values fundamentally different from the values of the ‘item girls’ that they temporarily represent in the film.

(Katrina Kaif in Agneepath item song)

Kolaveri Di’s success is equi-distributed and it is liked by most of the people. During my travels in different parts of India after the success of Kolaveri Di, I witnessed young children singing Kolaveri Di, old women bursting into a very lovable smile when they listen to this song, men shaking their bodies when they listen to it, or even very hip boys from the upper crusts of the society within the metro coaches proudly singing the lines without any mistake either to please themselves or to please those young beautiful girls seen self admiring at the window panes darkened by the tunnels. This equally distributed success of this song originates from the very visuals of the video and the people who ‘behave’ in it. For the time being let us call them the ‘actors’ in this video.

In 2011, Dhanush completed ten years in the Tamil film industry. He is a contemporary of several other young actors who came from the film families and from outside. Dhanush came without much baggage; of family as well as looks. He belongs to a generation post-Rajni-Kamal, Post-Arjun-Ajit-Vijay. Dhanush with his very ordinary looks (may be in the same lines of Chilambarasan, Vijay and many other actors) drew the front benchers to his persona. He came as an angry young boy, a destitute and a social outsider. He faintly resembled the legendary Bruce Lee in his looks. And in his eyes the same fire raged. Most of the youngsters in Tamil Nadu (and interestingly in Kerala too) could immediately identify with Dhanush because he just looked like them. He was not one of those make believe ‘next door boy’ types. He was not a chocolate hero either. He flipped his dhoti up, showing his lean and toned thighs as well as the striped under wear. He courted girls as a loser and cried whenever he felt hurt. This wrote his success down in the minds of the young people.

In India, within the dominant culture of patriarchy, marriage is the most scared institution and it is said that it is not the boy and girl who get married but two families, their legacies, reputation and wealth. Dhanush raised his status from being a darling of the front benchers to the status of a heir apparent to the supreme super star Rajnikant by marrying his daughter Aishwarya, who is a producer-director of ‘Moonru’. In our country, a son is supposed to be the carrier of father’s legacy and this thinking is heavily dominant in our society that most of the social ills like female foeticide, infanticide and ostracising of women who do not beget sons or their lower status within the family and amongst daughters-in-law come as result of this. Rajnikant, whose family life is held as a very sacred one (unlike Amitabh Bacchan’s, Rajnikant’s life is not still not openly criticized for any reason. Criticism were rampant when the Karnataka-Tamil demographic issues came up in the political scene of Tamil Nadu almost a decade back and also when there were rumours of him entering into active politics) and it is not publicly scrutinized by the media. On the contrary, Rajnikant is viewed by his fans as an incarnation of a philosopher saint, Raghavendra as once he had acted in the bio-pic of Raghavendra and also made his spiritual intentions clear by acting in a flopped film called, Baba.

(Rajnikant in his 100th film Shri Raghavendra)

The public life of Rajnikant is so open as he appears without make up in public functions and speaks to his audience in a language that is so rooted and tinged with philosophical maxims. To add to his philosophical aura, people post photographs of his very ordinary self in social networking sites, especially when he makes annual pilgrimage to the Himalayan shrines. This ‘local and ordinary’ image of Rajnikant has helped him to consolidate his position in the Tamil filmdom considerably. But to carry forward this legacy, he does not have a son. Though the two daughters he has are interested and are active in the film world, the lack of son is always felt. Now, with Dhanush marrying Aishwarya Rajnikant a few years back has been perceived as an adoption of a son who is almost equal in qualities of Rajnikant. Dhanush is lean, thin and unconventional just like Rajnikant was when he entered the Tamil film scene decades ago. He has mannerisms that verges on to villainy but has all the capacities to redeem himself from disgrace by doing good for the sake of a larger population. And above all, Dhanush proves himself to be a singer, a quality which Rajnikant does not have unlike his rival in reputation, Kamal Haasan, who leaves no chance in his movies to sing a song for himself.

In this sense, in the public imagination, Dhanush is the ‘accepted and acceptable’ son of Rajnikant, perhaps a surrogate son who could cover up the lacks that his father has. So when Dhanush appears in the video, happily singing, we tend to see Rajnikant singing through his son (-in-law).Besides, the story of success of this song become all the more authenticated when Rajnikant himself tells the press that he was not so sure of the ‘future’ of this song when he heard it first. This scepticism is originated from the fear of his own lack and the anxiety whether his son (-in-law) could do justice while doing something that he himself has been incapable of doing throughout his cinematic career (there was one instance of Rajnikant himself singing in a drunken mood inside a bedroom which was received with so much of happy hooting even by his own staunch followers and fans). Dhanush, himself says in one of television interviews that he was very happy that it was on that day the recording of this song took place when his child took the first steps. So, as a sub-text the credibility and talent of the family chain/line is endorsed and reinforced within the video.

The conformity of the Indian family, which is devoid of any conflicts is what, as I argue, makes the Kolaveri Di album popular amongst the people irrespective of their age, locality and gender. In the album, we see four active people; Dhanush himself, the music director Anirudh Ravichander, Aishwarya Rajnikant Dhanush and Shruti Haasan. Anirudh is one the recording panel and a key board. Aishwaray, quite business like is seen at the side of her cousin, Anirudh and the film’s heroine, Shruti Haasan is seated quite professionally inside the studio. Even a cursory analysis would reveal that there is a reaffirmation of family values within this unit of people. First of all they are from the reputed film families carrying forward a pool of talented genes towards the future. And theoretically, the couples are divided as Anirudh-Shruti and Dhanush-Aishwarya. Though Shruti is unmarried and does not have anything to do with Anirudh, here we see a surrogate pair happy between themselves, though we do not see them communicating much except when Shruti stands in front of the mike jiving and gives a thumbs up to the three people at the recording panel.

Aishwarya’s body language in the video reiterates that she is in control of things, including the possible emotional engagement between her husband Dhanush and the screen pair Shruti. At the same time, Shruti equally shows self-restraint by smiling and nodding in approval without showing any emotional bonding with Dhanush when he approaches her for a suggestion or comment. In the studio, she takes a passive role, seated slightly away from both Anirudh and Aishwarya, asserting her own zone of individuality, family distinction and right to be there. Here, a keen observer could see the sacred family life of Rajnikant and his progenies coming in direct conflict with the troubled family life of Kamal Haasan but safely saved by the aloofness of Shruti in the setting. And with the conflicts resolved by self positioning of the actors, this video shows a confirmed family set up that could carry forward the family legacies to the future as the future belongs and is assured to them.

While we read the success of this song/video within the traditional family context, we should not forget that this is a carefully constructed/produced and articulated video. Those who are familiar with the song recording sessions could easily make out that this video that is hailed as done in twenty minutes is a staged spectacle. What we see here are the compositely edited visuals from a recording session and a post recording session acted out for the camera. We also see Dhanush lip synching in places and also straining himself to match up with the rhythm that he hears in his head phone. As we know that the picture of Dhanush wearing a heading phone and standing before a recording mike has become so popular that even spurred up so many other video makers to emulate (including the clones of Kolaveri Di) this particular posture and light scheme of the Kolaveri Di video. So what we have is a carefully crafted music video which could be included in the genre of the Indi-pop music.

(Anirudh and Aishwarya)

To go further with the argument of this song being Indi-pop, we should see how this genre of Indi-pop is constructed. Peter Kvetko in his article ‘Private Music’ says that while the Bollywood music depends heavily on Ragas and aalps, the Indi-pop finds its energy in western beats generated through drums, strutting of guitar strings and bass. Here in Kolaveri Di song the rhythm that we listen to is not exactly western one. It is folk-ish to the core and is familiar to the South Indian audience whereas the other instruments used are rhythm pad, saxophone/clarinet and key board. The electronic blending of the three with the Indian rhythm gives the song a special sonic quality which is closer to the western pop while retaining its rooted sonic qualities through the percussion rhythm. And most of the western music is meant for private consumption (especially the pop, hip-hop and heavy metal and so on) using high quality sound systems including car-stereos. In the meanwhile, Bollywood music is created for public consumption including its playing up in public places without heeding much to the quality of the sound systems.

In this sense, Kolaveri Di falls into the ears of the listeners as a ‘very private music’ and it evokes individualistic sensibilities. Peter Kvetko makes this observation while explaining the distinction between the Bollywood music and the Indi-pop music. “..the differences in the sonic texture and iconography between Indi-pop and film songs often correspond to (these) two lived environments, that while filmi music and imagery evokes collective experiences and sensibilities, Indipop articulates an individualistic sensibility more in line with the era of neo-liberalism and global capitalism.” (Peter Kvetko- Private Music – Popular Culture in a Globalized India- ed.K.Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake- Routledge-2009. Indian reprint 2011). Seen in this perspective Kolaveri Di substantiates position within the Indi-pop genre and assuming the position of a very private music. It also articulates the individualistic sensibility (four people in a room with distinct identities) in an era of neo-liberalism and global capitalism.

Dhanush is now a hot property in the star nights. The way the Kolaveri Di song transcended its language barriers through assuming the status of a private music, Dhanush also has achieved a different status in the popular culture in India. It is ironically interesting and interestingly ironic that through faulty English and its failed articulation he could cut across the boundaries. In his public appearances after the success of Kolaveri Di, Dhanush carefully plays up the family values (being simple in dressing) and playing it up to the galleries like a ‘tapori’ as and when he is expected to do so. When he stands along with glamorously dressed Abhishek Bacchan, he is noticed for his simplicity, the way Rajnikant is noticed for his appearances without make up in public functions along with a heavily dyed up Kamal Haasan. Dhanush also understands the aesthetic scenario of the Tamil film industry after the huge success of films like Subramanyapuram, Nadodikal and Naan Kadvul by young film makers who revisit the murderous rage of the Tamil ethos throughout its history. The Kolaveri Di songs and its lyrics come from this cultural ethos which Dhanush has internalized not only as an actor but as a producer of culture.

As an end note, I would like to add that most of the writings and reports came about this song and its success have accidently or carefully avoided an invisible presence; the presence of the camera (man/woman). The gaze of the camera in this video is omnipotent because by shifting its location of gaze almost in 360 degrees capturing each and every action of the actors, it remains there as a watchdog; t he guardian of these four young people. When the line ‘kaila glass-u’ is sung, the camera ( I would say, the paternal gaze) immediately cuts to Dhanush who is now reclining in the corner of the recording lounge of the studio. From that reclining position, almost obscured by the lack of light, Dhanush says, ‘only English –a’. We find here a linguistic slip; a fault line suddenly appearing between the song’s assumed global position and its very rootedness. However, the conflict is smoothened out immediately by the intervention of the camera/gaze that almost obscures the image of a faltering Dhanush to a corner. Now with the conflicts ironed out, family values confirmed, happiness celebrated, Kolaveri Di reigns the public imagination.

A Free Man

2012-01-08T23:02:00.002+05:30

First few pages of ‘A Free Man’ made me think that this writer was stepping into the shoes of Sudhir Venkatesh who had brought sociological research into a gripping thriller experience by publishing a detailed account of his research on the urban drug peddling poor in the underbelly of the United States, under the title, ‘Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets’. Soon I realized that this young writer, Aman Sethi, who obviously has been influenced by the style of Sudhir Venkatesh research and its outcome, however has found out his own way to write his research trips and life in the backstreets of Old Delhi where innumerable migrants from the poverty stricken villages in the North India hoard to eke out a living.

‘A Free Man’ centres around the life of Mohammed Ashraf, a mazdoor who likes to live a free life. He has hopes and dreams to make it big in life. But his personal philosophy pertaining to life in general and freedom in particular does not help him much in turning his dreams into a reality. Hence, he remains a painter mazdoor in the Bara Tooti Chowk near Sadar Bazar in Old Delhi. One interesting thing about him is that he so free that he could jump into any train that he sees first and go to a place where the locomotive takes him and live there for years without missing his life in Delhi even for a moment.

(Aman Sethi)

Aman Sethi, the writer of this book, young, vibrant and equipped with a research fellowship reaches Old Delhi to study about the lives of the migrant labourers who live in pavements and streets daring the extreme climate, unhygienic conditions, effects of liquor and other intoxicants and the frequent attack of the police. Aman does not feature the life of Ashraf, Lalloo, Rehaan, Kalyaani, Satish and so on as the supreme examples of the mazdoor life in Old Delhi. Instead, he approaches them as case studies, and just like Sudhir Venkatesh got interested in the drug running life of the gangster, J.T, Aman too gets interested in the life of Ashraf and he uses it as a fulcrum to revolve the weights of the other lives.

Ashraf is a free man and he is worldly wise. His philosophy is impressive and his world view is refreshing. All these come from his education, exodus and experiences in life. He is a much travelled man. The exodus starts when he accidently challenges a land grabber. Then he moves to different cities including Calcutta, Mumbai and places in Punjab before he settles down in Delhi. Still he believes that he could hop into the first train and leave the place. But Old Delhi like a hook that pierces into the gunny bags full of rice, does not leave him alone.

Aman befriends Ashraf, whose age is not mentioned anywhere though the reader could assume that he must be somewhere around fifty, and through Ashraf life he understand the lives of others including the enterprising Kalyani who starts off her career as a gleaner of spilled away grains and later becomes one of the notorious vendors of the local liquor. Aman weaves his narrative through the lives of Rehaan who believes in the ability of his own body to do any difficult task and Satish who succumbs to the vice grip of tuberculosis.

‘A Free Man’ could be read as a fiction and once we read it as a fiction we come to know that real life is more fictional than fictions. When we read it as a real life of a few people we come to know that we live in a city about which we know very little. Night has a different complexion in any city and it has a different meaning to different people. The state reacts to those who live in streets differently and the pavement dwellers also react to the state differently. While the middleclass shrinks away from the presence of the state in the form of Police, only two sections of the people stand up to it; the affluent and the deprived. Both have their own reasons to challenge the law. A Free Man tells us how the deprived and the destitute challenge the state.

Aman’s narrative is quite gripping and the glimpses of a scenario writing is seen quite often. But this book might not make a movie that could move the box office records because the hero in this book does not win over anything or anyone. Though he does not do so, we could never see Ashraf as a loser. When he is neither a loser nor a winner, he loses his chance to be a filmic hero in the typical Indian sense. He is a loner, perhaps he is a person who has achieved the Indian wisdom, a sufi vision, as nothing stands.

The young author has a knack to touch the auditory and olfactory faculties of the reader. He narrates the sounds of night as well as the taste of the food, liquor and weed. And when you read Aman describing himself first drinking desi daru (local liquor) you feel the burning liquid sizzling your tongue then moving down through your guts like a molten iron.

(Sudhir Venkatesh)

This book becomes a part of the Delhi narratives with a sense of ease because it is unpretentious on the one hand and has a lot of information about the lives of the migrant mazdoors. Also it graphically narrates the kinds of labour available and the kinds of jobs done in and around Old Delhi. It peeps into the upper and under dealings of the state. Above all it deals with the dreams of people who leave their familiar zones behind and tread onto the unchartered futures, and find themselves in the pavements of big cities.

I would recommend the young readers to read this because it is written by a young author who has a lot of hopes and dreams that run parallel to the dreams and desires of Ashraf, the protagonist of the book.

In Search of a Very Costly Condom on a Drunken Afternoon

2011-12-25T17:07:00.000+05:30

Rs.3600/- (Rupees three thousand and six hundred) for a condom. A Georgian artist named Irakli Kiziria designed this costly flute cover. I call it flute cover because someone recently sent me a sms joke: After having sex the woman tells man, hey you, your flute is so small. Then the man replies, ‘I did not know that I was going to perform in a town hall.’

Jokes apart, this condom is very costly. It is branded as Louis Vuitton though the company denies its connection with this costly rubber. But this going to be a style statement. Like the people who go to eat caviar to make their kids intelligent by birth or the people who go to Kochi (not to attend the Kochi Muziris Biennale) to spend their honeymoon only because the packaged deal of tourism (by private operators) say that visiting some temple in Kochi would beget them a boy child, there would be many who would like to have a shot with this Louis Vuitton rubber.

One bad thing about rubbers is that a single piece could be used only once. If someone tries for the second time would be naturally a pervert who finds it from the garbage or a child who sees it in a dustbin.

But if any rubber that costs more than fifteen rupees should be treated as a souvenir and very special. Now there would be more chances of people celebrating their wedding anniversaries with this rubber. I don’t think not too many are going to gift it to others considering the price tag.

The middle class couples are going to make a lot out of it. One of my friends says that as the recession has hit the market people would frame their last boarding pass and keep it as a souvenir as there would be lesser chances for them to fly again. If so, there would be chances of people seeing albums with a page (a secret one) devoted for a used condom.

You may think I am drunk. To be frank with you, I have just finished two bottles of Kingfisher beer (strong) as a part of a quite Christmas celebration. People these days do not need any reason to drink. They could even find a reason by reading the way the government of India treating Anna Hazare.

And I am thinking about rubbers because a few hours before I had a funny time hunting for a packet of condoms. I went to the main market here as I knew that there would be only one medical shop opened on Sundays as per the rules of the medical shop owners association. I went to the shop only to see a lot of people crowding that dingy little shop and I thought I found a familiar faces.

So I decided to make a call to a friend. He was on roaming and we had a very short talk. I made another attempt at the lonely medical shop where I found a woman around fifty years old making a very animated conversation with the shop owner. I spent time deleting a few text messages from my inbox and after five minutes of impatient waiting I found the woman still there.

I drove my car to another junction hoping that there would be another one opened. When I saw one I did not find a parking space. When I saw the next, parked the car and reached the shop I realised it was a Homeopathy store that did not sell condoms. Then I found another one in the vicinity, defying the diktats of the medical shop owners association, and finally that person gave me a pack of condoms.

I was happy to pay Rs.60 for that it remotely ringed Rs.3600.

Then I remembered a similar incident that had happened in 1990s. We were newly married and old by experience. One day we were desperate and did not find a piece at home. So I went out for hunting one packet of rubber. It was a Tuesday. On Tuesdays Delhi people do not open medical shops and meat shops. Even if liquor shops are opened they all look deserted. People abstain from drinking and having sex on Tuesdays. Even barbers close their shops on that day. They all compensate it on Wednesdays.

But being a rebel I thought of going out and searching for a pack. Those days we were not too sure of our safety measures without rubber as we were young and our muscles and emotions were not too much listening to the warnings of brain.

Finally as I was finding it difficult to find a shop, I walked into the clinic run by a lady doctor whom we knew as we consulted her once in a while, and asked without twitching a muscle on my face, whether she had some packets of rubber in her stock. She stared at me for a moment and then she broke into laughter. Then she said, no. Crestfallen I went home. I don’t remember what we did after that.

Now, I am writing this only to check whether I am able to articulate some stuff after drinking and having sex. In fact one could write anything after having sex. Only thing is that it should be guilt free. So make sure that a writer is not delivering quite regularly he or she is having guilt ridden sex life.

Also I am writing to know whether facebook and blogsopt would remove this objectionable content as per the government rules.

Coming back to the issue of rubbers; my friend was telling me that people would enjoy a costly sex with a costly rubber, but they would tend to ask whether the rubber would come with a girl in tow or not. Also he mentioned that this costly rubber would prove costlier if there would be a climatic rupture.

Hmm...it is always safe to get down at NIzamuddin than New Delhi, I mean for safety.

PS: All the while I was asking I could not go to a shop and ask straight away for a pack of condoms the way I ask for a packet of ipill. Is that creation is so shameful and destruction is ruthless and accepted?

Kochi-Muziris Biennale- The Biggest Story of Corruption in the Indian Art Scene.

2011-12-18T08:02:00.002+05:30

In a candid interview with the young art critic and theoretician, Premjish Achari, India’s most popular art blogger, art critic, curator and writer, JohnyML unveils the backstage maneuverings of both Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu in misusing public funds to their own ends in the name of Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

(NO Bose Krishnamachari- from Bose' Dubai show. Sudarshan Shetty, Bose Krishnamachari, JohnyML and Shankar Natarajan)

Premjish Achary: Kochi-Muziris Biennale seems to have got into a controversy regarding alleged misusing of public funds and lack of transparency. And you are amongst the few people who have raised a voice against the proposed Biennale. Now as there is a controversy pertaining to it, what is your stand on this issue?

(Premjish Achari)

JohnyML: Kochi-Muziris Biennale was destined to get into this controversy from the very day of its inception. I have been only wondering why there is no public hue and cry against it till an article written by the noted journalist Viju V.Nair appeared in one of the prominent Malayalam weeklies called ‘Madhyamam.’ If you remember, it was in February 2011 the formal declaration of this proposed biennale happened in Kochi with much fanfare. Two artists namely Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu have been projected as the front persons of this project. But except for these two people none in the Indian art scene knew what exactly was going to happen with this project. Even today none knows what is happening inside this Biennale project. It was communicated in trickles that the project was going to be funded by the government of Kerala. And a whopping amount of Rs.72 crores is the project estimate. To an interview given to the Art Newspaper, London, Riyas Komu had said that one third of this amount would come from the State government, and the second portion of it would be raised through the central government agencies and the rest would be raised from the private sector. The government of Kerala gave an initial funding of Five Crore Rupees to the Kochi Muziris Biennale Foundation in March 2011. But today, by the end of 2011, the Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu say that the money is over and they need another Five Crores from the state government urgently. Interestingly, apart from the renovation of the Durbar Hall in Kochi they don’t have anything substantial to show or claim before the public. There is some mystery behind this biennale project; one, there is no accountability and two, there is no transparency.

Premjish Achari: Why do you say that there is no accountability and transparency? What kind of accountability and transparency are you expecting from these project managers?

(JohnyML)

JohnyML: I believe in the values of democracy and a non-corrupt society is what I am aspiring for. When public money is spent on anything, the public has the right to ask why it is spent and on what it is spent. When a cultural project like a Biennale happens, people have the right to see what exactly is going on behind the scenes. Let me tell you, the people in India or in Kerala are not dumb people. They want to know why the state government has agreed to spend Rs.25 crore on a project like this and what was the reason for believing in only two artists out of the millions of other artists, historians, art scholars, curators and experts in this country.

(Partners in Crime? - Bose and Riyas)

Premjish Achari: I would like to intervene at this point and need a clarification. Could you please make it a bit clearer? The problem is there in the Biennale organization or in the way the funds are used?

JohnyML: In both. Many people do not know that the idea of this Biennale originated almost two years back. The context was not exactly a biennale. Bose Krishnamachari owns a plot near Aluva (near Kochi) and his idea was to build a private museum for contemporary art. He had big ambitions as the market was booming and money was coming in. Bose had even made an architectural model of this museum and when he knew that the funds were not coming in, he had even exhibited this model in a couple of exhibitions in India and abroad. When the economic recession struck, it became impossible for Bose to continue with this project. To make this museum possible, he with his friend Riyas Komu approached M.A.Baby, the minister of education and culture at that time. M.A.Baby, it is said, told Bose that he would not be able to help to establish a private museum but if anything happens in the public sector, as a minister he could do something towards it. It was then this idea of Biennale had come up. There were a series of meetings between these three people in Mumbai and Trivandrum since June 2010.

Today Bose and Riyas claim that the government of Kerala approached them to do a Biennale in Kochi, which is very difficult to gulp without asking a few questions. First of all why the Government of Kerala approach two individual artists living in Mumbai to do an international show in Kerala? Secondly, when the idea was mooted there was no Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation. It was a quick formation with five members, Bose Krishnamachari as president, Riyas Komu as secretary, Bonny Thomas (a low profile cartoonist) as treasurer and V.Sunil of W+K as the member. Though the foundation’s head office is in Bose’s studio in Borivili, the foundation is registered in Sreemoolanagaram, a village near Eranakulam.

Within three months after registering this foundation, in March 2011 the CPM led government in Kerala allotted a fund of Rs.5 crores to this organization and it was routed through the Muziris Heritage Trust. In the MOU between the foundation and government of Kerala (dept of Tourism), interestingly there was no clause written so that the foundation stood answerable to the finance department. The idea of accountability was flouted at the initial stage itself. That means, the intentions of making use of this money and the amounts that were supposed to flow into the Foundation’s kitty were not that good. It is quite alarming that the so called cultural activists getting into large scale financial corruption.

(Suresh Kalmadi- Corruption charges regarding Commonwealth Games organisation)

Premjish Achari: How do you define corruption in the context of this proposed biennale?

JohnyML: Corruption starts when you obscure information. We have never asked Mr.Amit Judge (the head of former Bodhi) how he spent his money because it was his private money. Even if he keeps information regarding the working of Bodhi under cover we cannot question it because it is his private organization and it is his private fund. But here in the case of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the corruption is not just about misusing funds, it is about misleading people and safeguarding information.

(Bose Krishnamachari)

Look at the organization’s character. We have Bose as program head and Riyas as executive head. To read it in different way, they are the official commissioners and curators of this biennale. At the same time, they are the fund raisers as well as fund users. And now, if we ask who are these two people? They are two moderately successful artists living in Mumbai. Bose has curated a few significant and many insignificant shows. Riyas’ claim to fame is that he has once been in Venice Biennale. But we have several other artists better equipped and better qualified that these two. After all, if I quote an artist friend, ‘both of them are only BFAs’.

(A.Raja, former minister- in for 3 G spectrum corruption)

Besides, if you see these guys have asked for Rs.4.9 crores as their personal fee to conduct this Biennale. And biennale cannot be a short term affair. In the project report that the government approved without checking facts it says that the rent, renovation and functioning expenditure would be met by the funds provided by the state government. That means, as we know the biennale offices are Bose’ and Riyas’ studios in Borivili, in the coming years, if the agreement stands, Kerala government will provide money to do their private business.

(Riyas Komu)

When the declaration of this project happened in February 2011, Bose invited a few artists and the only art critic he invited to the function was Uma Nair, a newspaper columnist who writes on art. She was the only representative from the art scene other than a few artists. That means Bose and Riyas did not want, from the day one onwards, anyone from the art scene to have a say in this project. The organizational structure proves that Bose and Riyas want to make it a private affair at the expense of public money.

Premjish Achari: So, what? Why cannot we have two private individuals initiating a project like this? Why do you insist that there should be more people into it?

JohnyML: Premjish, if Bose and Riyas are using their own hard earned money and they raise some fund from the private sector to establish a biennale like this there is no problem. Even if government is strategically involved in such projects nobody can question it. Only thing is that then it would not be a ‘biennale’ of its name’s worth. There are several private biennales across the globe where anybody could get any kind of awards. But here this biennale is primarily funded by the state government. In that case, we cannot let the two individuals to call the shots.

(Bose and Riyas)

Now let us take the way the international biennales function. There is an organization and there are collaborations between the public and private sectors. There will be an advisory committee and committee of experts and there will be members with executive charges and powers. These committees work in tandem with each other and there is a decentralized way of functioning. That is at the organizational level. Coming to the intellectual part of it, there are several expert committees that organize seminars both domestic and international, there are educational programs and many other reach out activities. Look at the Think Fest organized by the Tehelka in Goa and the Jaipur literary festival. Both are world class programs with strategic partnership with the local governments. They are not getting into controversy. Why? Because they are transparent and they don’t do it to pocket the public fund. Here in the case of Kochi Biennale, none of these formalities are followed. There has been no activity apart from the renovation of the Durbar Hall which is another huge controversy.

(Yamuna-Elbe Project in Delhi)

Premjish Achari: You are talking about misinformation, obscurantism, lack of transparency and now lack of activities. How do you elaborate on that?

JohnyML: Let’s take two recent examples in India- ten years of Khoj and the more recent Yamuna-Elbe project. Both are initiated by private agencies with the strategic government participation. There have been several layers of preparation including various seminars, reach out programs and artists’ exchanges. Most of them have happened under the public eyes. Now we have had this Delhi Biennale project almost ten years back. This was looking for the possibilities of creating a Delhi Biennale. Instead of straight away going for crores worth of government funding, the Delhi Biennale Committee went for a series of discussions, seminars and debates, and after two years of thorough brainstorming the project was shelved for the time being and even one of the leading figures of the Delhi Biennale Committee, Gita Kapur declared that Delhi Biennale would remain as a platform to discuss and theorize the biennales. Everything went on record. And this effort had all the intellectuals’ support and it was an inclusive platform.

Now, one year gone by with the Kochi biennale, with adequate government funding, not a single public project or seminar has been organized by the foundation. No advisory board has been instituted. Not a single person from Indian art scene is apprised of the activities of this foundation. It raises questions about the intentions of both Bose and Riyas. Why didn’t they want to organize a committee which has the stalwarts from the Indian art scene that include the art historians, theoreticians, cultural theorists, critics, gallerists, collectors, social scientists, city planners and so on? Hence, we understand that for Bose and Riyas it is an ego trip with no respect for the public or government.

If you look at the website of the Kochi Muziris Biennale, which is also listed amongst the other thirty seven biennales all over the world in the Biennale Foundation website (a unified portal for the world biennales), no information is available. It has a flash driven home page with the images of a few dilapidated structures in the Fort Kochi area. The written information is limited to a mission statement, an about us, a press release and two photographs of Bose Krishnamachari sitting with a laptop in front of him. Most of the links are blank. I am told the foundation has conducted some secrete seminars in some five star hotels in Kerala. If so at least there should be some pictures and information regarding those should be there in the website. This is what I again say that there is a tremendous about of lack of transparency and secrecy in this project which leads naturally to the issue of misuse of public funds to private ends.

(Durbar Hall, Kochi- in the name of Renovation)

Premjish Achari: Now it is alleged that the renovation of Durbar Hall in Kochi has eaten up all the money and the Biennale Foundation is in a cash crunch situation. What exactly happened in Durbar Hall issue?

JohnyML: Had it not been Durbar Hall issue, the corrupt practices of both Bose and Riyas would have continued away from public scrutiny. One of the agreements that Bose made on behalf of Kochi Biennale Foundation and the Kerala Lalitha Kala Akademy was that the foundation would renovate the heritage building, Durbar Hall and in return to that the foundation should be given the permission to use the premises free of cost in every two years for during the biennales. As per the initial agreement the renovation was supposed to be completed by mid 2011 and was to be handed over to the Lalit Kala Akademy. However Bose could not finish the work within the stipulated time. So he approached the academy again with a request and the then committee accepted his request and gave him a four months extension to finish the work. As per the second agreement the work was finished and the building was handed over to the academy. By that time the new government has come up in Kerala and as per there were changes in the academy administration also. When the renovated Durbar Hall was re-presented to the state with an exhibition organized by the Lalitha Kala Akademy, to the horror of Bose and Riyas, they found their names were not written on the plaque. They went to town with a press conference alleging that it was they who spent the money and they were not acknowledged in the final outcome.

(Viju V Nair's article in Madhyamam- the first open opinion against the highhandedness of the Biennale organizers)

This press conference by Bose was the first one since the declaration of the Biennale. That too was not for displaying the accomplishment but to complaint. Now let us ask a simple question: How did Kochi Biennale Foundation itself came as the ‘contractors’ of the renovation of the Durbar Hall? If they wanted Government involvement why didn’t they ask the government directly to renovate it but under their supervision? How did Bose’ brother became the chief contractor of the whole renovation process? How did the foundation claim that it was ther money? Today, it is said that Rs.3.5 crores is spent on renovating that one single building. I am told that except for the new lighting, false walls and split air conditioners no fundamental changes have been done in the name of renovation. And this unearthly sum of Rs.3.5 crores is just spent on this. Ajayakumar, the former secretary of Laliha Kala Akademy says that in his tenure when the renovation was done it had not exceeded Rs.25 lakhs. And also the then cultural minister T.K.Ramakrishnan was skeptical about air-conditioning the whole building.

(This costed Rs.3.5 crores !)

Today, it is clear that split air conditioners do not work in such huge buildings. We need centralized air condition with an external air cooling unit. As it is a heritage building you cannot build cooling units near by the heritage building. So you need to find a different place to set up this. Bose has not observed any of these formalities and there is no account for how this 3.5 crores is spent. Also it is said in the project report submitted to the government by Bose and Riyas (read the foundation) it is clearly mentioned that part of the money will be used for setting up and enhancing the offices of both Bose and Riyas in Borivili. As we all know from the given address that these offices are nothing other than their personal studios. It is also said that the people hired as office staff were not given salaries for a long time and most of them left the organization in due course of the last one year. So we need to ask where the rest of the Rs.1.5 crores gone?

(Riyas Komu- An Ambi- Valent explanation)

Premjish Achari: There is also an allegation against Bose and Riyas that they have not observed the rules of the Archeological Survey of India that takes care of the heritage building, Durbar Hall.

JohnyML: That is quite a serious allegation to which these two parties stand answerable. But interestingly, when asked by a journalist from the Indian Express Newspaper, Riyas Komu said audaciously that it was not the concern of the foundation as the building was handed over to them by the Lalitha Kala Akademy and to which it was given by the government of Kerala. First of all, this man with a simple BFA degree in hand does not have any respect for the people of this country as he is out and out here to plunder the public funds. Otherwise how as an artist he could have said such a dismissive answer? Now after spending this princely sum of Rs.3.5 crores on the renovation of Durbar Hall, he says that he is not responsible for observing the directives of the respected Archaeological Survey of India. Interestingly, this is the same person who started a very ‘revolutionary’ newspaper from his studio this year with its first issue dealing with the lack of sanitized toilets for the poor migrants in and around his ‘home town’ of Borivili. The same person, after a few months is out there to grab the public money for private use. In of the press reports it is said that Riyas wanted to bring political art to India through this proposed Biennale. And even they were trying to get Ai Wei Wei from China. I wonder whether these guys have ever understood anything political about art or art about being political. May be they have learnt the art of politics along the way and the corruption accompanying it.

(M.A.Baby- former Culture and Education Minister, Government of Kerala)

Premjish Achari: Where does the former minister M.A.Baby stand in this issue?

JohnyML: M.A.Baby is not a novice in politics or in organizational activities. After student politics and an active political career in Kerala, he was sent to Delhi by the CPM. Baby was here in Delhi for around ten years and he was one of the major supporters of Swaralaya, a cultural organization that promoted music. I believe M.A.Baby was sincerely hoping something to happen in Kerala during his tenure as a cultural and education minister. But when I look beyond that, I have all the reasons to think that Baby had some strange fascination for these two guys. In June 2010, when I was invited by the Film Akademy to set up a video show along with the international short film festival, M.A.Baby took a special interest in introducing Bose and Riyas to the press, almost avoiding me and Gigi Scaria, who was a participating artist and an already declared Venice Biennale invitee. He introduced Bose and Riyas as ‘internationally acclaimed’ artists. I believe the discussions for this biennale was already on or about to begin then. It is quite surprising that Baby went to the Venice Biennale in 2011, with Bose and Riyas and attended a lavish party thrown by these two guys there. It is strange that even after becoming an opposition MLA, Baby was requesting the present Congress government to give more funds to Bose and Riyas. I don’t understand the psychology behind this. One needs to probe further on this nexus. Also we should ask why the government of Kerala has never given such kind of funds to the other academies working from Kerala. Just look at the annual grants given to the Lalit Kala Akademy, Sangeeta Nataka Akademy, Sahitya Akademy, Cartoon Akademy and so on. The Cartoon Akademy gets an annual grant of Rs.10,000/- (Ten Thousand only) from the government of Kerala. Isn’t that amount ridiculously inadequate for an acdemy which has been there for more than ten years? How did a government with Baby as the cultural minister overlook all these and then suddenly decided to give a grant of Rs.25 crores to a newly formed foundation by a few private people? And once the government has agreed to do so, these guys are going to get an annual grant and full-fledged government support for the rest of their lives because Biennales are not done over night. It needs round the clock activities in all the 365 days in a year. This is one of the most strategic corruption cases in India in which unfortunately M.A.Baby is involved.

(Different in appearance always- What about this time? Bose Krishnamachari- Picture Courtesy- Malini Ramani's website)

Premjish Achari: Everyone knows that you were a good friend of Bose. But now you are very critical about him. Is there any personal reason to do so?

JohnyML: Bose is a good friend and I am sure he would remain one if he steers clear this controversy and comes out clean. I have written a lot about him and his works. I have helped him in formulating several of his curatorial ideas. He used to ask me for help because he could never articulate things theoretically. Even today, if someone asks me to write about his works I would happily do that. But he seems to have developed this ego of being the ‘biggest’ artist in India who could do anything under sun. He is fashion crazy and is boastful. He had even declared that he is a communist and bourgeoisie at the same time. That means he has not digested the theoretical polarities of these two notions. Off late, he had even compared himself with M.F.Husain. But for me, Bose is one of those artists left the home land to struggle in Mumbai and made it to the top. He is one of the many. He is a restless person with a lot of aspirations to do things. But I would have appreciated his efforts if he had approached this ‘biennale’ in a democratic fashion and stood in public clean and uncorrupt. He should have asked this question whether he and Riyas stand qualified to do a biennale all by themselves. He should have respected the people in this country and also the artists and art fraternity in particular. He has proved himself to be power hungry and prone to corruption. I wish he could come out of it soon with clean hands.

(How long shall we blind fold the law? Bose with Prasad Raghavan and his work)

Premjish Achari: Okay, (smiles). Where does this Biennale stand now? And are you out and out to stop it by asking for clarifications and all?

JohnyML: As far as I know, further funding of this biennale has been stopped by the government of Kerala.

I am not against a grand opportunity that Kerala would have perhaps through this biennale. I want it to happen in a very democratic and intelligent way. I demand transparency and inclusive methods of functioning. I do not want any position in this biennale. I have a clean history and I am not power hungry. My strength is my conscience and the artists, writers, cultural activists and well meaning politicians in this country. I want India to be a strong country in all the fields including arts. And I believe, if we are against Rajas, Kalmadis and people like them, why should we not stand against the people who do corruption in the name of art?

Premjish Achari: Thanks Johny!

Mario Miranda- The Artist who Gave a Little Bit of Goa in Our Lives

2011-12-12T13:10:00.000+05:30

(Mario Miranda 1926- 2011)

On 11th December 2011 morning around 10 am, in Goa, at artist Subodh Kerkar’s home, he was showing me one of his latest gadgets, an Ipad that he had bought from the Dubai airport while coming back after visiting the Venice Biennale. He showed me the books that he had already downloaded and was mentioning how easily now he could cut time now while waiting for some meeting to take place or a flight to announce its departure. As a facebook activist I was curious to know whether one could access facebook in it. He then opened the overtly familiar social networking site with a flourish.

While scrolling down his home page, I saw artist Norman Tagore’s status line, ‘Mario Miranda’. ‘Anything wrong?’ I asked Subodh. Mario Miranda, one of the most familiar names in the field of Indian cartooning and illustration, had been keeping unwell for quite some time. Anxiously we rolled the page down to see whether some other people too had said something about the veteran graphic artist. Journalistic instincts got worked up both in Subodh and me alike and we made a quick google search to see any updates on Mario Miranda’s health and we did find none. We felt some kind of emotional solace as we generally do not expect those people who have enriched our lives with their personalities and works to sing their swan song or make their curtain call. But that feeling was a short lived one. Within a few minutes, Subodh, who is also a pocket cartoonist for the Times of India, Goa edition, got a call from a friend which said Mario Miranda was now history.

(cartoon by Mario)

It was quite a coincidence that I was in Goa when Mario Miranda, who gave a different profile to Goa other than its touristic one to the world through his chronicling of Goan life through exquisitely complicated, breathtakingly revealing and aesthetically charming graphic lines. I had never got a chance to meet Mario in person. However, during my frequent visits to Goa during the last three years, I got a chance to imbibe the milieu that created the cartoons, graphic chronicles, hagiographic landscapes, characters studies and visual commentaries on Goan life by Mario Miranda. Gerard da Cunha, the architect, art collector, expert in Goan history and above all a close friend of Mario Miranda was instrumental in publishing a well documented volume of Mario Miranda’s works with well researched articles by Manohar Malgonkar and Ranjit Hoskote. In fact, this book was a great entry for me into the world of Mario Miranda.

A few years back, Gerard da Cunha had created a private museum of Mario’s works adjacent to his home designed out of exposed latterite stones, a special building material in Goa and a hall mark style to da Cunha himself and to one of the most talented architects from the same state, Dean Decruze. We thought it would be a befitting tribute to the departed master if we made a visit to the museum. While driving to the museum, Subodh received a call from his daughter, a young economic undergraduate student, from Mumbai. She told her father that in the Mumbai streets people were talking about Mario Miranda. We really felt great. In a country where the demises of politicians and film actors make headlines and the departure of artists make four inches news (M.F.Husain was an exception), if common men in the streets talk about the death of a cartoonist and graphic artist, it should be news. We felt really great.

(Subodh Kerkar and JohnyML in front of Mario Miranda Museum in Goa)

I am sure many people in many cities in India, and in many streets must be talking about Mario Miranda. Despite my status as a cultural activist, I too feel that I am one amongst those common men who could admiringly talk about the departed master. Growing up in 1970s, we all had the chance to see Mario Miranda’s cartoons in the then famous ‘Illustrated Weekly of India’. Under the editorship of Mr.Kamath, Mario Miranda literally illustrated the weekly that made it illustrious amongst the common men in India. People in those days came to know about cricket, art and Mario Miranda through the ‘Illustrated Weekly’. As a person who was born and brought up in Kerala, I got the first taste of Goa and Bombay through the cartoons and illustrations of Mario Miranda. Though I grew up with the cartoons of Sankar, Abu Abraham, O.V.Vijayan, B.M.Gafoor, Toms, Somanathan, Sukumar and none other than R.K.Laxman, it was in the cartoons of Mario Miranda that I got the life of a land with real characters that operated outside the political lives, which in fact had been the anchor of many other cartoonists especially during the turbulent times of Indira Gandhi and Emergency.

(Work by Mario Miranda)

Speaking in retrospect, there is a little bit of Goa in everyone’s life. It would not be fallacious to say that it was Mario who gave a face to Goa and to certain extent to the Goans in Bombay. If Remo Fernandes gave Goan pop music to India, Gerard da Cunha, architecture, Wendel Rodricks fashion, Subodh Kerkar land art, earth mines, the politicians party hopping and scandals, beaches sunshine and alternative music and Sandra to Bandra, it was Mario who gave Goa to the other Indians with palpable and laughable characters. Had it been R.K.Laxman who gave a common man to the Indians the way Sankar had given the quintessential Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, it was Mario who gave the ‘common people’ of Goa to the world. Mario transcended the common people of Goa, their typical and typified characters rooted to their colonial past and the post-colonial present and he presented them as individuals with proper personalities like Ms.Nimbupaani, Miss Fonesca and so on.

(Where is Sandra? Still from the Movie by Paromita Vohra)

It was Mario’s cartoons and the character of a ‘private secretary’, a sort of surrogate blonde in the Western imagination that led me to look for ‘Sandra from Bandra’/’ Where is Sandra?’, a short film by Paromita Vohra, an alternative film maker. Raising a critique on the depiction of Goan women in the popular narratives as women with not so tight morals and a bit of idiocy, in this film Vohra searches the origins of ‘Sandra’ she often comes from a place called Bandra in Bombay. It could have been a critique applicable to Mario also but Mario escapes from such feministic readings and critique because Mario approaches ‘Sandra’ with sympathy and love. Being an insider, Mario up to an extent typifies them but he does not make them the perennial stereotypes that could become ‘lap top’ private secretaries or vamps on order. A closer look would reveal that many such stereotypes in Mario becomes a stand in character for the common man as in Laxman’s world who remains a silent witness to all the good, bad and ugly deeds.

(Comparison of Alex Fernandes' Tiatriste series with the works of Mario Miaranda)

When Alex Fernandes, a Goa based photography artist who takes interest in Goan contemporary and past history through making character studies through the generic studio photography style, did his Tiatriste and Goan Musicians series, Ranjit Hoskote found a strong resemblance, though subconsciously inspired, between the characters created by Mario Miranda and Alex Fernandes. In this sense one could say that Mario was an inspiration to many artists including fashion designers, character designers and photography artists as Mario could portray the Goan people in their inherent personalities, characteristics, mannerisms often seen through an exaggerated lens tinted with humor and satire. This quality of Mario has paved way to the establishment of a sort of Mario industry in Goa and in Mumbai. Several Mario’s works are translated into mosaic tiles, post cards, cups, utensils, T-shirt pictures, murals and so on, at times with his permission and involvement and at times with no copy rights.

(Subodh Kerkar giving telephonic interviews as a tribute to Mario Miranda)

Born on 2nd May 1926, Mario was a true gentle man with a cut glass personality. “I have seen rogues making good art but here in Mario you see a gentle man making wonderful art,” observes Subodh Kerkar who had a rare opportunity to share a cartoon column in the Illustrated Weekly of India when he was a medical student. “I would consider Mario at par with F.N.Souza and V.S.Gaitonde,” says Kerkar and also he insists that though the departed master had been conferred the Padma Awards (Padmashree and Padmabhushan) by the government of India, the state government of Goa is lacking in perspective and vision as it could not honor the legendary graphic artist. While giving innumerable telephonic interviews to the journalists Subodh asks them to make demands to the state government to award Mario Miranda with the highest award of Goa, the Gomantak Award posthumously.

While guzzling down beer after beer in a moderately hot afternoon in a shack called ‘Flying Dolphin’ at the Calangut beach in Goa, with Shaji Mathew from Niv Art Centre, Mrs and Mr. Peter Mueller, Indian art collectors and gallerists from Munich, I listen to people talking about Mario. What more an artist could have asked for in his life?

Delhi Calling: To My Children Series 24

2011-12-09T15:49:00.000+05:30

(Vivekanand Rock and Tiruvalluvar Statue in Kanyakumari)

Delhi or Mumbai? Sitting on the boulders at the sea shore of Kanyakumari (Cape Comerin), where the Arabian Ocean and Indian Ocean meet, against the backdrop of a setting sun and rising hopes in our minds, Mrinal and myself asked this question several times to ourselves. I had an offer from Trivandrum Fine Arts College as a temporary lecturer through a relative who wanted me to marry his daughter. Now with another girl on my left side I could not have approached the person to get that job. We were looking for a place to stay and work and one common ground on which we stood firm was that we did not want to stay in a place where either Marathi (mother tongue of Mrinal) or Malayalam (my mother tongue) was spoken as the primary language. Ideas to migrate to Mumbai were put to back burner because of Marathi language. Delhi was the other destination. It was 1995.

I had some Mumbai phobia then. Though I had never visited Mumbai at that point of time, there was something dreadful about that city in my imagination. I thought that Mumbai would gobble me up. Now looking back I could discern two or three reasons behind this special kind of urban phobia I had. First of all I was a small town boy. Trivandrum was big enough to be called a city but not huge enough to be called a metropolis. All my ideas about city were formed through literature and films. For me, Mumbai was a place where underworld dons and Shiv Sena activists ruled the streets. I thought people who had gone there to eke out a living were living under the constant threat of these two parties. In our village, there were some Shiv Sena activists. They formed their club near a temple and most of them played volley ball by evenings. They were just next door youngsters and none of them looked harmful or threatening. But the village grape vine used to inform the young kids like that they were very dangerous people and they had links in Mumbai. In those days Mumbai was called Bombay.

As a young boy I could not have escaped the political milieu of Kerala. Though I don’t claim that my home was a hub of political discussions and related events, as I have described in previous chapters, there used to be a political feel to the meetings that my father conducted at my home along with his friends. I used to work as an errand boy in these meetings, bringing tea for them and at times making some wise cracks to which my father reprimanded me sternly either by rolling his eyes or giving me a smack at my thighs with his bare hand. My father was an avid reader of newspapers and political magazines and I picked up this quality from him though my interest was more on rape cases, robberies and above all some pulp fictions and barely clad women’s photographs. From the newspapers and magazines too I had gathered that the Shiv Sena guys were really dangerous and they were terrorizing the migrant communities in Bombay though I did not know the gravity of things at that time.

(Ajay Devgun as Don)

Films were the other source through which I had formed my ideas about Bombay. In the Malayalam movies that I watched during those days, the heroes went to Bombay and fought the underworld dons there only to become more powerful underworld kings. Though they helped in pumping my adrenaline quite well I never thought of going to Bombay even for a visit thanks to the invisible fear that had roosted in my mind while watching these movies. Besides I grew up listening to the stories of those guys who tried to go to the Gulf countries via Bombay. Many of them used to fall prey to the greedy middle men who offered them visas and entry passes to these hapless guys. Mortgaging their properties and gold in banks and in the lockers of the local money lenders, these young men with dreams in their eyes took the money to these middle men who often cheated them and left them stranded in Bombay. After endless wait these young people came back to Kerala only to try their luck again with more convincing middle men.

The major reason should be lying in an incident that happened sometime in 1993. I was trying to reach home from Baroda by road. I was desperate to reach home because my girl friend of that time was under house arrest. She wanted me to go back to Kerala and take her out of her confinement. Though nothing happened even if I had rushed to Trivandrum, I had a very strange experience in Mumbai. I remember reaching there at Bombay Central railway station one early morning. I was wearing a blue shirt and a pair of blue jeans and was sporting a pretty long hair and beard. It was a time when the Indian intelligence got wind about the LTTE activists moving to Indian shores. I was stopped at the Bombay central railway station and was thoroughly frisked and cross examined. It was a very humiliating experience and I thought that I would never go to Bombay again. Though I was released from the Police custody, I was totally dazed and I do not remember how I moved from Bombay to Pune by bus and then to Kannur, a northern district in Kerala. I was almost sleep-traveling.

The sun went down in the horizon. We became two other shadows lingering on the sea shore like many strewn all over the place. The Vivekananda Rock became a silhouette occasionally washed by foam and water by the rising tidal waves. A few meters away from the Vivekananda Rock, the rock where Swami Vivekananda had done penance during his visit to South India, the government of Tamil Nadu was sponsoring a huge statue of Tiru Valluvar, a great poet who authored Thirukkural and believed to have lived between 3rd Century BC and 8th Century AD. The foundation stone and a part of the pedestal were lying there like a ruin waiting to be completed and gain the status as of one of the tallest sculptures in Asia (133 feet).

“Shall we go to Delhi?” I asked Mrinal.

(N.N.Rimzon, a still grabbed from a documentary 'Speaking Stones' directed by myself in 2009)

She looked at me and said yes. We did not know anyone in Delhi. Suddenly I remembered an offer came from an artist namely N.N.Rimzon in 1994 when I visited a sculpture camp at the Nirmithi Kendra, a government run architecture research institute in Trivandrum. I was coming back from the Cholamandal Artists Village in Chennai after doing my research for the final year dissertation and when I reached Trivandrum someone told me that there was a sculpture camp going on in Nirmithi Kendra where I could meet a few sculptors. When I reached there, N.N.Rimzon, Valsan Kolleri and K.P.Soman were doing their site specific works. Some of them knew me by name and I had an opportunity to talk to them closely. Before leaving Rimzon suggested if I had any plan to go to Delhi, visit him there as he was living there. I smiled at him, thanked him for the offer and left the place.

Now, at Kanyakumari, though the sun had gone down a hope was rising in our minds and we knew that there was at least one person who could help us if we went there. We contacted a few friends in the days followed and made sure that Rimzon was in Delhi. Some people gave us the contact address of Amit Mukhopadhyay, who was working as the editor of the Lalit Kala Contemporary, the Contemporary Art Journal, published by the Central Lalit Kala Akademy. Someone also suggested that we could live in the Lalit Kala Akademy guest house dormitory for a meager amount of fifty Rupees a week. But we just needed to get a recommendation from someone like Amit Mukhopadhyay. With two names and two suitcases full of clothes we set out for Delhi though we did not know the capital city of India would become our home soon.

It was in June 1995 we reached Delhi. The Kerala Express, the train that runs between Trivandrum and New Delhi crossed the Faridabad station after two days and two nights. It was drizzling and with widened eyes I looked at the shabby huts that had sprung up along the railway line. I saw rickety autos and buses plying on the roads that ran parallel to the railway tracks. I saw people squatting behind the bushes defecating. Women stood up with their sarees down but the legs apart when the train arrogantly rushed past. On a roughly painted white wall with a black line for a border I read, ‘Gupt Rogi Milen, Dr.Gaba’ (Meet Dr.Gaba for treating Sexually Transmitted Diseases). That was the first notice that welcomed me to Delhi. I need not have been a socio-cultural specialist or critic to understand that the people who lived in these shabby shores were prone to sexually transmitted diseases.

(New Delhi Railway station now)

Water drops fell on my face. I did not know whether I was day dreaming or thinking anxiously about our future together in a big city called Delhi. Whatever be the case, the touch of the water drop woke me up from a land where I was lost myself. Mrinal too was silent and a bit tense. She did not know what would happen to her if nothing worked out for us. We had already taken a decision not to do any other work than doing art criticism. We thought that art criticism would give us food and shelter and we were young, and we were dreaming a lot. We also had thought that we would never get married formally. We thought that we would be a revolutionary couple who would always operate from outside the mainstream life. We imagined ourselves to be an ideal couple who would defy social rules and live a life without marriage and without kids. Even if we wanted kids at some stage, we told ourselves, we would adopt them because India had so many kids who desperately wanted parental care.

Between idealism of our private lives and the city called Delhi, the Kerala Express wheezed into a stop at the 12 number platform of New Delhi Railway station. I had never seen such a big railway station in my life. Mrinal told me that she had been once here and she came with her friends to visit a Triennale conducted by the Lalit Kala Akademy. The first thing came to my mind was to turn back, run into the train and go back to Kerala. I did not want to become anything. I wanted to live a small and inconspicuous life in my village. But that was lying a neat 3000 kilometers down south. Between my village and me there was three days and two nights distance. And that distance was further made wider by the responsibilities that we had taken together on our shoulders.

(kerala Express)

We waved down an auto rickshaw and got into it. We huddled together in the backseat of that rickety vehicle that puffed and panted like a fox. We were like two puppies terrorized by invisible creatures that came around them when they mother was away. We reached the Lalit Kala Akademy premises at Mandi House. Unlike today, it was a very accessible place. None asked from where we came and why we came. Today if you go anywhere near Lalit Kala Akademy, the private security men would ask you the reason for your presence there. We asked for Amit Mukhopadhyay. Someone showed us where he sat. He was inside a room shared by two other people, Avani Kant Deo and Vikram Mehra. He was leaning against a chair, with his right hand crossing across his chest. And on his table covered with a thick glass sheet there was a packet of tobacco, cigarette paper, match box and a cup with the tea stain inside it.

Amit Mukhopadhyay welcomed us. He was happy to see a boy and a girl all determined to become art critic in a city where they did not know anyone. He was quick to patronize us. He asked us to go to the Lalit Kala Akademy guest house and keep our luggage there. We went, got freshen up and came back to Amit Mukhopadhyay’s office as if we had found someone to lean on. I was posing to be a tough guy. I still remember that I was wearing a black shirt and a pair of blue jeans. With a full grown beard and long hairs I looked more than my age. I was twenty four then and Mrinal was twenty one. She was lean and thin. When she wore skirt and blouse she looked like a school girl. When we came back to the Akademy it was already five o clock. Many eyes were staring at us. Amit Mukhopadhyay took us to the canteen behind the main building where he got us tea and some snacks. He asked more about us and we were more than willing to share our ideas and aspirations. We were not worldly wise then. So we revealed our likings and disliking so quickly. I believe, Amit Mukhopahdyay had assessed us on that very first meeting itself.

(National Lalit Kala Akademy, New Delhi)

Night came and we were left alone in the city. We did not have any place to go other than the guest house where the girls had a different dormitory and the boys had a different one. It was time for dinner and I did not know where to go. Mrinal knew that there were two different dhabas (way side eateries) where they served good food for cheap price; one was near ITO, next to Pragati Maidan famous for its industrial expositions and erstwhile theme park called Appu Ghar. Appu Ghar was named after an elephant that became the mascot of Asiad, a sport extravaganza of the commonwealth countries in 1982. This elephant had come from Kerala and its train journey from Kerala to Delhi had made news. I never knew that one day I would also take the same route and reach the same destination. This dhaba near Appu Ghar was a called Hanuman Dhaba. This was called so because it was located behind a huge statue of Lord Hanuman, the monkey God. The second dhaba was near the Bengali market where the affluent class of Delhi came for their gossips and snacks. This dhaba was rightly called ‘Refugee Dhaba’ for mostly the refugees went there to eat. Besides, the refugees from both the East and West Pakistan were once given shelters there by the government of India. While crossing Bengali market at night and heading towards the refugee market, Mrinal told me that in Bengali market Super Star Amitabh Bacchan used to come for snacks when he was studying in Delhi. I glanced the lit innards of the sweet shops on either side of the Bengali market. And I was wondering whether I would ever be able to go inside and eat one of those sweets on display.

(Asiad Appu, the mascot)

“Alooo palak, dal fry, gobhi masala, aloo paneer, palak paneer, tinda, bhindi….,” a boy who was looking elsewhere and mechanically wiping a steel plate with a piece of dirty cloth recited these words non-stop. He was responding to a query from Mrinal. I looked at Mrinal because I had not understood a word from what he said. Mrinal negotiated with boy and ordered something. After a few minutes the boy came back with a small steel plate with a few pieces of chopped onion, cucumber, radish, green chillies and a piece of lemon and threw it before us. I looked at Mrinal. She told me it was a salad. Not that I never had any experience with different kind of food. In Baroda I had feasted on a lot of potato, onion and two different types of lentil soup called, Punjabi and Gujarati. Punjabi tasted like lentil soup and the Gujarati tasted like a sweet dish. In Baroda things were simple. You could scoop up any amount of potato mash and onions. And whenever you wanted these regional lentil soups you just needed to shout either ‘Punjabi’ or ‘Gujarati’.

Finally the boy came with two oval shaped steel plates. One was filled with a steaming thick black daal and the other had a green paste where potato pieces lay dead. ‘Dal fry and Aloo Palak’, Mrinal explained to me. I nodded as if I got the meaning. Hot tandoori rotis were placed before us on steel plates as big as the rotis. In South India we eat rice from the main plate and curries from small dishes around. Here in North India people ate differently. They kept the curry before them and ate roti from side plates. They broke rotis in small pieces and made a spoon out of it, scooped the vegetable or dal in it and then pushed it into their mouth. Later on I realized that it was more a class oriented eating style. Poor people ate like that and we were sitting amongst a lot of poor people who could not afford sophisticated food from the Bengali market. The poor people ate with relish. They took the Tandoori rotis in hand and clapped them against their palms to remove the black soot from the tandoor oven and ate with a lot of festivities. It was like dumb charade. They hissed once in a while as they bit their teeth into ferocious green chillies. They gulped unfiltered water from the dirty drums covered with dirty clothes.

(aaloo palak)

I was learning to eat Delhi for the first time. And Delhi ate with a passion. And I was becoming a part of the passion. I did not know there were many other eateries in the city where people ate from huge plates, in silver wares served by turbaned bearers. I knew Delhi through the refugee dhaba. Mrinal was eating silently, occasionally looking into my eyes asking whether I was enjoying it or not. I was thoroughly enjoying it because I thought at least I could grapple with Delhi in terms of food. I did not know what palak was. Mrinal told me that it was Spinach. It took me many more years to know that it was the same spinach that Pop Eye ate for all the energies. With faceless people we too sat and ate without face. Some people ogled at us because at that moment Mrinal was the only girl in that dhaba and she obviously did not look like one who frequented such places. She was more defiant than myself and with the defiance inherent in her she dared the gazes which went back in shame after sometime.

We walked back to Mandi House and then to the Akademy guest house. Night was thick. There were no familiar faces. We sat there for a while in the hall of the guest house. I did not know what I was feeling. Mrinal was tired after three days of train journey. I too was tired but I was not feeling sleepy. After chatting up for some more time, planning the next day though we did not have much to do in the city to begin with, we said good night to each other. Mrinal went to the right wing of the guest house where the girls’ dormitory was located and I went t to the left wing where boys were supposed to park themselves at night. I sat silently on the bed for some time. Some boys were on other beds. Some were sleeping and some were looking at the ceiling. Someone was rolling a few paintings. I did not know anyone of them. I was posing like a brave young man till then. Now I felt like crying. Here I was in Delhi. Alone, in the midst of hopeless strangers. Then I calmed myself down. I went out to the drawing room and made sure that Mrinal latched the room from inside for she had told me that no other girl was present there that evening. I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for a while. All those twenty four years paraded their highlights before my eyes. I heard a vehicle screeching to halt somewhere out there. I let myself fall into a deep well that I thought was a metaphor of Delhi for that night.

Why This Kolaveri Kolaveri Kolaveri Di- The Biennale Song Sung by JohnyML

2011-11-30T10:11:00.000+05:30

(Sing as if you were singing Kolaveri in Karoke)

Yo boys I am sing song

Soup Song....... Bose song....

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Rhythm correct...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Maintain please

Why this biennale .......... aaa di...

Distance –la durbar hall-u hall-u colour-u white

Five crore-u background white-u white-u ...changed into black-u

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

White skin-u art-u art-u ..Bose want black –u

Vice vice meet-u- meet-u ...artists’ future-u dark-u...
Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Mama...currency notes eduthuko...appadi kaiyile snacks eduthuko

Kokoko kom..ko ko ko kom..ko koko ko koko kom....

Sariyaa vaasi.....

Haahahaha......

Super mama...ready ready oneee twooo three......four

Whaa..what a change over mama...

Okay mama now tune change...u

Kaiyila brush......

Only English.aa.

Handla bursh...stretcher-la canvas ...eyes fullaa tear-u

Empty life..u... Bose-u come-u , life-u reverse gear-u...

Bose-u Bose-u oh my bose-u I make you go bow-u
Cow-u cow-u Holy cow-u ...I want you hear now-u

God artists dying now-u Bose happy how-u

This-u song-u for soup-artists-u

They don’t have choice...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Hannh cku nakuna..

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Why this biennale biennale biennale di...

Why this kolaveri Kolaveri Kolaveri di...

Ramdas Tadka goes Behind the Shadow of Big Bose

2011-11-29T13:17:00.000+05:30

(Ramdas Tadka 1968- 2010)

Ramdas Tadka passed away on 13th September 2010. He was a professional artist and when he succumbed to cancer at 43, he was an assistant professor at the Nagpur Fine Arts College. Tadka was a classmate of Julius Macwan and Bose Krishnamachari at the J.J.School of Art during late 1980s. Julius Macwan was a close friend of Tadka and knew well how this artist had wished to be a part of the contemporary art scenario.

Unfulfilled dreams of the people who pass away are often fulfilled by those who remain. Julius felt that it was his duty and karmic responsibility to do a show of Tadka’s works which he was not able to exhibit when he was alive. Till the last moment Tadka was giving a fight to the disease and working to mount a solo show. The paintings were his last act and for Julius it was his first mission to showcase his friend for the people. The show was inaugurated on 12th September 2011 at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. To supplement the show, Julius came out with a book titled ‘The Other JJs’. This book consists three long conversations between Julius Macwan, Sudarshan Shetty, Bose Krishnamachari and Jitish Kallat.

(The Other JJs - cover page)

The other JJs. A wonderful concept. It could have brought out the essence of the JJ School of Art bridging the hiatus between the English speaking mainstreamers and the vernacular speaking, vernies. It could have been a great book. While Julius Macwan’s effort remains quite commendable, the content of the book fail to do justice to the concept and the title, ‘the Other JJs’. Let me justify my critique.

Sudarshan Shetty sums up JJ of his times, that is of the early 1980s. For Shetty, JJ was attractive because there were a lot of beautiful women around. He came after doing his B Com. Shetty did not like his commerce studies because he felt he did not belong to the stream. He did not want to become a painter because he never thought that there could be a vocation in painting. But it was natural for the river to flow to the sea. Hence, Shetty reached the ocean called the JJ School of Art and he could, while remaining a constituent drop, prove that he is also a sea, but a different one.

(Sudarshan Shetty with Bhavna Kakkar and Ina Puri)

Shetty is candid as usual in his takes. He did not know Tadka directly so his conversations revolve around the milieu that defined the aesthetical practices prevalent in Mumbai in general and at JJ in particular. Also Shetty reveals how there was a divided atmosphere between the English speaking and the Vernies. When we read between the lines, we come to know that vernies are pre-destined to go into the gutters of oblivion. But Shetty could cross over to the other shore with sheer determination and effort. And as a man who has never lost his sense of balance Shetty is always on a look out for those vernies who have disappeared from the scene. And at times, at odd contexts they just drop in from somewhere, with a sense of guilt and sense of awe written largely over their faces. Shetty speaks his mind about abstraction and portraiture. He also tells Macwan about how the teaching methods were quite mechanical in JJ at that point of time.

(Bose Krishnamachari)

Then we come to Bose Krishnamachari. And as we keep listening to the story of Bose, we tend to think that we are reading a book about Bose not about Tadka. Instead of talking about Tadka and the other JJs, the othered JJs and the othering JJs, Bose makes himself a hero of the times and Julius plays along with supporting comment. What the reader expects from this section of conversation is the elucidation of the binding concept of ‘the other JJ’. Macwan and Bose could have gone deep into defining the dynamics that constituted the other JJs. Was Tadka a loner among these others? Who were the others? Who were those faces that are now curiously appearing along with the recognizable faces of Bose, Macwan, Kallat and so on in Facebook and all?

When a photograph appeared in Bose’ facebook account a few months back, I saw a few faces that were more confident and bold than the face of Bose with his downcast eyes. Bose soon made it his profile picture. In the book too, we see Bose sitting like a loner with other loners including Tadka and Rajendra Kapse. Bose might have been trying to find his foothold there amongst the friends and as the story goes he did find that and he became quite popular amongst the students. In the conversation he reveals that and he calls that JJ is constituted by migrants and it is like a village with the canteen as the village square where people gather to chat up with each other. Bose was a great motivator.

(an old picture of Bose -behind right- posted by Ravi Joshi)

However, when we read through, we feel that Bose replaces the whole of other JJs with his own glories and hagiography. At one point he says that he knew only two languages when he came to Mumbai: English and Malayalam. Those people who have interviewed him in innumerable journals and television channels know for sure that Bose has time and again said that he knew only one language when he came to JJ first time and that was his mother tongue, Malayalam. Suddenly Bose wants to shift his position to a cosmopolitan from the very beginning there by opting out and surrendering his citizenship in the world of the others in JJ.

This falsified notion of a winner from the very beginning makes the conversation of Macwan with Bose a bit uncanny for the reader. And in due course we see Tadka and people like Tadka disappearing from the scene, therefore a total erasure of the other JJs, and the glorious picture of Bose coming up there like a hoarding. Once we finishing reading this part, we really ask what was Tadka like and how did he feel amongst these ‘towering’ personalities of his times? And what was Tadka’s work all about? This book has a lot of reproductions of Tadka’s works but there is none to tell the reader why Tadka’s paintings are like this? The book could have served this purpose.

(Jitish Kallat)

When we come to the third part, we see Jitish Kallat speaking his mind. Kallat was not a part of Macwan’s batch. Hence, ethically speaking he is not supposed to delineate the qualities and characters of Tadka as a person or as an artist. Instead, as intelligent he is, Kallat speaks about the pedagogic distinctions and comparisons that existed as a general backdrop for the students like him at that point of time vis-à-vis those of the JJ School of Art and its arch rival, Fine Arts Faculty, Baroda. Kallat also speaks about the rebellions that his generation of students brought forth within the JJ School of Art. Interestingly, Kallat is asked to face the interviewer, Macwan, after the latter had conversed with Bose Krishnamachari. Hence, for Kallat too, Bose’ claims become a point of reference and there occurs an internal need for not contradicting or not disclaiming the positions that Bose has already taken.

(Bose- a false profile? from FB)

There is no doubt Bose had been a powerhouse student when he was there in JJ. Like a true migrant he had tried his best to stick his neck out. He was the other JJ but today in retrospect, he wants himself to be out of that otherness and claim a predetermined allegiance with the mainstreamers. Bose still remains a powerhouse today. But he has pawned his ethics to do things bigger even if it goes against the primary principles of democracy and our Gandhian legacy of non-corruption. Otherwise, how a person who claimed to have boosted up the morale of many, now consume Rs.10 Crore for a trust that has constituted with people with no history in the field of art and kept everything away from public scrutiny?

(Julius Macwan)

History is a bitch (and bastard too) at sometimes. When the winner writes the history, the vanquished ones loose a chance of utterance. In their muted position they are as dead as Ramesh Tadka, even if they are living today. I wonder why Macwan did not interview one of those losers and ask them to articulate their own otherness. Only face saver of this book is a post script written by Prof.Prabhakar Patil who had taught Bose, Tadka and Macwan when they were foundation students at JJ. As a conclusion Patil writes: “Ramdas had multi dimensional personality- talented artist, committed teacher, a nimble dancer, great mimic, loving son, caring husband and more. Considerate, energetic, perseverant and hardworking, he has always viewed the brighter side of life- till destiny cheated on him, snatching him away forever even as Mumabi was deep in the midst of the Ganesh festivities. Ramdas, who, once upon a time painted portraits of the dead for a living, was now himself the past. Visiting his Worli home to offer condolences, the digital photograph of a smiling Ramdas in front of me became a blur as I struggled to hold back my tears…”

(prof.Prabhakar Patil and wife Manisha Patil)

Had this note of Prabhakar Patil not been there, this book would have been clearly passed for a project devised and funded by Bose Krishnamachari. Julius Macwan is a well meaning person and despite his odd sense of dressing (he wears a skirt and sleeveless shirt at the art openings), he is forthright in his life and in his works. Had he intensely felt for the concept of the book, the other JJs a bit deeper, he could have come out with a fabulous documentation of the life and times of JJs since 1980s.

(Mukesh Panika,Director Regligare Arts)

I thank Mukesh Panika, the director of Religare Arts, who officially released this book, for bringing a copy for me from Mumbai and carrying it always in his car till he met me in an art opening and handing over it to me with a smile in his eyes.

The Evil Orientalist: Waswo hits stands with a Comic Book

2011-11-25T10:43:00.000+05:30

Waswo X Waswo has done it again; his faith in India, Indian life style, pace of Indian life, the beauty of the people here, the sound of the languages, the colours of the turbans and clothes and the transcendental purity of the mountainscapes, landscapes and riverscapes.

Waswo, the Udaipur based photography artist and an artist collaborator of the traditional photo-painters and scenery painters from the locality, writer, translator and friend of so many Indian artist has proved his faith in his latest comic book titled ‘The Evil Orientalist’. This book will be a part of his forthcoming solo show in a galley in New Delhi.

He has been in the middle of it for quite some time. Initially he came as a traveller and like many travellers from the west he too had found India quite an alluring place. Replete with contradictions and rich in cultural variety, he felt initially that this was the place where god could come and shake hands with you at any turn of the road.

Hailing from Milwaukee in the United States of America, Waswo, since his childhood onwards has imbibed the sense of multiculturalism. He grew up when the idea of segregation and apartheid was rampant in the milieu of America and within that context he lived as a doubly alienated personality as he realized his different sexual orientation and inclination towards gender politics.

Having studied print making and photography Waswo travelled all over the world till he came to India and fell in love with Udaipur, the land of lotus ponds and havelis and palaces. In any love affair there is always a sense of doubt. Till you kiss it away it lingers on. And Waswo did kiss his scepticism away.

But the locals were not so lenient towards him all the time. They looked at him like any other Firang who had come to colonise them through money and white skin. It took a long time for Waswo to become their Chacha. Once the ice was broken he became the ladla of the local. Today he is a master artist and a craftsman who works with the local masters and craftsmen and never shies away from acknowledging them.

The comic book, ‘The Evil Orientalist’, which is less in pages than a usual comic book in India is a solace in the Indian graphic novels scene perhaps, mainly because most of our graphic novels that intended to be comic are really tragic while reading and seeing. Here, we have an artist taking up his own paintings, photographs and collaborative works as the crux of the narrative and pepping up it with newly painted scenes and scenarios.

This is the surrogate story of Waswo himself who finds himself in the twilight zone of being both a foreigner by looks and Indian by heart. He is a compulsive photographer who tends to click before he licks. But people though they are not aware of the discourse on gaze often find it quite intimidating. But soon he gained the confidence of the people. Still the tag of an orientalist who looks at the eastern subjects through the discourse of the oriental formulated by the hegemonic gaze, as explained by Edward Said in his famous theoretical work titled ‘Orientalism’.

Orientalism was an appreciable genre of knowledge when it was benevolently used. But it became a tool of oppression later by many. There was a time when the orientalists where regarded as great scholars. Post-colonial studies have disproved the orientalist claims as they often viewed the east as an object to be scrutinized under a powerful gaze, controlled and categorized.

With this negative connotation of the word lingering around when someone suggested Waswo’s works were orientalist, it stung him deeply. This was a comment that sent Waswo thinking. This comic book is a result of this deep inner search for his original identity vis-a-vis his assumed one as an Indian, an artist, a man of alternative sexual identity, and a collaborator in creative works.

The Chacha, the young firang is seen sitting at his bungalow where the servants bring him tea and snacks. Waswo makes it a point that these characters speak in their respective language by using English and Hindi respectively in the thought bubbles. While Chacha thinks that the servants consider him as a gora, the servants in turn think that he has come here to exploit them. Chacha’s attention is on the young man who thinks both in English and Hindi, therefore educated, who mops the floor. Chacha’s interest is on his body in order to suggest his alternative sexual interests.

The mannerisms and apprehensions of a foreigner living in India as well as those of the Indians towards the foreigner is well brought out through the dialogue between Chacha and Kaka, an older man from the west. The scenic beauty of Udaipur and places around are captured by R.Vijay who has illustrated the text.

Waswo also brings in subtle critique on the Indian attitudes towards the foreigners by portraying Chacha as Laxmi who has this dollar back up. Besides, by evoking the Indian modern art historical references, Waswo positions himself within this discourse. He brings in Amrita Shergil’s famous paintings, the Brahmachari’s like a quotation and makes the central figure to say that ‘the painter girl could put them in a better frame’. Also Waswo uses the references of Raja Ravi Varma, A.Ramachandran and Surendran Nair, besides evoking a whole lot of miniature paintings.

As post script Waswo has also jotted down 101 confessions that a foreigner/orientalist would make in any unguarded moment of sincerity and simplicity.

This is a worth reading book and collectible item, which is available for Rs.20/- (Rupees Twenty only). Good going Waswo....

Importance of being Sasikant Dhotre at the India Art Festival, Mumbai 2011

2011-11-21T11:05:00.000+05:30

(Sasikant Dhotre)

India Art Festival opened at the Nehru Centre, Mumbai on 17th November 2011. The building, from a distance looks like an old cuticura powder tin with chinks all over made by truant school boys from the kolivada. Some people say that it is a phallic symbol; siva linga (the phallus of shiva comfortably fitted into the Parvati yoni created out of the second floor terrace).

Anchor of the opening ceremony, Kanchi Mehta announces the name of the first Kalavishkar Award winner, ‘Sasikant Dhotre’ and a section of the audience erupts in an ecstatic applause. The award carries a purse of One lakh rupees, a certificate and a trophy. Artist Seema Kohli is the donor of the cash award. “There are millions of artists in this country and very few galleries to accommodate all of them. India Art Festival gives the interested artists a chance to come and exhibit their works in the Art Festival booths, of course against a payment. But a panel of judges would assess their works and give this award to the best amongst them,” explains Rajendra Patil, director of IAF and Kalavishkar, an NGO that has initiated this festival.

Kolkata based art historian and critic Nanak Ganguly, Delhi based artist Seema Kohli, Bangalore based artist Ravi Kumar Kashi and myself are the judging committee members. We have a very tough time in assessing the works as each work vies with the other to be the ‘worst’.

(Sasikant Dhotre receiving award from MH Minister for culture Harshvardhan Patil)

The word worst is too judgemental and prejudiced. Most of the artists who take part in this section are either from small town art colleges or small villages. Many of them are self taught and many have not even exhibited once. There is a tremendous amount of naivety in them. They are innocent in many ways. They look at a Jitish Kallat sculpture exhibited downstairs and would wonder, ‘what’s the big deal? Any village craftsman could do it.’

One important thing that these artists who are not seen in mainstream (they are seen in Lalit Kala Akademies, Jehangir Galleries, Kalaghoda Pavement and so on), are quite convinced about what they are doing. And they are willing to learn too. The issue is that there is none to guide. For them the ideals are not Subodh Guptas and Sudarshan Shettys though they rake millions; their ideals are the village masters, MF Husains and local art gurus who have ‘made’ it.

(Painting by Sasikant Dhotre)

We are snobs and before we see try to see the truth of their art, we judge them as bad artists. Okay, if they are bad, then I would say the city’s upmarket buying class in total has bad taste because the second floor where these artists have exhibited along with my SOFA project attract more visitors than the high-brow-ist galleries and their exhibits in the ground floor.

In Delhi, it would have been different. Everyone would have appreciated or depreciated everything because here we have both totally ironed out aesthetics selected by a set of perennially prejudiced gallerists and market players who claim themselves as ‘judges’ and those cash croppers like Paresh Maitys and Jogen Choudhurys selected out of necessity by the judges as well as their representative galleries.

India Art Festival is a new model art fair with more democracy in approach and if it is successful in the coming years those galleries that have been sulking this year from participating would come in throngs and there would be several chances of the fair being ‘bought’ out by corporate houses from abroad. So Rajendra, be ready for a great cash gain. Create new accounts now!

Let’s come back to Sasikant Dhotre. As far as we, the judges concerned, Sasikant was the best out of the given number of artists in the second floor, who had booked their own booths and participated as competitors. That does not mean that Sasikant is the only one artist in the country at this given time who deserves this prize. It simply means that within the given he is the best. It is applicable even in the case of Skoda prize. If someone gets ten lakh rupees worth of Skoda Prize, there is no need to think that he or she is ‘the’ best. Within the given applications and given interests, he/she is the best; and that is the truth.

We, the judges came to a unanimous conclusion that this artist named Sasikant Dhotre, within the given context shows all the possibilities of growth and also show the potentials to experiment. Besides, he upholds the traditional skills of portraiture and shows a high amount of sensitivity towards the subjects that he deals with.

Now, who is Sasikant Dhotre? Sasikant comes from a place called Kolhapur. He is a self taught artist. He had spent two months in Sir. J.J.School of Arts and he left the course for reasons unknown to us. Perhaps, considering the skills, he was not ready to learn further from the college or other circumstances were not favourable.

I have a special relationship with Sasikant Dhotre. I saw a few of the works uploaded in his facebook account almost six months back. Super realist works are everywhere in the facebook, especially those of nude women and I think I have a collection of such images in one of my folders. But this young man’s super realist works caught my attention. I thought this guy had something more to say.

So I went to his info, took his number, called him up and soon I realized that I was talking to a person who was not comfortable with English. So I switched to Hindi. My Hindi, for professional uses is as good as his English. Still we communicated and I told him to meet me when I was in Mumbai next. And my next visit was in September and Sasikant came with his paper works. I was astonished to know that he travelled from Kolhapur to meet me! I was thinking that he was a Mumbai based artist.

Sasikant works in a super realistic style. He is a master of draperies. Like the Renaissance and the Venetian painters, he shows his flourish in painting drapery. Though there is a little bit of male gaze in his works, as his subjects are mostly his family members whom he considers in the place of mother and sisters, this gaze is controlled up to an extent. Sasikant believes that he is a chronicler of the Maharashtrian life once prevalent all over the state but now pushed to the rural areas.

Sasikant selects events from the lives of the girls and young women. They are all seen either self absorbed or involved in doing domestic duties. Through the minute depiction of the paraphernalia, Sasikant features the ingredients of a rich style of life that is being lost out to the onrush of the mall culture.

The brooding women in Sasikant’s works emblematizes the epitomical Maharashtrian beauty which in fact had become the focal point of the artists like Raja Ravi Varma and Mahtre, Dhurander and many other doyens from Maharashtra state. This rich tradition of painterly and sculptural portraiture is inherited by Sasikant.

However, there is a lack in Sasikant’s works; something that makes these works more contemporary than them just being the vignettes of past and a frozen life. I told him to find that out for himself and he promised me to do that. I did not know in September that I would meet the same artist in the India Art Festival.

I did not have any qualms to suggest Sasikant’s works for the prize and to my suggestion all of my fellow panel members agreed without much ado. They had their own reservations and views about Sasikant’s works to which I too had agreed largely. Sasikant needs to grow further and this award is just a moral booster and reminder of his responsibilities for those friends who had clapped when they heard his name announced at the India Art Festival.

Art....yes, it is nothing but responsible interventions in our socio-political and cultural lives.

No Marks...in a No Marx World- Pari Baishya’s Performance at Cart Wheel

2011-11-13T13:19:00.000+05:30

(Pari Baishya performing 'No Marks')

No Marks...Pari Baishya is really concerned about the body marks, birth marks, skin irritations and all other indices marked on her by the society.

Young Pari Baishya who is a third year painting student from College of Art, New Delhi, uses her body as the medium and message. According to her painting is a sort of mark making and body could be her canvas. Perhaps, the teachers in the college would not agree with this young student’s idea of converting her body as her canvas.

No Marks...is a performance that Pari Baishya did at the Cartwheel Archives and Journal premises at Chattarpur, New Delhi on 12th November 2011. Pari came out before a selected audience in a very small pair of shorts and a pull over. The she spoke to the audience initially with hesitation and then with some sort of daring.

Pari was talking about her body marks or we should call it ‘markings’ on her body. Initially she identifies a scar on the right temple and she circles it with a black marker. Then she goes on to talk about the other scars that recently received from insect and mosquito bites while travelling and camping in the hills. Then she circles each of those marks while mumbling, humming.

The not so large space transforms into a large arena as Pari cavorts in. Then with her limited theatrical props she coverts the room into her own personal space. She shows her long legs to the audience while circling the scars with black marker pen and says that she does not have ‘pretty legs’.

Then Pari speaks about her birthmarks. One is on her bosom that she circles out. Then she has one on her back that she cannot reach and one from the audience circles it for her.

Immediately after that Pari realizes the need for removing those scars from her body. She takes out a cream, which in fact is a tube of black acrylic paint and smears the ‘cream’ all over the body wherever she thinks she has got stains and scars and marks. Finally Pari does her facial act and turns herself into a black diva.

In the meanwhile she gets anxious about immaturely greying hairs. She wants them to be black so she adds black to those streaks of hairs too.

Then Pari gets up as if she has completely removed her ‘scars’ and asks the audience to click her image till they drop dead. She poses before the audience as if she were showing her bodily assets to a panel of judges.

Pair Baishya’s performance is loaded with ideology and human pathos. Ideologically, Pari wants to repudiate the idea of ‘no marks’. The beauty industry that overworks to turn the world white tells the people all over the world go white. And the beauty industry make the people believe that their skins are all scarred and stained. The new age guys would only fall for the white girls with unblemished complexion and smoothness of skin.

In short, the beauty industry demands a girl to be extra cautious and conscious of her skin and appearance. She is forced to believe all the time that she is just an ugly duckling and she needs to turn into a beautiful swan so that she could win the hands of a prince who would one day wander into this new forest called ‘urban space’. So she is on a perpetual wait.

Pari’s performance is a retaliatory one. She scorns at the demands of the beauty industry and selects the blemished parts of her skin to circle out and tell the world that yes she has got scars on her. So what? Now, in a mock act she smears the ‘fake’ cream on to her body and turns into a black girl, generally a category that has less demand in the marriage, professional and economic market.

Here, we have all the reasons to believe that Pari’s rebellious act is to emphasize her ideological positioning against the so called ‘white’; white as the hegemonic power that rules the world and controls the tastes and even prepare the cultural outlook of the people. Pari’s retaliation comes out of her black pride and she by making herself as black as possible tells the world that yes now she is ready to pose the same way the so called fair skinned models pose before the cameras.

On the other hand, Pari’s act also underlines the pathos of the human beings; especially of those women and girls who perpetually think about their complexion and let their bodies to be the field of desires. When she utters that she does not have ‘pretty legs’, it comes out as a normal and usual psychological response to the self analysis and the ultimate feeling of dejection on the ‘lack’ of prettiness that is demanded by the society in general. Pari, in a way here acts out the hidden fears and anxieties of a young woman who is destined to wade through the troubled waters of fashion, beauty, desire and eroticism.

This ideological binary and their polemical setting became one of the major talking points in the post ‘Prettiness’ as a notion had been even etched in the performer’s mind and she was not able to come out -performance session where an all cleaned up Pari Baishya sat before a very concerned and sensitive audience and faced the questions. The ‘pretty legs’ issue came up through the engagements of Sanhita Bhowal, Mrinal Kulkarni, Agastya, Anurag Sharma and John Xaviers as they all emphasised the issue of this binary (being a part of the ideological drives of the beauty industry and at the same time being critical of it t the extent of being a rebel and smearing herself with black colour). They argued that of it.

In short, their criticism was on the lack of political edge or awareness that Pari Baishya as the performance artist displayed while speaking on this pressing and urgent issue, which in fact was the crux of her performance. But Devyani, a student from the Delhi College of Art said that it was quite natural for a young girl to feel ‘inadequate’ when she confronts her own self before a large mirror. This However, when this feeling of inadequacy becomes ‘natural’, there feeling of inadequacy could be ‘natural’, she argued.

However, when this feeling of inadequacy becomes ‘natural’, there is an allowance of it from the individual’s side too. To resist that one has to come out of the whole notion of beauty as promoted and propagated by the beauty industry which is purely inclined towards making profit over profit. A contemporary woman, a conscious, intelligent and rebellious woman should be making attempts to going in and coming out of this situation as looking good before an audience is not a ‘crime’ but the idea of looking good is controlled by the hegemonic ideas of beauty, it becomes a problematic which needs analysis, resistance and solution.

Pari Baishya’s performance has the potential to be analytical and rebellious. Though there are no conclusive solutions given through her performance, she hints at the possibility of considering the ‘other’ as the beautiful, the dejected as the acceptable, the displaced as the mainstream, the subaltern as the relevant, the migrant as the citizen, the scarred as the rightful and the stained as the saint.

'No Marks....’- Performance by Pari Baishya

Facilitated by Cart Wheel Archives and Journal

Photography Collaboration: Anurag Sharma

Assistant Photographer: Anush Singh

Video and Report: JohnyML

I Don’t Need Your Help: Manmeet Devgun Hits at the Male World

2011-11-12T08:34:00.004+05:30

When a single mother says, ‘I don’t need your help,’ we should heed it with respect. We should listen to it with respect especially it does not come from a woman who belongs to a very affluent class. It shows the courage to be alone, the courage to rear up a child ‘without’ a father and above all to have sex with whoever she wants to or choose not to have sex with anyone. Sex cannot be avoided from the discourse of ‘single mother’ as this is one marker that upholds her virtue as a ‘devoted’ or a ‘wanton’ single mother. If her body is not claimed, or if she does not allow her body to be laid, then she is a great mother and if she does, she is a woman of loose morals.

Hence, our sexual morality is what drives us towards defining and judging the women who take courage to be alone, to mother a child all by herself and to have sex with anybody she wants. Manmeet Devgun in her first solo show at the Abadi Art Space, New Delhi literally screams to the world that she does not need anybody’s help’. The show is titled ‘I don’t need your help’. This exhibition has Manmeet’s photography works, videos and a performance.

Interpreting a set of works of art through the authorial intentions and autobiographical references could be debilitating as far as the works’ intrinsic ability to transcend times and stay as aesthetic objects. Against this we could also say that a work of art or an aesthetic form of expression becomes relevant only when the authorial intentions are addressed as a part of the readerly interpretations. Therefore, it would be always good to approach this new body of Manmeet’s works independently as well as through her auto/biographical references.

Hailing from a Chandigrah, Manmeet came to Delhi in late 1990s to study fine arts and she graduated in painting from the Jamia Millia Islamia. Though she was a trained in painting, perhaps, Manmeet is one of those women artists who abandoned the trained completely with no regret almost a decade back. She moved around in Delhi with friends and helped them in documenting their works and independently did photography as she had the access to a camera.

Manmeet partnered with Shantanu Lodh, initially in art and later in life and they together did a few wonderful project. Considering the fundamentalist censorship on personal freedom prevalent in a post-Ayodhya scenario in India, Shantanu and Manmeet took it up as a pivotal issue in their performance and photography series. In 2003 they made a bold attempt by distributing large posters of them kissing in public. By that time Shantanu had assumed a different artistic personality. He called himself ‘Art Maharaj’ and distributed scooter step-in covers inscribed with Art Maharaj. Also he did a series of performances with Inder Salim Tikku. Manmeet, by them had assumed an artistic identity and she started calling herself as ‘Mrs.Manmeet’.

Manmeet also did two independent projects in 2001 and 2002 respectively. The first one was a series of objects for masturbation and their digital prints which she exhibited in a group show titled ‘Closet/Closets’ curated by Mrinal Kulkarni. In 2003, when Mrinal and myself curated a show titled ‘HEAT’, addressing gender and sexuality in visual arts, Manmeet created a series of photographs in which she enhanced her body parts with inflated balloons. Manmeet was one of the much written about artists of that time. Later in 2005, Shantanu and Manmeet did the boldest of performances ever in Indian art scene at Khoj International. ‘Hamam Mein Hum Sab Nange Hai’ (We are all nude in Public Bath), the project was called and in this both of them stripped themselves into nudes and let their bodies to be inscribed by others.

Perhaps, this is one project that faced both internal and external censorship directly in Indian art scene. The documents of which are still available at the Khoj International. But it is not released thanks to certain very sensitive reasons. It is sure that this performance will be hailed as one of the pivotal performances of India when the proper history of performance art is written.

In due course of time Manmeet got married to Shantanu (interestingly, senior sculptor K.S.Radhakrishnan and myself were the ‘uncles’ who signed for Shantanu in the marriage register and Mimi Radhakrishnan and Mrinal signed as ‘aunties’ for Manmeet). Relationships could sour if they professionally too much involved. It is always better to work separately. Even Marina Abormovic and Ulay separated after doing a series of path breaking performances.

In the meanwhile a beautiful daughter was born to them. She is named ‘Brushti’. Slowly Shantanu and Manmeet moved apart.

‘I don’t need your help’, the solo show could be read against this backdrop. But as the time passes, none is going to recount the personal trips and traps that the artist has undergone. In that case, we could also read the works away from this biographical background.

Most of the works in this project are done after Manmeet separation from Shantanu. The haziness and the troubles that she has been going through during the post-separation days are quite palpable and Manmeet is successful in bringing all those elements in her photographic works. Inside the decorated interiors of a drawing room, well arranged kitchen and bedroom Manmeet makes movements and caught in slow shutter speed they look like apparitions. There is a feeling of non-belonging-ness and even in her own domestic space where she has spent her time as a ‘family’ unit, now she feels herself like an apparition.

I am sure that this series is the outcome of a passing phase. The non-belonging-ness is not going to prevail as Manmeet has the courage to say that she does not need anybody’s help. These hazy photographs could develop themselves into as separate aesthetic projects with different aesthetic and philosophical reasons soon.

In another set of photographs Manmeet shows herself as a mutilated person. She portrays herself as an ugly creature with displaced organs grown all over her face. This series must have come out of the scepticism that she has felt after the separation; scepticism about her beauty, appearance, demand, desire and recognition.

In another brooding set of photographs, arranged as if they together created a narrative story, Manmeet is seen sitting with her daughter, now her own world and focus of attention. She is totally absorbed into her thoughts while the child does her own things unaware of her mother’s internal turmoil. The world that is and that would be for sometime is caught well in the scribbles that Manmeet’s daughter has made on the walls with colour pastels. Also the scattered tiffin boxes and pencil boxes tell the story of the child’s growing up.

In a lighter mode, Manmeet portrays herself as a beautiful and ‘available’ (marriageable) woman in traditional saree attire. Interestingly her towering presence is kept against the ‘Groom Wanted’ columns in the newspapers. In one, Manmeet seen with a two fire extinguishers for her crown/horn suggesting that as a bride she could do ‘fire fighting’ jobs at home and in the second portrait she is seen as a multi-tasking woman with multiple hands and multiple utensils, tools and implements in them. The grooms’ expectations are fulfilled in one go. The sexual potency of her own self is shown in her red silk saree and the inviting (menacingly) smile.

The video ‘I don’t need your help’ starts with a close shot of Manmeet uttering expletives and hurling abusive words at them. In the beginning they are inaudible but from her lip movements one could make out the words. And like in a musical symphony, these words reach a crescendo and she screams ‘I don’t need your help’.

One of the most interesting videos that Manmeet has done in this project is a 2002 unreleased video. In this small projection on the wall we see a Lucian Freud painting that almost look like Shantanu lying nude, smeared with some clay like substance and sleeping unaware of someone’s gaze. Here Manmeet sees the painting/him though a pair of magnifying glasses. Each and every part of his body is scrutinized and the genitals are observed clinically. This work should be treated as one of the best counter gazes ever that any Indian woman artist has produced so far.

Manmeet has also added a performance element to this project. In a furry red rug placed in a corner of the gallery, she cuts several of her portraits and stitches them together to create a creature who resembles her but with a displaced and distorted appearance. Perhaps, this shows the current mental situation of the artist. And if we read it out of the personal context it could also suggest that often (single) women are viewed in this way, cut and pasted body parts.

One element that repeatedly appears in Manmeet’s project is that of screaming. Except for one video Manmeet does not literally screams out in any of her works including the performance. The performance is one of the most silent acts in the whole show. But the screaming is quite palpable.

Screaming is a way that a child uses to get attention from its mother. To read it inversely, screaming is the first step towards demanding recognition and identity. Here Manmeet by screaming that ‘I don’t need your help’, literally sears herself away from the past as ‘wife’ os someone, partner of somebody and so on, and she demands recognition not only from the man whom she has left behind but also from the world that has so far seen her as wife and partner of someone. There is an element of attachment and detachment to this aspect of screaming. The child wants the mother to listen to this screaming at the same time it wants to move away and start everything independently. The distortions that Manmeet give to her portraits must also be seen similar to those distortions often the children make to grab attention of his/her mother or the people around. Manmeet becomes a child once again to do her rebellion and all the indications are there that she would grow into an independent woman and artist without any confusion in the nearest future.

About (some) Women as Artists and Their Stories

2011-11-11T13:19:00.000+05:30

I have so many girlfriends. The emphasis on girlfriends because they are ‘girls/women’, in the sense, as one of the T-shirt logos say ‘I am a Virgin’ – It is an old T-shirt, by gender. Don’t get me wrong. There is no sexism in this comment. These women are my friends and most of them are artists too.

An art critic’s job involves a lot of listening. You have to do a lot of couch sessions. Again, please don’t get me wrong here too. I am talking in a very Freudian sense not in Shakti Kapoor-ian sense. To become a good art critic and a curator you need to develop a strong sense of listening. A sense of seeing is a different issue. “CD bhej deejiye….or send me a mail with low resolution images of your works,’ is the common refrain that most of the art critics do; this lot includes me too.

So basically, an art critic listens a lot and he/she is expected to absorb a lot from these sessions. While speaking about listening and talking, Osho says, the Westerners have made listening into a profession. And they call it psychoanalysis. They make a lot of money out of listening because none listens to none there. One day, a friend of Freud asked him, “You listen to people a lot. Don’t you get bored?” To that Freud answered, “Who listens? I just pretend to listen. If you listen to all those you will go mad.”

In that sense, an art critic cannot be a Freudian. He/she has to listen; listen absolutely. Men artist folks do not talk too much. Even if they talk they talk about so many worldly things. If Malayalis meet another Malayali they start with Marxism and ends up in old romantic Malayalam songs. If Bengalis meet Bengalis they only talk Bengali and it starts with and ends in Robindro Shongeet. I am not being parochial.

Women artists speak and they speak a lot. Most of them are beautiful and beautifully existential and existentially spiritual, spiritually materialistic, materialistically troubled, troublesomely materialistic and spiritual, confused on ideas, confused with ideas and confused by the very notion of ideas, they are feministic to the core and conventional to their teeth, outgoing in many ways and ritualistic for protecting their family peace. Some are deeply vague and many are vaguely deep. Many are beautifully shallow and therefore too vehement on what they do.

The degree of this confusion increases as per their belief in auto-diktat-ism grows. The same observations could be made on male artists too. But they carefully cover it in their indulgence in property price and the properties of the new car that they have ecently purchased.

Also, please don’t mistake that a silent male artist is quite a deep person. In fact he does not have much to say. Even if he has he has said it in his works, which is sadly mute, dumb and in all possible ways handicapped.

In couch sessions I hear a lot about their supporting husbands. That is just a beginning. Now I am sure, by the third session the husbands will have grown into devils.

Often these women artists speak that they need to earn from their art and the more they emphasis on that you become sure that they are nearing their thirties or mid forties. This lot is hated both by the young women gallerists and women curators. But the solace is not even there in the old women gallerists. They too hate these women artists.

Then for whom do they work for and for what they still do their work? They say it satisfies them spiritually. But they want material success. And their age is not conducive for them to move around with a CD in their hands and say, “look I am an artist, please see my works.”

Often, the moment they enter in a gallery, all the lights come into life. The errand boy would come with a glass of water and then ask for chai or coffee. The gallery director would come out and give them a conducted tour in the ongoing show. They have been taken for a ‘buyer’ because of the chauffer driven car, designer clothes, Gucci bag, Swarovski diamonds and all.

Then they literally ‘burn’ the CD inside their bag. Some women artists bury it in their vanity bags. Whether you burn or bury, you are gone.

Many like to make page 3 appearance.

They will be in group shows, which will have minimum thirty artists. And they curse themselves to be a part of that show. Yet they participate. And each woman artist in the show hates the other woman artist in the show. See the group photos in FB. You could see hatred largely written on their painted face.

There are yet another group of women artists. They are like Andy Warhol’s girls. They are famous because they are famous. They are famous so they get entry everywhere. They are seen with the right people but participate always in the wrong shows. When they are the daughters of the rich and powerful there works could be even framed upside down. They will coolly justify the blunder with some vague Picasso quotation.

And if they wear a skirt-pant, a mutant dress, god alone knows some anti-woman activist might have designed it, their intellectual quotient will go a bit high till it is removed for good or bad reasons.

Many prefer to be seen with anybody foreign. One speaking in Spanish and the other speaking in English would not make much difference. After all free food and drink don’t need any language.

So I welcome my dear ladies….if you have anything to tell me, please do. You give me a lot of stories. And let me tell you, you may not be a star in the art scene. You might not have achieved the kind of success you want to have. But you are wonderful people. Your confusions and tribulations and happiness have contributed a lot in my life; it helps me to grow everyday into a new person.

I am a listener. I can listen to your stories without judging you.

Food and Sex in Delhi Metro

2011-11-10T13:00:00.000+05:30

Like Celal Salik, the great columnist in Istanbul as seen in Orhan Pamuk’s novels, I too like look at the faces of the people. Mr.Salik reads letters out of them and he believes that there are greater secrets written on people’s faces. And also when he walks along the streets and travels by ferry, he listens to people almost eavesdropping in their conversations.

I too like doing it. From the bits and pieces of their conversations, one could weave a story; an imagined story of and about their lives. These stories may be absolutely false but if you recount them to the people they would believe it and they would feel like living those stories for themselves as stories always make people desirous of such fantasies lavishly strewn into them by the story tellers.

That justifies the success of the pulp fictions. People like to read pulp fictions because it makes them desirous of their own lives with imagined complications; they see their lives through someone else’s eyes and feel that the ideal spaces where the other posits them is real and worth desiring. People prefer to shut themselves in such ideal spaces in their vacant hours.

May be conversations are like pulp fictions; complications made out of nothing and nothing made out of complications. Most of the conversations between the male and female friends are filled with sexual connotations and references; but subtly and sophisticatedly rendered. It is like a cat and mouse game. The one wants to pounce upon the other and the other want to move away on the right time. Some rats have death wish.

I travel by metro, one of the public conveyance systems in Delhi that makes the otherwise lawless citizens of Delhi a bit calm and sophisticated. And I believe it is in these metro coaches that most of the people here really relax. Many of them are seen dozing off, many listening to music through ears phones plugged into their selves, yet another lot speak incessantly into their mobile phones as if it was their last chance to utter rubbish and a few read.

I belong to the last category. But my reading is not in full concentration. I am watchful about the movements around me. I could tell who is speaking to who.

If the call is from the office, the person who speaks transforms into an official. If it is from his wife, his muscles tense up. If it is from the girl friend, he melts. If someone is scratching the walls of the shiny metro coach, make sure that he is speaking to a girl.

Just before the door closes, when the girls pass by, hapless working class boys stand close to the door panels and murmur, ‘hi darling, hi darling’. When the door closes with a wheezy sound, these boys remain calm and nonchalant.

A lady in good clothes and with her nose up in the air gets a seat quickly, even if the coach is sardine-ed by hopeless human beings. A woman with a shrieking child in her lap, if she is in her tatters, will never get a seat. There are thirty six lucky men in a coach who elbow their way to the seats because there are only thirty six seats. And all of them will pretend to be lost or asleep when such women from lower classes push their way into the coaches.

Girls and boys sit on the floor of the coaches though it is prohibited because they find it cool.

The other day I overheard this girl talking to this boy: “You know, those boys in the school uniform were trying to take my picture with their mobile phone.”

“What did you do then?”

“What could I do? I kept shifting on my legs so that they would get only a shaky picture.”

“School kids are like that.”

I looked at them. They might have come out of the school a couple of years ago. The baby fat on the girl’s cheeks is yet to say good bye.

I thought now they have many more serious things to say. So I closed my book and decided to stand as if I was trying to relax my eyes.

“So when did you leave Central (must be a Mall)?” the boy asked.

“It must be around eight. My god…I don’t know they were asking me to eat gol guppa …but I refused my stomach was full.”

“Then what did you eat?”

“Oh I had chocolate tarts, strawberry shake and creams. And the cake was so filling.”

“My god..that sounds great..So what’s strawberry shake?”

“Yaar..nothing ..I thought it was strawberry creamed whipped in fruity.”

“What did you do then?”

“We met Milli Aunty…and she took us for ice cream…and you know this aunty lives in Trans Yamuna…the other day I went there..my god..what a stinking place…it is so bad. I hate this river…it is stinking….”

…..
I was wondering what they were trying to communicate. Were they serious? I thought so. They were very serious and intense on their talk.

Then, is this the way this new generation people communicate among themselves? Do they talk a lot of small little things which have no consequences?

I understand when my six year old son when he tells his friends something like this: “Hey Ayush…(pointing to a ledge near the park where they go to play) you go and make a house there. You can have your breakfast there. You can eat your lunch and dinner too. For ice cream you can come to this shop (pointing at an imaginary shop)…”

I understand this because at this age they don’t think much beyond cartoon channels and junk food.

But what about the sixteen and seventeen year old people? I know I am generalizing. But the conversation I overheard cannot be forgotten just like that.

Then I remembered Osho and his take on communication between the enlightened and the non-enlightened.

When two enlightened people meet there is utter silence because they already know. When two non-enlightened people meet they talk and out-talk each other because they don’t know. When the enlightened and the non-enlightened meet, the former remain silent and the latter talk.

Going by the Osho way, should I call these kids non-enlightened people? May be they are. They just want to fill their vacant space with chattering. Or they must be so full that they need to chatter it out.

Or are they really enlightened people, even when they talk about food and snacks? When we are thinking about Jitish Kallat and Skoda Price, they don’t have any confusions; they just talk about ice creams, chocolate tarts and strawberry shakes.

Isn’t that a simple way of tackling life? Or for them food is a surrogate for sex?

I don’t know.

I prefer silence to talking.

Performance Art in Context: A Provocation to Discourse

2011-11-08T12:33:00.000+05:30

(JohnyML as Malcolm X, Mumbai 2008)

When the performance piece, ‘Migrant Art Critics Eating Banana’ with Premjish Achari and Anurag Sharma (with Anush Singh as technical supporter) was published as a series of photographs, several of my friends came forward to tell me very frank opinions about it. The observations range from ‘great’ to ‘bullshit’. On behalf of the team that made it possible, let me express my gratitude for all those who expressed their views without mincing words.

One question that people pose before me quite often is this: are you an artist? I am and I am not. If writing is an art form, then I am an artist. If only visual art practices come under the purview of ‘art’, then I am not because I cannot draw a straight line; the moment I try, it takes different curves and become letters. However, years before, categorically I had stated that writing/blogging was a performative act. In that sense I remain a performer at each and every passing moment. I keep performing in a very private space and only the outcome is shown to the public.

One may wonder why JohnyML, all of sudden start performing. I am a very reluctant performer; but when I perform, I do it with flair. In 2008 October, when I was trying to explain the logic of my blogging, I published the photograph that you see above along with that article. I was enacting the posture of Malcolm X who was retaliating at the white aggressors outside his home. This picture of Malcolm X was published in the Life Magazine. I became a great fan of Malcolm X when I was studying in London and learning more and more about black people and their histories. I took ‘By All Means Necessary’ from a Malcolm X speech. And I wanted to perform like Malcolm X.

(JohnyML performing with a nude sculpture at Chintan Upadhyay's Home)

Since then I had performed on several occasions. One of my performances was with a nude sculpture at Chintan Upadhyay’s Juhu residence and Chintan had documented them in detail. On another occasion, again at Chintan’s home in Juhu, I performed with Somu Desai and it was called ‘Artist and Critic’. Quite provocative with its blasphemous acts, Chintan only has the pictures of that performance. I hope one day we could release those pictures for public perusal.

I have a special interest in performance art and its theatrical varieties because in me there is always a performer working sans fatigue. As a keen art history student, I am quite fascinated by the evolution of performance art from its early 20th appearance in Duchampian intervention in art till date. Till recently, in India at least performance was a part of a larger work, or an outcome of a process, which could be a video or photographic piece of art. Though Nalini Malani, Ayesha Abraham, Pushpamala to Sonia Khurana, Shilpa Gupta to Atul Bhalla to Ravi Agarwal performance is an integral part of their works, the outcome is not pitched on the performance; performance remains an integral but un-articulated area in these works. Perhaps, ‘Bird’ by Sonia Khurana was one performative acts that invested the energies on the very act of performing/performance.

(Bird by Sonia Khurana)

However, by the end of mid 1990s itself we see a new crop of artists making attempts to do performances in their own regions. Umesh Madanahalli was one amongst pioneers of performance art (though we call his work as ‘earth art’) by physically acting in a space with machines and mechanics to help him. One could say that it was a scripted act on the earth. Subodh Gupta, before he became a ‘bartan’ artist he did a performance at the Khoj Artists Workshop at Modi Nagar in 1997-98. Gupta smeared his body with clay and cow dung and lied down before the energy house that he created out of the dung cakes.

(Umesh Madanahally)

(Subodh Gupta)

However, there are some unheralded performative acts that literally defined performance art in India. ‘I Slapped my Traditional Father’ by Santanu Lodh was one among them. In this series of eleven photographs taken from a performance Shantanu did with his father. Here you see a nude son/Shantanu serving tea to a fully clad father (to know more read my article from 1997-98 in this link http://artindia.net/johny/art6.html). It was one of the defining moments in Indian Performance art practice.

(Shantanu Lodh)

Later Shantanu did another sado-masochist performance in the memory of his mother. Shantanu was a teacher in Mira Model School in West Delhi then. He brought a group of fresh water fish with sword like mouths in a large tank made out of rubber tubes (the way Bengalis buy fish from the market). He tried to catch them one by one and in the process got attacked by the fish. Then with the bleeding hands he cut his hair in separate tufts and put them into the water. (I don’t know whether the photographs of this performance exist today)

(Kaushal Sonkaria)

(A work by Manish Kansara)

Koushal Sonkaria, Manish Kansara, Manmeet Devgun and Sushil Kumar were the artists in Delhi who did provocative and deeply meaningful performances. In 2000, Koushal performed with two pencils and went on drawing for hours in a roll of paper that ceaselessly unfolded before him. Manish Kansara brought his child’s funeral ashes into the artistic context. Manmeet Devgun, even before she did the nude performance with Shantanu Lodh at Khoj in 2005, in 2001 she had created a prosthetic body using balloons to exaggerate her breasts and stomach, in a show curated by Mrinal Kulkarni, titled ‘Closet/Closets’). Even Sabrina (Osborne) did a performative act in her work where she portrayed herself in all her bridal fineries. Vidya Kamat was another artist in Mumbai who indulged in performative acts in her works.

(Manmeet Devgun)

(Vidya Kamat)

Somehow our art history is lopsided. Today performance art is hailed in such way as if it had never happened before. As we often say, public memory is very short. But art historical memory, considering the recent events, is shorter. While we hail Nikhil Chopra’s very daring performances, we fail to mention Manjunath Kamat’s performances. Manjunath was one of the first artists in India who did a real take on Andy Warhol’s ‘Sleep’ by literally showing his own sleeping face on a tilted black and white television monitor, in between opening his eyes to watch the people watching him sleeping. While we mention Inder salim, we fail to acknowledge Murali Cheeroth and his performances.

(Manjunath Kamath)

(Murali Cheeroth)

I was shocked to see how history is blackened out or erased to create space for certain monopolistic moves in the field of performance art, when I went to see Inder Salim Tikku’s workshop at the Kiran Nadar Museum. While it is completely appreciable that a private museum is taking interest in performance art and facilitating a workshop on the same art form, I found Inder Salim’s idea of being and ‘becoming ‘ a performance ‘guru’ quite appalling. He had forgotten that performance art cannot be taught! He was telling the young people (me excluded from this young category) who came to attend that in Lahore there was a college that taught performance art.

(inder Salim Tikku's performance at KNMA)

I strongly believe that while performing arts could be taught, performance art is out of all pedagogic clutches. Taking a workshop is one thing and misguiding youngsters with ‘structures’ of performance is another thing. The serious danger that I find in this whole process is that the ‘new’ performance artists’ performances are not registered beyond a few photographs and facebook appearances. Instead, all these workshops and acts are credited to our ‘Guru’s account. Isn’t it necessary that each performance should be analyzed and contextualised for keeping this aspect of art at least unconventional and non-conformist? The moment it is hailed as a Inder Salim’s workshop (call it Harkat or anything), a school is slowly formed. Then it would not be different from Udayshankar’s Ballet Troup or PC Sircar’s Magic Company.

Joseph Beuys was a great performance artist. He did not become a Guru. He said he was a shaman. But he did not create a Beuysian school of performance. Let me tell you, pedagogic intervention of performance art is possible only when the performances are individually analysed, studied, contextualised and interpreted as per the needs of academic and cultural discourse.

(From 'Migrant Art Critics Eating Bananas Performance)

Seen against that backdrop, ‘Migrant Critics Eating Bananas’ is a very conscious attempt to create a context for a series of individual and group performances. My idea is to construct a discourse around a series of performances ‘performed’ by a variety of artists/people irrespective of their educational background. Their individual take will be recorded along with possible interpretations (I can see people telling me, ‘that’s what we too do’) and place it for public interventions in a discursive realm. I don’t intend to invite too many people to attend these performances. There could be no audience for a performance!

(Premjish Achari)

‘Migrant Critics Eating Bananas’ was a simple performance with no cynicism intended. But the act itself became cynical in its outcome and the strong homo-erotic connections became quite evident. That is a beauty of performances. The performance that we were planning to do was totally a different one and we did that too. The first one, which was titled ‘Blow Job- A Tribute to Andy Warhol’ was discussed between Premish Achari, Anurag Sharma and myself for almost a week, we watched the youtube version of the original ‘Blow Job’, prepared ourselves to do the act and even found a similar backdrop in my office at Chattarpur, New Delhi.

(Anurag Sharma)

We did act out ‘Blow Job’ performance, which was in a way scripted. But once that performance was done and we were relaxing, we thought of this second one, ‘Migrant Critics Eating Bananas’. The issue of migrants came as Premjish wished to get himself photographed amongst the migrant labourers in Delhi, especially in and around the new ‘aero-city’ coming up near the T-3 Terminal, New Delhi. Also, Anurag was discussing his pet theme of having people over the studio/office with their favourite undergarments in their hands. Somehow the idea of migrant art critics eating bananas triggered in me. And in no time with the consent of all three we decided to do this performance. We are still negotiating whether we should release our ‘Blow Job- Tribute to Andy Warhol’ or not.

Spermsformation in Art Scene

2011-11-07T06:54:00.001+05:30

I love this concept of ‘butterfly effect’; you make a small gesture somewhere and its results are reflected somewhere else.

Paulo Coelho, in his novel, ‘Eleven Minutes’ portrays the grief of Maria, the protagonist. She sits on the bank of a river and throws a pebble at the water. After some time, a duck that was floating on the other side of the river just moved as the ripples created by the pebble thrown by Maria touched it.

Buddhism also speaks of the same. Your gestures transform something somewhere depending on the quality of your gesture.

Try to abuse a rash driver from your wheel while the windows are closed. The abuse comes back to you because it does not have a space to go. Your words come back to you as ‘vulture’s effect’.

Butterfly effect could be drastic too. Many a war had started with reasons not related to politics or diplomacy. Flimsy reasons could trigger a war. A bad stomach of a monarch could end up in invading a neighbouring country.

Monopolies in any field could facilitate bad butterfly effects. Let me explain it with a story.

Consider we have a small state/country. A lady cultural impresario handles all the cultural activities in that place. Without her knowledge none would sing in public, none would exhibit in state owned galleries. Nothing will happen without her permission.

Now I take you to a land that lies beyond seven seas. There near a beautiful sea, a young couple relaxes on their beach chairs. The young man is silent. The girl too is silent. In silence they sip their beer cans.

She gets up, goes to the sea and swims in the beautiful blue shallow water for some time and comes back. The man is still sulking.

Impatient and irritated, the girl finally blurts out at him. “Why the hell are you sitting like a sullen monkey? Can’t you talk?”

The man looks at the horizon line. It looks like there is something sour that has been brewing up between them for quite some time. He looks at her face with apprehension.

She gets up in huff and walks towards the hotel where they had checked in by Friday evening.

By the night, the beach transforms itself into a land of carnival. Differently clad people throng the beach and walk against the soothing breeze. It is a full moon day with a clear sky.

Our protagonists are at a restaurant table. Both of them look fresh after a day’s sun bath and swimming. They seem to have sorted out their issues, at least partially.

The dinner is gorgeous. The music is enthralling. The atmosphere throbs in romance.

Back in the room, they make love, intensely, as if it was their last day on the face of earth.

After three months, the telephone of our cultural impresario rings and she picks it up: “Mom ... I can’t handle it alone. You have to come,” the girl sobs at the other end.

“My sweetie...don’t worry... I am there in a week’s time.”

“Will you stay with me till my child is six month’s old?”

“Of course, beta...”

The Ministry of Culture in that place gets into action. Our madam’s trip is planned as a year long research trip.

Till then....nothing will happen in the cultural front back home. That’s an order. The government facilities should not be opened to the artists till she comes back.

I call this phenomenon ‘Spermsformation’. A sperm could stop all cultural activities being presented in a state/country.

Monopolies work on butterfly effects.

Love, Sex and Violence; Graffiti Art Project in Goa

2011-11-02T14:36:00.001+05:30

Norman Tagore paints violent images. He paints the images of love too. Is that because he considers love as something a refined and sublimed form of violence? Levinas had once said that you could shed blood by making someone blush.

Love could be violent and for some, violence could be love too. When violent love happens Macbeth takes birth and when violence becomes love, Fascists take birth. Only love and lust for life could make you write diaries. What would you do when you don’t have a pen and diary in your hand and you find yourself confined in a cellar waiting to be gassed?

Then you scribble your love on raw walls with your nails, till your fingers bleed. Picasso once said if he was confined in a place without a paper and charcoal, he would draw on the walls with his tongue.

(Suhas Shilker and Norman Tagore)

In love too you use tongue to taste the saltiness of your lover. Tongues are used when you want to spread hatred too. When love happens you wail. Then you spray the walls of the city with your color cans. You write ‘Love’ in big bold letters.

What we need is love. That’s what Norman Tagore says through his spray cans. And artist, Suhas Shilkar too uses spray cans to speak of the abstract emotions.

Love was that united them in this project and it is called, ‘Sadak Chaap’. Sadak Chaap means ‘Street Stamp’ or Street Smart. And it is a graffiti project that Norman and Suhas took up in a street near the Miramar Beach in Goa.

(Graffiti by Norman Tagore)

Norman Tagore and Suhas Shilkar are two artists based in Goa. Norman has been interested in learning about ‘graffiti art’ or street art. He followed the works of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, MBW, D*Face and so on.

Then One day Norman watched a movie titled ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’. This Oscar nominated movie speaks about Banksy and street art. Norman was hooked. He contacted Suhas to collaborate. Then this project happened. It was between 24th and 25th of October.

Norman wants people to see art. And he wants to tell the world about Love because in the name of Love he had been tortured by a friend.

Perhaps, Norman does not want anyone to know about this story of his suffering. May be he wants. But I want to recount it for you:

(Norman Tagore)

Norman was a student at the Goa Fine Arts College. Tall, lean and handsome, Norman was a darling of everyone (He remains to be one). Then one day Police came knocking at his door. He was accused of raping a fellow student. She accused him and two other boys of mass raping her.

They were detained. The news hit the headlines. The boys were sent to jail. They languished there as ‘rapists’ for almost a year. When the case came for trial, it was categorically proved that the girl had schizophrenia. She was imagining things.

Norman came out unscathed but with a deeply hurt heart. His family was going through the worst of its times. He found his solace in art. Norman painted all about love and sex too. Now he paints simple images of couples in sylvan landscapes. He is an artist to watch out for.

Perhaps, the old wounds are still smarting. That’s why Norman still speaks about love and the right to love. No violence.

Suhas Shilker paints abstract art. When the project was proposed to him by Norman, he took it up with all enthusiasm. He painted spontaneously on the shutters and walls of the shops in Miramar. Norman stenciled images and sprayed them to his heart’s content.

Sadak Chaap turned out to be a success as people gave it due attention. In Goa, in the art front there are exciting things on the move. There at the Kerkar Art Complex, artist Subodh Kerkar invited the Goan artists to paint a huge tear drop made out of fiber glass. That came out to be a graffiti project on a given surface.

If there is a wall, be sure, in the coming days there are going to be utterances on love, sex aur social dhokas.

Makers of Indian Contemporary Art 2: Story of Jobbii Chakkoroo

2011-11-01T15:17:00.000+05:30

(Jobbii Chakkoroo at work)

Jobbii Chakkoroo speaks when he draws. He looks at the hagiographic details of his sitter and his large, inquisitive and smiling eyes measures each part for its finer details. When friends come around Joby speaks without stopping even for breathing, while his moving hands make criss-cross lines to capture the last bit of resemblance from the sitter’s face, posture and ego.

At times, Jobbii hands too falter. Then he looks at the person with some kind of resentment. His eyes would plead for one more sitting. He has committed an error. Now he wants to correct it. And as a sitter you are more enthusiastic than him for he does not take any money from you; the organizer of the event pays him. And Jobbii is an event in himself.

Jobbii Chakkoroo is a well known name amongst the instant portrait makers in Kerala. He travels all over the world to make portraits of the people who are interested to have their semblance of the self captured in graphite powder. Have you observed one thing? When you are forty plus you feel like having a portrait done by an artist. You want to see it hanging from your wall minus a garland and a flickering lamp.

Portraits remind you of death. You need not read Roland Barthes to know that. Portraits are like Life Insurance Policies. They guarantee some kind of safety and security from the fear of death while it gives you the assurance of the same happening to you in the near or distant future.

Hence, the portrait maker in a way helps you to understand your own mortality in graphite powder, if it is quick, in water colour wash if it is quicker and in oil or acrylic if it is permanent. Photographers are the messengers of death. Each click of their camera takes away one minute from your life because the more you are photographed the more you become a ‘past’. Photographs capture the moments of ‘past’ to be enjoyed and relived in the ‘present’.

That’s why present has the meaning, ‘Gift’.

Jobbii knows it. So when he is called to make portraits of the people in melas and social events he takes up the job with a lot of happiness. It was long back, when he was a student at the Fine Arts College, Trissur. He was a batch mate of T.V.Santhosh, Murali Cheeroth and ‘Panorama’ Prasad. Jobbii skills were known to the Trissurians. So he was invited to make portraits of the dead, alive, living dead and dead living. Then it became a passion, then a habit, then a source of income, then a profession that brought Jobbii all the fame.

Jobbii lives in Trissur and he knows most of the people by face. Like the way a cobbler know the person by his shoes, looking at the facial features Jobbii could now tell about a person. And he is a repository of stories. Friends gather around him while he works at a portrait. And he keeps speaking while draws as if it were an effort to ward off evil and death.

Personal sacrifices make a person greater than the ordinary mortals or successful mortals like us. Jobbii has not looked for any other job than doing portraits. Nor did he look for a permanent job that demanded most of his time. He chose this kind of freelancing as he realized that her daughters could not walk.

Jobbii devotes his time to these two school going girls. Perhaps, he realizes the strength of the people in his lines because he wants to overcome the weakness that the greater forces had imparted to his darling daughters. There is no justification for destiny. And we are the only people who could fight destiny and surrender to it.

Surrendering without giving it a fight is not a good thing, Jobbii knows it more than anybody else. But none would come to know that he carries a deep sense of pang in his mind. None sees him brooding over his destiny. He faces it with a smile. And he shakes hands with it when he draws the faces of the other people on the white paper on his drawing board.

Only once Jobbii cried. That was when he was in some Middle East Countries. He had gone for a ‘portrait trip’ invited by some friends there. He had collected enough money for his young daughters. But in the airport he came to know that his money was missing. It was stolen by someone. Jobbii fainted and when he woke up he cried.

(My portrait done by Jobbii)

Jobbii is a great friend of many. I got this rare opportunity to sit before him for a portrait. He captured my semblance in no time. I looked handsome in that and I was very happy. I thought in a momentary death everyone looks handsome.

Jobbii still works on in Trissur and around the world. When friends come back with their success stories, Jobbii tells them about the stories of those people who were once dear to them all as young boys. He tells them about the girls with whom they had flirted. He tells them about the sky of the city, the changing rituals in the temples, the sizes of the elephants that come for the temple festivals…But he does not speak anything about anybody’s face.

That he draws on his papers.

Baroda and the Fine Arts Faculty: To My Children Series 23

2011-10-27T11:29:00.000+05:30

(Fine Arts Faculty, Baroda)

Today when I drive through the roads of Baroda I feel a strange sensation. The streets looks strange, alien and I feel a great disconnect. When I was a student here I was very much connected to these streets though I did not have too many friends. Those friends I had were very good people and they entertained me as much as they could and in turn I used to entertain them with my poems, songs, mimicry and a bit of intellectual talk. Perhaps, when you are drunk, intellectuals stuff gives way to the popular things. If it is a Malayali crowd, I would say Marxism gives way to old Malayalam songs, that too romantic ones. Everyone likes a good Malayalm romantic song, the way Bengalis always like a Rabindra Sangeet irrespective of location, time and space. Today I have a lot of friends in Baroda and the level of hospitality has increased quite high too. But still I feel a strange disconnect.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, my second coming to Baroda was on a rainy day. I did not know where to go and the places that I knew were the boys’ hostels and Shibu Natesan’s place in Nizampura. When I went there first, after almost escaping from a pressing situation in Kerala, it was the peak of summer. Shibu was always busy with his works and social engagements and he got time to meet me only after the night fall. He had taken me to one of the boys’ hostels where T.V.Chandran and Manoj stayed. T.V.Chandran was expected to submit his dissertation in the Art History department and was supposed to leave on the next day in an early morning train in which he had a seat reserved. So he asked me whether I could go to the department and hand over the dissertation to one of the teachers there. I happily agreed. Hence even before becoming a student in the fine arts faculty officially I had this great opportunity to submit a dissertation there, though it was by T.V.Chandran. His dissertation was on the face painting of Teyyam performers from the North Kerala. Today T.V.Chandran teaches Art History at the Trivandrum Fine Arts College and publishes art historical articles in journals.

Left alone in middle of a city that was absolutely strange to me then, often I found myself sleeping or wandering around. I was desperate in several ways and Manoj was the only friend I had. He was a very friendly guy with some sort of odd behaviour. We stayed in somebody’s room on a second floor in the hostel. Often we saw thousands of bed bugs travelling out of the room once the iron beds got really heated up in the unbearable heat of the summer sun. None bothered to kill them. If they killed them they came back in hoards with some kind of vengeance. So I spent my vacant hours counting bed bugs and studying their behaviour while listening to the stories of Baroda recounted by an equally disturbed soul like Manoj.

Manoj was a student in BFA sculpture and when I met him was either rusticated from the department or was undergoing some kind of punishment for not depositing his dues or something like that. He wandered around in his khakhi corduroy pants and a T-shirt whose colour was violet once upon a time. He often gnashed his teeth as if he was venting his ire against some invisible forces. And on his skin I found several round patches which were the scars of burning. Someone later told me that he had the tendency to torture himself and he placed hot coins on his skin in order to ‘heal’ himself.

In one of his stories Manoj recounted how he was forced to live in other people’s rooms and how he had to subsist on other’s charity. He used to a great reader of the Russian literature translated in Malayalam and was quite popular in Kerala. And he spoke in a language that resembled the language translation. So he said: “One day I was coming back to my room after having tea from a roadside shop. It was a full moon night. Nothing was moving. All the students had gone to sleep. In the corridor, with a forty watt bulb layering everything with an eerie hue and letting long shadows of iron bars and grills falling along the corridor, I saw myself standing. I did not have the key to my room. The warden had locked up my room with a different lock as I had not fill in my dues. All my possessions were inside the room. So I entered the room from the balcony. I sneaked in through the backdoor and to my shock I found out that all my things were taken away by the warden. Since then I am left with this one pair of clothes.”

One day Manoj took me to the post office and that day he looked extremely happy. I knew, from his innumerable stories, how he celebrated when his father sent money via money order. We were there at the post office to collect his money sent by his father. There were a lot of girls standing at the counter. The clerk asked him to sign a receipt. To take out his pen, Manoj pushed his right hand into his pocket. And while taking it out, with a loud thud something fell on the floor and all the girls started giggling. My attention too was focused on the object that fell from his pocket with a rather metallic noise. It was a barber’s equipment- an old form of battery driven haircutter. It looked like miniature tiller. The girls were laughing at it! Manoj gnashed his teeth and with a studied movement he picked it up and kept it back inside his sagging pocket. Later on he told me that he used this machine to cut the hairs of all those ‘successful’ artists who resided in Baroda and to this service they offered him some money, food and good company.

Manoj was quite a Lacanian. He wanted to see how others saw him, through his own eyes. The legends of Baroda say that Manoj was in love with a girl who was not in love with him at all. He thought that she was in love that was why she was ignoring him. One day he was sitting at the steps of the old building in the faculty and the girl came from a distance and he thought that she was looking at him. When the girl passed by without giving any damn to the royal presence of our hero, he made another guy to sit in the same place where he was sitting and he went to that point from where the girl walked and assessed how she might have ‘framed’ him from that distance! He was a very happy presence and for me he was very soothing in my loneliness. We spent our afternoons, lying on the lawn around the huge Banyan Tree sculpture made by Nagji Patel at a traffic island in Baroda. It was with Manoj I left for Kerala to meet Kalapana. At Kannoor railway station we parted ways and I have never met him till date.

When I reached Baroda on the second time it was monsoon. The city was facing flood situation and many places were already submerged. Luckily I got an auto and went straight to Shibu’s place. To my shock I found his house was surrounded by water till the doorstop. There was a neem tree right in front of the house and around it there was a raised cemented platform. It was already dark and none was seen around. Hoping that Shibu would come back soon I waged through the water, climbed on the platform and sat there, waiting impatiently for Shibu. It was growing darker and I found myself marooned like a shipwrecked sailor in the middle of the vast expanse of water. I lit a cigarette and smoked without taste and a sense of growing fear. Suddenly from a distance, across the ground which now looked like a still lake, on the terrace of a three storied building I saw the glimpse of an ember burning. Someone was standing there and smoking.

“Yo....man....Is that Johny?” a voice came with a thick accent. I recognized the voice. It was the voice of Moses, a Kenyan student studying law or some other subject. He stayed across the ground in front of Shibu’s place and once in a while he came to have a drink and chat with Shibu. He had seen me in my previous visit and had befriended me.

“Yes, its me,” I hollered back. He told me that he was coming. I felt relieved. I saw the ember flickering down through the stairs and coming towards me.

Like the mythical Moses he came, wading through the water, parting it into either side. He was minus large mane and beard and for a staff he had an umbrella in his hand.

He took me to his home where his girlfriend served me with a cup of hot tea. After a while, Moses took me to the MA Hall of the boys’ hostel.
I don’t remember the room number. But I remember each and every face there. Shibu Natesan was sitting on the cot, grinning. So was Alex Mathew. Final year MA students Salim and Gopan Perumbada was also there. Antony Karal, Baiju Kurup and several others were sitting. Many of them I was seeing for the first time. Gopan was cooking something in a pressure cooker. Salim was smoking. Perhaps, everyone in the room was either smoking or drinking. Through the curtain of smoke and mirth I saw the glowing faces of my friends and future associates.

Moses handed me over to Shibu. I thanked Moses for all the help. Then someone extended a glass filled with some drink to me. Even without asking what it was I bottomed it up into my mouth. Strong rum burnt its own way through my innards. Someone handed over a cigarette to me. I dragged it. Something exploded in my head. I was grinning like everyone else in the room. Someone was singing. Many were chatting. In the growing din I too talked, sang and had several rounds of drinks and smoke. Things were welling up in me. I wanted to vent them out. I knew the topography of the hostels from my previous visit. I rushed to the bathroom area. Standing in front of a series of washbasins and mirrors I puked. Things flowed out of me. My past, my ignorance, arrogance, vanity and everything. I raised my head and looked at the mirror. There, a different man was standing with his moustache and beard drenched in the foul syrups of past. I could not wash my face and bring the new being out before that with a big bang I collapsed on the floor. I could see a thousand watt bulb flashing and going dark inside my head.

(Feroze Babu, JohnyML and Somu Desai- after 14 years when I decided to flag off my art routes, I chose fine arts faculty as the starting point. Just before we started off from Baroda for the Art Routes trip- for more http://www.artroutes.in/)

It must be after half an hour or so when I woke up. Around ten anxious faces were hovering above me. And I could focus them one by one. Zooming and out. And when they saw me trying to recover from the shock of falling, they too felt relieved. “We heard a big noise and when we came there you were lying like a heap on the floor,” Shibu told me later. “Then we together carried you back to the room.” I got up and drank again, my fear was gone. I felt like a new person and I was ready to face Baroda.

As a student of the Art History Department of Fine Arts Faculty I don’t have much to say. Most of my experiences are outside classrooms. Even after officially getting admitted there at the art history department, I was not allotted a hostel room. I was living with my friends in the hostel. I was experiencing the ‘Gujarati’ and ‘pujabi’ dals in the hostel mess. In the meanwhile I got one of the cycles abandoned by the previous students from under the staircase of the hostel and got it repaired. One day Shivji Panicker who was one of the teachers in the department asked me whether I could stay in a house outside the campus. The owner of the house was a famous dancer and he was going on a foreign tour for two months. And during those days he needed someone to be at home, take care of it and keep it functional. So it was a mutual arrangement. I immediately grabbed on the offer and started living in that house.

It was a good house though I don’t feel, today, attached to that house at all. Shivji used to come and visit me there once in a while and I used to make tea for him. Sometimes he talked of his gay inclinations. He used to be a great friend in the beginning. Somehow we fell apart as time progressed. I questioned several of his ideas and he disliked me to the core as I was not following his ideas. Ratan Parimoo was my teacher. He was a great teacher and a great guide. He had single handedly built the archives of the Art history department. Though he was a teacher of conventional art history I liked the way he developed methodology and tried us to guide through the difficult areas of art history. If you ask me who was my teacher I would say without any doubt, it was Ratan Parimoo. Deepak Kannal was another teacher who was not so close to me. But when a Gujarati Encyclopaedia was in preparation he asked me to write an article on Cholamandal or something and it was my first major ‘art historical’ writing, which got published in fact in Gujarati language, though till date I have not seen that publication.

The first year in Baroda was rather difficult for me though I had several friends. N.S.Harsha was my batchmate. So was Arun Kumar H.G. I was desperately looking for a girl friend not because I lacked friends but because I wanted something more. So I started looking around for girl friends. Other friends used to tell me that having a girl friend is one important thing in Baroda. My hunt for girl friends was rather silent one. I dipped my despair in books, cigarettes, smoking weeds, drinking cheap liquor and so on. One day when none was around there in the archives I asked one girl from some other department whether she could go with me for a cup of tea. She looked at me and walked out of the archives. That was the end of my asking someone out. I thought I was an utter failure with girls. Especially my past history made me think totally hopeless and ineffective. The more I thought low of myself the more I engaged myself in reading and then smoking. In between I thought I was in love with a girl from the senior batch. And later on I came to know that she fell ill knowing that. I felt so sick of hearing all these.

By the end of the first year I was sure that there was no hope for me in the case of having girl friends. It was time to think about dissertation and by then I was looking like a desperate bohemian with long beard and hairs. I chose 1970s art scene in Kerala as my dissertation topic. Cholamandal, the artist village was one of the areas of studies for me. I decided to travel and make use of the vacation time in doing my dissertation. It was during this time the first year students went for a study trip in Sarnath, Sanchi and Konark. I too joined the team. While in Konark, I realized that I was not interested in art history at all because I was not understanding a thing that the teacher was telling us. I tried to focus on things but the more I tried the more I became depressed. By night when the team decided to unwind on a river bank with cheaply available drinks and songs under a full moon sky, I was already high on my desperation. I drank a lot and went off. Some students helped me back to the bus, then to the inn where we were staying. In between, inside the bus, one girl came and asked me whether I needed any help and she offered me some soft drinks. Her name was Mrinal Kulkarni.

Mrinal Kulkarni was my classmate. I had not particularly noticed her. She was always with the gang of a few that included Jayaram Poduval, Monal Iyer and Abha Seth. They were always together. I kept away from this gang because they had been together for almost six years and I was a new comer. I never had any particular interest in Mrinal at that time. But before I left for the first year vacation I saw her coming towards the art history department and I was standing somewhere up in the first floor. I looked at her. She was wearing a blue skirt and check shirt tucked in. Later I saw her near the steps of the art history department where Jayaram’s gang always sat. While leaving the place I asked her when she was coming after the vacation. She said something and that was the only communication I had with her.

Second year started with a different note. I had worked very hard and travelled to Chennai to collect my data. And also I had the opportunity to meet several living artists and interview them. When I went back to Baroda I was all set to become a focused student. Hemant Singh Arimbam from Manipur was my best friend in the class. He was very soft spoken and always seen with a smile on his lips. One day I told him that I wanted ask Mrinal whether she could come with me for a cup of tea and whether he could accompany me. He smiled and told me that I could do it on my own. With a trembling heart I asked Mrinal to go out with me to Kaakki’s larry, a makeshift tea shop run by an old woman and her husband. We went and had tea.

Then on a rainy day, I asked her whether she could meet me out near the Kamati Garden. She said yes. I was waiting for the rain to stop and the evening to come. Most of the place was water logged. As the rain was not abating I decided to go in the rain and meet her. As cycle would be a handicap, I decided to walk. She was waiting for me at the steps of her hostel. She saw me coming towards her with rolled up jeans and wet shoes. She smiled at me and I smiled at her. Then together we stepped into the water and continued our walking.

Plague. It started off in Surat, people said. It was coming towards Baroda. People were panicking. Students gathered around and discussed the situation. The hostel wardens ordered for fumigation and cleaning up of hostel premises. By the time most of the students were leaving for other parts of the country. It was said that the students coming from Gujarat were stopped at the state borders and checked them for carrying viruses. It was then Gopan Perumbada, then a final year sculpture student stepped in. He made some magical declarations and said that he is going to have a ‘havan’ (sacrifice with fire) that evening at the faculty of fine arts. He made special arrangements for it. What he did was this: He brought some anti-virus tablets, of course after consulting certain doctors, and threw them on fire and the fumes came out of it cleaned up the air. Or we believed it. Next morning everyone was asking for Gopan. But by that time Gopan had crossed the Gujarat bordered in the first available train with his help and friend, Babu.

Love in the times of plague. We decided to stay back. In a deserted city of Baroda myself and Mrinal and people like us stayed back to brave the attack of plague. We braved the disease because we were in love. And we got ample amount of time for ourselves to know each other. As the intensity of the love affair increased, my meetings with other friends became less frequency or were all postponed to late nights. They approved of my love only because I was hopeless in the first year. Many could guess who was my girl friend was even without me telling her name to them mainly because Mrinal was the only other girl who did not have a boy friend all these years. As time passed, our meetings were extended to Kamati Garden, a huge garden mainly used by the lovers, joggers and voyeurs. And we did all we could do sitting on the park benches shrouded either by darkness or by Mrinal’s chunni.

Love is blind and next to no logic. That’s why we decided to leave our hostel rooms and decided to live in a separate house rented in Baroda. What prompted us to do this was up to anyone’s guess. Some benevolent friends used to give us their houses when they left the city for few days. And during desperate occasions we had saved money to check in a hotel, that too right in front of the gate of the boys’ hostel. Years later, when I checked in the same hotel, I opened the room with a smile on my lips. For this room, once upon a time, we had struggled a lot.

Mrinal also used to ride a cycle. So one day we rode to the outskirts of the city looking for a good place to live. And finally we found out of near Sama. Still I am clueless about this particular building. The landlord decided to rend it out to us for five hundred rupees or something. It was quite a lot of money at that time. We looked at each other and agreed. Then there was a frantic search for arranging things for a functional house. Once we moved in that place we were already tired. But physical proximity made us forget the hardships of life. And I never thought once why we took this step. But one day we were forced to think about our foolishness. As we were forced to look out for kerosene, vegetable and so on, we asked ourselves why we did this move. And one day without telling anyone, in an afternoon, while everyone was taking a nap, we bundled up the things on our cycle carriers and rode away from the place. We rode so fast that even a car chasing us could not have stopped us. Back in hostel, we felt so happy. We became normal again. But the hardship that we faced at Sama was just a beginning. We were destined to face a lot more in the coming days.

You may ask why I did not write anything about my studies. There is nothing much to talk about it. I have always been a good student and with a very inquisitive mind and reading capacity. Even through the direst of situations I had kept myself focused on studies. There were no pending assignments or failure in class projects. I came out with a first class. And if you ask me what exactly I learned from the Art History department of Baroda, I would say I learned a lot from my fellow students, from the artists who lived in the city, from the city itself, from the mess boys, from the chai larry wallahs, from all those people who neglected me, who supported me, loved me , hated me and so on. The archives and library were a great help in my studies. Also I was seriously involved in the film club movement in the faculty and on the first year I was the secretary of the film club. I remember myself and Baiju Kururp travelling to Pune to procure a few movies and carrying the film box to the bus stand and to the faculty. Also I was introduced to Hindi films and Hollywood movies in a big way. We watched a lot of Hollywood movies in Baroda, almost one in a week. And a lot of blue films that the boys in the hostel showed religiously on Saturday nights in one of the common rooms. My education was very good in Baroda.

Me and My Gay Friends

2011-10-26T07:59:00.001+05:30

Several gay men are attracted to me. And I ask them why? Every day one or the other man comes to my life and knocks at my doors of emotions. They declare their love for me and some literally stalk me, of course over Facebook.

I ask myself even when I ask these gu/ays why they like or love a person so much. I tell them that they have not even met me. What they have seen are some profile pictures. And from no angle I look attractive. Like many others who post intellectual stuff, trivia and classical music on the walls of facebook to seek attention, I too change my pictures, perhaps with the same intention.

But I seek attention mostly for my writings; anyway not for my looks. So often, when I get soliciting chats and phone calls from my gay friends, I wonder what makes me so attractive to men who come from different countries.

They don’t have too many words to explain that. Some say that they like me ‘just like that’. Some say, ‘I have finally found the one I have been waiting for all these years’. Yet another lot say, ‘You look hot’.

I wish more women said all these things about me. But I am not disheartened by my gay friends. In fact I enjoy their attention.

There is this young man happily married and settled who wants to see me every day. He takes care of me in this virtual sphere as if he were my wife. He asks me whether I had breakfast on time, lunch on time, whether I am feeling headache, pain on shoulders and shall he come over and massage me. I send endless smilies to him.

Once in a while he calls me. He speaks to me when am I going to meet him. I say, ‘soon’. I don’t want to hurt him.

The other day a young man in his early twenties came and started chatting with me. He wanted to have a ‘relationship’ with me. I told him that I could be his uncle to which he responded with these words, ‘I like forty plus people like you.’ I spoke to him at length, tried to dissuade him and told him that I did not find his behaviour offensive but I could not entertain it. He said he was in love with me.

I wonder how people could fall in love with a profile picture.

I don’t judge them. In fact I like them. Not because they give me too much attention and they tend to pamper me but just because they too are human beings caught in a different zone with no escape.

But why gays only articulate their existence through sex? Can’t there be a normal relationship between two human beings? Why they drag everything into sex?

As a man of forty plus years I am not a stranger to same sex relationships in my personal life. Growing up years had seen me too in sharing beds with friends and cousins, exploring our sexuality through imagined penetrations and abundance of foreplay.

In Trivandrum a few gay friends had begged me to sleep with them. I thought it was strange to sleep with a friend with an intention to do sex. Often it happens when you don’t intend to do it.

I had broken the heart of a man who was in love with me. He became an enemy. And he still remains one.

A well known gay activist and intellectual friend of mine is terribly in love with me. Jokingly I asked him what he was going to do with me. I don’t know whether it is good to write it here, but what is there to be curtained and curtailed? So I write as he said:

“I will suck your dick, I will do everything for you. I will massage you. I will do all what you boring heteros don’t do.”

I laughed. I told him: “These are exactly the same things the ‘boring’ heteros generally do.”

I am not averse to the idea of getting pampered. But that’s not just limited to gays.

Strange Pilgrims: Journey of Three People into the Land of Secret Touches

2011-10-12T09:30:00.002+05:30

Cross the road, stand on the pavement where strangers stride, extend your palms, ask for alms. Suddenly, you realize life is a blessing and a boon granted by somebody beyond your reach. Strangers look at you with their dispassionate eyes. Some will look through you and some will take pity on you. On your open hands they may throw a few coins. Collect them. One day you may need them to understand your own life.

Life is a pilgrimage and a sort of begging. Slavoj Zizek says that we should not be talking about charity, instead we should be thinking about a world where the very notion of charity does not exist. Zizek is right. But what about those unknown hands and faces that lift you up when you faint into your own shadow, in a strange land on an unbearably hot day? Who were those people who just appeared before you from nowhere with a jug of water, when you were thirsty?

Living on charity is one thing. Regaining your life through charity is another. Often between the giver of charity and the receiver of it there develops a subtle connection based on hurt. The giver feels good because he feels the worth of giving. He becomes a hero before his own eyes and those of others. He becomes eternally connected to the receiver only because he wants to relive those moments of ‘helping’. But the receiver wants to run away from that moment of help. But he is eternally held by the invisible gaze of the giver. So he feels the perennial hurt.

(me and Murali Cheeroth, two out of the three)

But when you are a pilgrim on the road, with an unchartered land before you and some friends to give you a hand and a shade, you are not caught into the quotidian web of charity. However, when you are on the road, something holds you up, takes you on its wings, helps you to climb hills and crawls through caves of rebirth.

There the fields, tilled and prepared for the next sowing lay before you till the greenery frills it up to match up with the colour of the horizon and the crowding clouds. Muddy waters gurgles down to the lower planes, tickling the paddy blades sitting pretty stacked up for the touch of the farmers and their eternal release into the embrace of earth.

We three friends walk through the narrow pathways that divide one field from the other. We wonder at our own beings. Who has brought us here? We have not chartered our path. He said, we will just drive through the slanting sunlight. And the other friend just drove. We stood there in the middle of the field like three strange beggars while the wind dropped its coins of love on our open palms etched with the lines of deeds and misdeeds. Two water snakes flit through stream with a sense of purpose. One of them exchange a covert glance with me.

On the way, we see a pond. My friend stops the car. We get down. We sat at the steps that go into the pond. We push our tired and mud caked feet into the water. Between the fingers water flows and the dust of another land mixes with the water that has not gone anywhere. They exchange stories.

Slowly our feet feel the touch of a thousand lips. We look into the water. There hundreds of them; small fishes, the children of water. They eat dead cells, says my friend. If so I am just one big dead cell, eat me, I tell them.

They cover us up. First time I realized how mothers feel when they feed their infants. Hundreds of little fishes eat from our feet. My feet sprout into thousands of breasts. I feel the pleasure of being carried away to the worlds that I have never know before. I don’t even Bernini’s Ecstasy of St.Teresa. But I lean back in pleasure. My thousand kids feed on my feet.

We, the strange pilgrims say good bye to each other after climbing several hills and walking across several fields. At one point we hug each other and cry.

Pilgrims are strange people. They hug each other and cry.

(All the pictures are taken by Prasad in his Mobile phone camera)

Makers of Indian Contemporary Art 1- Story of Prasad in Trissur

2011-10-10T06:58:00.002+05:30

(Prasad- A friend in need is a friend indeed)

Behind every successful man there is a woman, so say the maxims. Let me add, behind every successful man there is a woman and a few other women whom this woman hates.

Cynics amongst you might think that I am writing someone’s biography in a single line. You are free to read blurbs even when the book is yours.

Behind every successful artist there must be a few silent people. They remain silent because they want to see their friends flying high in their life and career. They remain silent also because their circumstances make them to be grounded. They are like banyan trees, rooted deep into the soil but send their branches and leaves to explore the world of infinity that expands itself in the vastness of sky. Those successful artists are the leaves and branches.

If you could define silence as that sublime gravity accumulated at the innards of all seven seas, Prasad has that silence in him. Let me introduce you to Prasad, an artist based in Trissur. One of the most silent persons with a faint smile on his lips, Prasad is a presence in the cultural scene of Trissur. He is a singer, an avid reader of literature and theories. And perhaps, he is one artist who could say, with a lot of conviction that he does not paint because he cannot cheat his own self.

You may wonder why someone says so, especially when Prasad is a friend of all those well established artists who live in Kerala and elsewhere. Before I venture further into the life and times of Prasad I would say that silent and observant people like Prasad are very rare but they are there in everyone’s life. You don’t call them ‘mentors’, you don’t call them ‘patrons’. You just call them ‘friends’ because you love them and you don’t with which measuring pan you could gage your love for them.

I call them the ‘makers’ of Indian contemporary art. Through self exclusion from the mainstream, they have opted for a life of ‘being there for you’. Their absence is not often ‘framed’ by the presences under arc lamps or sharpened spot lights. But their friends remember them with fondness and they feel that their tired wings could take rest on the branches of these huge banyan trees.

Prasad hails from Peringottukara, Trissur. He has always been interested in painting and drawing. His parents were government servants and their job took him to several places in the northern part of central Kerala and his schooling was mostly done in different schools. After pre-degree he joined Trissur Fine Arts College.

“We were very active kind of people. We were ready to do anything for a progressive culture. We offended the then government by showcasing a controversial street play on Jesus Christ. And all of us got arrested,” after much prodding Prasad opens up.

The activism of early 1980s was not just for the sake of activism. The students were led by the feeling of camaraderie. They all dreamt a common dream; a dream to a happy future where each one would teach one and one shall stand for all and all shall stand for one. “So we stayed most of the times in the campus though our homes were a few kilometers away from the college. When we did not go home for several days our mothers came in search of us. They did not understand why we spent our time inside college when we could comfortably stay at home and work. It was a different time,” Prasad says.

Prasad was a rebel from the very beginning. Today when you look at his face you don’t see those traces of rebellion, instead you see the deep calmness of a person who has understood life in its entirety. “Prasad came to college on a cycle which did not have any mud guards or bell or brake. As he was tall he could manage it without brakes,” remembers Murali Cheeroth, artist and close friend of Prasad from the college days. “And he use to leave that cycle anywhere in the small campus. If someone wanted it they could use it. But none except Prasad could handle that crazy two wheeler,” Murali laughs.

Any rebellion cannot be without a cause. “Mine was against students like T.V.Santhosh,, Murali Cheeroth and many others,” Prasad cuts in with a smile. “These guys came with those clothe bags and put a lot of air of intellectualism around them. So as a couple of years junior to them I thought of responding to their intellectual garbs in my own way. I started wearing a dhoti printed all ‘Narayana Narayana’ and I brought my books and other stuff in a cloth bag which was used for packing some spice.”

None could have avoided this young student’s daring and during the discussions and programs Prasad’s comments used to be quite acerbic and critical. “This used to throw us in a very tough situation,” T.V.Santhosh, artist and a very close friend of Prasad says. “Prasad was tall so he had an imposing presence. And his words were very slow but were sharp. And later to our shock we realized that it was this junior student who really managed funds for our ‘intellectual’ programs and discussions,” T.V.Santhosh smiles.

T.V.Santhosh and Prasad look like brothers. They speak in very low tones. To hear them one has to train his ears very close. Prasad’s ‘silent speak and silent singing’ has now become a contemporary folklore amongst his friends. Prasad sings well but he is one of the most reluctant singers in the world, one could say. Friends used to insist him to sing. So he would tune himself up. But this tuning would go on for quite some time till someone would pitch into say that enough of tuning, now some songs.

When Prasad sings something explodes in you. Prasad also believes in this explosion of emotions inside. “Sometimes something snaps inside me. My eyes well up. It happens when I listen to good music, listen to good friends and at times when people bless other people,” Prasad says.

Prasad was a crazy painter as his friends put it. He would take a big canvas and paint a small image in some corner. Then he would ask his friends, ‘how’s that’ not with the scream natural to the cricket bowlers but with the nod of a classical singer familiar to the accompanying Tabalist. Their communications happen in smiles and nods.

After education friends like Murali and Santhosh went to Santiniketan to pursue further studies. Prasad was in love. He was already doing photography and he wanted to learn more. So he went to Bangalore to do some course and find a part time job. “It was like getting up one fine morning and deciding to go,” says Prasad. Nothing was planned. Bangalore was not so kind to Prasad.

“Within a few days I was afflicted by cholera. Death lingered around me. Fifty bottles of glucose was dripped into me. Then my father came and took me back. It was some kind of a shattering experience,” remembers Prasad.

He does not attribute it to fate. But he cannot help wonder what prevented him from taking off again along with his friends. “I came back. I activated this printing, copying and advertising firm, Panorama in Trissur. It was one establishment that worked twenty four hours a day. I was there all the time. I introduced very sophisticated kind of screen printing. So I started getting offers from other states too. Money was coming in and going out.”

If you ask why Prasad did not paint even when he had financial freedom he would say that he did not have time to do painting as he was doing other works. And he does not regret it.

Because friends were pouring in. This 24 X 7 establishment was a adda of all the artists and cultural activists. Prasad became shelter and refuge for most of them. Theatre activists used to come in the middle of night after their performance and crash down on the floors of his office. Artists from all over Kerala who came to Trissur came with one assurance that the doors of Panorama would not be closed anytime. Prasad was a sort of ATM for many.

Prasad did not pick up his brush and canvas even during the boom years. Many were infatuated by the kind of materialistic success their friends were reaping in then. “Boom did not have any effect on me. Many of my friends became very rich and famous. But great thing happened to me was that I did not lose them. They all remain my friends and they all come to me first before they even go their own homes,” says Prasad.

Murali remembers how motivating Prasad has always been. “When we were struggling, we used to get letters from Prasad asking for the images of our works or our humble catalogues. This gave us a lot of energy. We thought a few people back home were at least waiting to see what we had been doing.”

Prasad is a traveler. He has traveled all those places where a normal tourist would not go when he is in Kerala. Prasad knows the small alleys and lanes of Kerala where there are small temples, churches, mosques, special kinds of plants. He knows about the festivals and the myths behind them. Perhaps, he compensates his life with these travels.

Still you could go back to your canvas, why not? I tell him. “No, painting and music are two things where you cannot tell lie, or at least I believe so. My paintings happen in my mind and I happy by seeing the works of all my friends.”

Prasad likes to travel early in the morning and come back to his home by evening. “Both times you travel between slanting sunlight. It is a dream scape through which you pass. I like to go through this dream all the times. It is the most fascinating thing about art.”

When you say good bye to Prasad, you take a away a bit of love from him and that explodes in your mind and your eyes too well up.

Small City Blues

2011-10-07T08:58:00.001+05:30

(Picture for representational purpose only)

Music arrests me. It immobilizes me. It evokes a stream of emotions in me. And like many of you I am not a music scholar but just a lover.

Left alone in the middle of a city with familiar language and unfamiliar streets, I am led by a song sung in male voice. I am sure it is not coming from a record because the sound is different. Also I know that it does not come from a sophisticated synchronizing machine. It comes from somebody’s soul.

Across the street I see a Maruti omni van fitted with two stereo boxes. Night has already fallen in the streets of Trissur, Kerala. Work worn people amble back to homes and I could smell the fragrance of liquor in the air. Young girls in identical sarees walk past and I recognize them as sales girls who work in big malls and shops where they sell the items that they never ever would be able to buy or consume.

Buses parked along the shores of the streets and have dim lights inside and people look like silhouettes. They all look at this Maruti van from where the music comes. Standing in front of a fruit juice stall I look at the man who stands with a pair of crutches under his arm pits. He is the singer. He is wearing a white dhoti and a cherry red half sleeve shirt. While singing he shifts his body weight from one leg to the other.

He sings the old songs, nostalgic and full of pangs of lost love. He uses the karoke tracks for singing. A friend of his sits inside the car and handles a humble synchronizing machine. He is so adept in playing along the track and I could make out that he must have been a professional singer.

Next to him there is a small bucket, orange in color. Lit by the white neon light emanating from inside the car the bucket looks like a lamp shade. People walk with some kind of an inexplicable guilt and put some notes into it. Some tipplers gather before the singer and shake their head, obviously with a rhythm that does not sync with the rhythm of the song.

A sense of guilt engulfs me. I take out my purse and pulls out a ten rupees note. I cross the street and put the note in the bucket. I share the collective relief felt by all those people who are not disabled but could not sing.

He smiles at me. My grey moustache and beard, and my visible appearance of a stranger in the city might have made him feel sympathetic towards me. Or he might have sensed my feeling of discomfort. Or he must have been singing in streets like this and must be seeing people like me all the time.

He is Balakrishnan. His curly hairs and thick moustache show his bygone charm. I am sure he might have enthralled several people before the advent of music live programs in televisions. “I used to work with the Mangalam Orchastra’, he tells me as I strike up chat with him. I have heard about Mangalam Orchestra.

“I used to climb coconut trees also. One day I climbed a coconut tree in my house and I lost my grip and fell down,” he tells me as I ask him about the handicap. I purse my lips in shock. “I don’t want to sit at home. So I go to towns like this and sing,” Balakrishnan tells me.

I know it is not just about money. It is all about the applauses and appreciation. It is all about the invisible happiness that he used to impart to thousands of people in temple and church premises. Sitting alone at home would fill his ears with the roar of the audience. He wants it. He wants to feel it and live it.

Balakrishnan does not tell me all this. But his silent but very pearly smile conveys this to me secretly. I know how difficult to live in disgrace.

When Balakrishnan winds up his show with a professional announcement with the words full of gratitude and happiness, I walk away thinking that I could find my way back to the hotel.

For a new person Trissur Round is a maze. It will take you to nowhere. I had marked my way to the hotel. But after half an hour of walk I reach the same point where Balakrishnan was singing. Now he has gone. So were the tipplers and weary people.

So I call an autorickshaw and ask the driver to take me to my hotel. From the auto I could see the places that I had just passed while walking and like a magician the driver conjured up a left turn and it took me away from the maze like round.

From a distance I could see the hotel where I stay. It is so tall and all lit up. It must be a couple of kilometers away when I hear a priest giving a lecture to a few hundred strong audience and I ask the driver to stop the rickshaw. I get down there and go into the makeshift pandal where the religious treatment was going on.

The young priest is a good orator. He speaks like a motivational therapist. He asks the people whether anyone in the crowd was ready to go beyond what knowledge has given to them and be with Him, Jesus Christ. People raise their hands and say they want to. Then the young priest using his histrionic skills tells the audience that Jesus Christ was walking amongst them. He tells them that He was going to cure them.

Suddenly some people start convulsing. Some start shaking violently. And he declares that the clutches of Satan on them are now being removed by Jesus Christ. And he wants witnesses and approvers. People are called to the stage and they say that they have just felt Jesus Christ removing their back pain and neck pain.

A few young men wearing saffron lungis stand outside the pandal where I stand and chuckle. Inside people were getting relived of Satan.

I ask myself whether I felt Jesus Christ near me. I do not feel.

I walk into the darkness towards the hotel lit in lights.
I see destitute gods spreading their rags on the pavement for a dreamless sleep.

A Different Gift for 2nd October

2011-10-02T07:30:00.001+05:30

He sits alone in the corner of his small room. He feels like a caged animal. ‘A caged tiger,’ he thinks. Then he smiles.

I understand the meaning of that smile. I have been with him for a long time now. When people look at him through the wire meshed door he gives them a benevolent smile. These days he does not go anywhere. This place is enough for him; this place fills him with memories of Kasturba, Mira, Abha, Manu and many more soft presences.

He simply sits at his old residence in Sabarmati. Occasionally he touches his charkha but the moment he touches it he pulls his hands back as if he were touching a piece of ember. There a few paces away from this ashram at the Gujarat Vidya Peeth students and teachers still do the ritual of charkha.

“I don’t know,” he tells me. “I don’t know why they still do it. Look along this river Sabarmati. Both the banks have been taken over by the government. Now the river has got concrete frills. They tell me, the people could come and sit here in the evening, contemplate on the flowing water. Great idea, right,” he smiles at me again.

I too smile at him. “But Sabarmati is not Change Chan river in Korea,” he continues. Change Chan was pushed under the ground and later it was brought back and they made river front walks and gardens along the length of it. Here, river front development, I am sure is a hogwash. It is going to claim the riverbed for the corporate houses and rich ones.”

Old people will always sits on the places kindly allotted to them by the people who have power and health on their side. So all these benches along the streets of Gujarat. Old people sit there and watch the setting sun and in their sagging flesh they carry memories like termites.

I remind him of Narendra Modi’s fasting. He smiles again. “It is always good if somebody fasts. But not those people who go to bed without food every day without an end. Fasting is meant for those who eat every day, three times. I fasted because I could afford to fast. I wanted to kick at the conscience of those who could eat and I could call out to those who did not find anything to eat at all. So it worked. Now it seems to have become a fashion.”

But what about Narendra Modi’s refusal to accept a prayer cap by a Muslim? He smiles again. “Oh..I thought I saw that in television. See now I have a mobile phone too,” he fishes out one and shows it to me. “I listen to FM Radio in it whenever I am sleepless. You know, after nine o clock at night they play good old songs without commercial breaks. I enjoy those songs.” He seems to be in a different mood so I prod on.

“Political farce; a kind of role playing. It all started by my beloved Nehru. He traveled all over. Danced and wore people’s outfit. Unfortunately he was just wearing it on his body, not on his mind. Today everyone does it. But then when someone puts the real symbol on you, you get frightened.”

They say these roads, this prosperity and so on have consolidated his space here. And he is tipped to be the next prime minister, I ask him. He again smiles.

“Roads. I am an old man. I don’t want roads. Young people want roads. Old people’s road ends in cemeteries. I heard a story yesterday. Someone came asking for Kabir. Someone said, go to cremation grounds. If someone is still talking philosophy after coming out of the gates of the place, he is Kabir. Old people are Kabirs. They just want sunsets and breeze.”

And what about the young people and their aspirations?

“I told you no?” he looks at his watch. “Oh..no ..this too has become a habit. I am not going anywhere. Still I look at this watch. Yes, young people need roads. But look at these cities in this state. None cares the other. Death rides on two wheelers and four wheelers. Villages are divided by eight line highways. So they cross the roads from wrong directions and get killed. Death is an unrecorded entity when it comes to the graph of progress.”

He gets up. Like Haroun Al Rashid, he too uses disguise to venture out. He does not fear a mobbing that had been quite used to. But these days he does not want to be identified on the road.

“The other day you asked me about these disguises. I hate to wear too many clothes. But this shepherd’s one suits me best. I like it. If I go out in my loin clothes they would recognize me. They would show me reverence; a kind of reverence and awe that you show if you see a museum item on the road. I have seen people like me behaving like me, even dressing up like me. I tend to tell them, don’t. But then I think that I should keep quite.”

I eat a plate of mutton kebab while he sits next to me, clutching on his walking stick. The dingy narrow alley reeks in the aroma of spices and burning animal flesh. The muslim men in the shops seem to be familiar with his presence. “Baba…kem cho?” someone calls out.

“Maja ma,” he replies with a smile. “I am good. I am always good,” he mutters to himself.

Doesn’t he feel the perennial disgust in this alley where people eat meat? “No no no…I have overcome that also,” he tells me. “I don’t eat. But I don’t have any problem if others eat. It is Karma. If I believe in Gita, I should not be fanatic the way I used to be.”

Tomorrow is your birthday, I tell him. “I want to gift you something, Bapu. What would you like to have from me?” I ask.

He looks at me. He pats my back. I feel his touch.

“Take me to the NID campus,” he tells me.

I raise my eyebrows as if those were meant to be two huge questions.

“Yes, I want to see garba; the dance of abundance and pleasure. The dance of love. I love to see young people showing the true spirit of love through graceful movements. Garba is a way of praying to the nature and its bounty. I want to forget myself and float in the rhythm of those moving bodies. Take me..”

I hold his hands. We walk. And in a distance, through the thicket of bamboos we could hear the drums inviting the young and the beautiful to the ground.

The World Needs Touch Today

2011-09-22T06:20:00.002+05:30

Kings liked to be touched because they were tired after a long days work. Queens wanted to be touched because they were bored. Girls in harems wanted to be caressed because none cared for what they felt.

Touch. Each human being on the earth wish to be touched by someone. I am talking about the physical touch. The sublime touch of electrical fingers that would ease the pains from the tired flesh.

I am not talking about the touch that would eventually make one to unzip his pants and make someone else to part her legs.

I am talking about the touch of compassion, love and care. Some product advertisement says, there are thousands of ways of human touch. Yes, there are.

Vivekananda was sitting at the foot of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa. At one moment, Paramahansa touched Vivekananda with his toe. Something passed through his body. He fainted. When he woke up he was a different man.

A touch could change the world. When I see those tired people hanging in the buses and metro trains like carcasses in a butchers shop or sardines in a fish tray, I think they all want nothing but a caring touch- not the prying fingers that explore the softness of bottoms and fatness of valets.

Now we have lost the sense of touch. We have touch screens today. That’s why in the airports and ad pages of newspapers we see lot of invitations to the massage parlours. I like standing outside the glass doors of the massage centres in the airports and see young people touching the tired and fat feet of weary travellers. I have always felt going inside and getting it done for myself. But I resist not because of what they cost for a half an hour session but because it would leave me to a different plane which would make me miss my plane.

I heard that blind people touch well. Their fingers are their eyes so when they touch you they touch you with their eyes. Eyes are the windows of souls. So when they touch you they touch you with their souls.

The girls who touched me in Bangkok were not blind. But their fingers were eyes.

When I remove the shoes from my feet, after a long days work, I feel the need for a touch. And I get it.

I wonder how identical twins satisfy their itch to touch.

So touch touch ....go and touch each other with compassion and love.

(Now an exercise for you. Go to google search, select ‘image’ search and type ‘Touch’. And tell me about all what you see there)

Punch Lines for Life and Management

2011-09-20T07:56:00.000+05:30

When you go to a bookstall you choose a book. In an airport bookstall the books choose you. The difference is, you visit a bookstall with a purpose to buy a particular book and in airport bookstalls you accidently find some books that would provide you with an exciting reading material during your flight.

I chanced upon this book, ‘Rajni’s Punchtantra’ written by PC Balasubramanian and Raja Krishnamoorthy in one of the bookshops at the Mumbai airport. An ardent Rajini fan I could have left anything behind for this book. So I picked it up out of sheer admiration and growing curiosity.

As the title shows, this book deals with the punch lines from Rajini’s films. Rajini’s punch lines are famous and infectious and the proof to this viral effect of his punch lines could be seen amongst the people all over South India as they repeat those lines relentlessly with or without purpose, with or without context. The very recital of these punch lines give people a sort of pleasure and a kind of reassurance; almost a reassurance like Shwarznegger’s ‘I will be back’ or Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Mein Hoon Na’.

The moment I flipped through the pages and the blurb of the book I could make out that it was a type of book that Arindam Choudhury or Dr.Johnson would write. It is a feel good book that helps you to see Rajini’s punch lines both in management and life situations. Indisputably, the authors of this book are successful corporate managers and business consultants.

Like any other Rajini fan I too am familiar with his punch lines. For example, “Malaeda…Anna Malai” from the movie Annamalai had been a great inspiration for me during my twenties. When you repeated these lines you felt like a hill, the great Annamalai. It takes you to the heights of the hills and at the same time you get a hint at the great saint, Ramana Maharshi who had found his abode at Thiruvannamalai.

The authors analyze thirty punch lines from different Rajini films. I will mention a few of them. In his Shivaji –The Boss, Rajini says, “Panningathaan Koottamaa varum. Singham Singlathan varum”- “Pigs come in a crowd. Lion comes alone’.

The authors say that a corporate should not have the herd mentality. It should be like a Lion, with a unique quality of daring and brand building. Also in the life situation, the authors advice that each human being should have the quality of a lion not that of pigs.

You may now interpret these lines for yourself:

“Pon, penn, pugazhu pinnadi ambalai pogathu. Ambalainga pinnadi ithellaam varanam”- You should not be chasing wealth, women and fame; rather they should chase you. (Basha)

“En Vazhi, Thani Vazhi”- My path is unique path. (Padaiyappa)

“Naan yosikkaama pesa maatten. Pesina pirage yosikka maatten”- “I think before I speak and don’t doubt what I say.” (Baba)

“Naan yaana allai, kuthirai..keezha vizhuntha takkunnu ezhunthupaen.”- I am not an elephant but a horse, for I get up in a jiffy when I fall- (Chandramukhi)

About Early Success, Love and Longevity in Art

2011-09-18T08:46:00.001+05:30

I am not a marriage counsellor. But I have this tremendous patience to listen to people telling their stories. At times, for no reason people open up completely before me. May be in me they find a friend, a confidante and a brother to lean on to.

I don’t know.

This young couple stands in front of me. He, an engineer and she, a talented artist.

Their presence is quite pleasant. They look as if they were really made for each other. There is no streak of disturbance in the invisible territory they occupy wherever they are. But to a person like me who is interested in people both familiar and strangers could listen to a distant humming of pain in their private zone.

They are my friends. They have been married for two years. When they look at each other, in their eyes still you could see secrets playing hide and seek. Their gazes meet each other in half way, they embrace and then they go back to the dreamy pool in their eyes only to repeat this meeting game again.

“I am afraid of doing my works,” she tells me.

He looks at her with a lot of love because he knows that she has been waiting to tell this to someone other than him.

“Why?” I ask.

“I am not able to touch upon the limits of satisfaction that I have drawn for myself,” she says.

This girl had done a wonderful installation and a set of gorgeous works a year before. Now, in her studio, she finds herself utterly lonely and anchorless.

“Out there, they too have drawn lines of expectations on you. I know it is difficult to satisfy somebody’s expectations,” I tell her.

Her eyes are almost moistened. I could see the red streaks along the edges of her eyes. I remember a line from Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, Aleph- ‘Tears are the blood of soul’.

If that is right, this girl’s soul must be about to bleed.

I touch her shoulder and say, “Look, you are here not to satisfy anyone else. You are the best judge of your work. You are not working for anybody else. Your works will find their own audience once you free them from all personal guilt, doubts and worries.”

Now I am more interested to know his version about things. But except for a silent smile and the surging waves of love for her, he does not have much to say. However, I know what he wants to say. So I start:

“When you are afraid of yourself and of your works, you force yourself into a cocoon and you feel that one anchor you have is he. So you take your mobile phone and call him to know what he is doing. And as he knows that you are going through a difficult period, he is worried the moment his phone rings. You, in fact haunt him and hunt him out of his work and focus. To cut the story short, both of you are screwed.”

He nods his head.

“So better avoid tracking him over phone. Find happiness in your studio, amongst your friends and in your work,” I conclude.

I know I have not told them anything new that could fundamentally change their lives. But I have told them what they have been afraid of telling each other for the fear of falling out of each other’s favour.

Suddenly I remember a statement by the noted curator and art expert, Robert Storr. He says that when you find success very early in your artistic life it has to be understood that you have a long way to go. But within ten years you are exhausted and you struggle to produce new and exciting works to satisfy the art scene and yourself. But a person who finds success by the age of forty has not only a body of works to prove his worth but also a comfortable twenty years ahead to do new things with his new success.

When my artist friend Rajita Schade sent this observation by Robert Storr, I thought it was a great eye opener. Those who are supremely successful in art in their twenties, they have forty years ahead to negotiate and prove as fresh and challenging as ever.

So my young friends what you have done before you become successful is more important than what you would do afterwards. That gives you the base.

What have you done before the age of twenty five?

In fact, if you are not a child prodigy or super genius, you would not have done much than chasing a few skirts and having a lot of wet dreams.

We- Living Evidences to Prove our Parents’ Desire to Articulate

2011-09-14T06:59:00.004+05:30

There is a moment between the word and the act of writing. The word is there and your ability to key it in on your computer page is there. But yet something stands between these two; the desire to postpone the act. For a writer there is a perennial desire to postpone the act of writing and see how the minute hiatus between the word and the very act of writing changes its breath, length and width. It could be directly or indirectly proportional to the desire for postponing. When the gap decreases, nothing could prevent you from writing it down. Then you are in love with the word.

May be others hate your love for words; your love for writing. It is like a love affair. None likes to see a happy couple being happy and oblivious in their love. Their abundance and abandonment imparts a certain kind of discomfort to us. They threaten our ideas about love. They in their relationship and its flaunting of happiness inscribe a different idea about love. They appear before us as word and meaning. And the narrowing gap between them facilitates them to write it at the very face of nature. They say they are in love.

Writers are like jealousy onlookers of a loving couple. They keep looking at the lovers, the word and the meaning, coming close and drifting apart. When they drift apart they feel the joy of postponement. When they come too close almost in a collision by tenderness, the writers cannot just escape. They just need to sit down and write.

Recently, a friend told me that I should stop writing for coming ten years. I told him that if he could give me a lot of money, which I would use for buying all those things that could keep me distracted from looking at the romantic union between word and meaning, perhaps I could consider his suggestion. Then, I also told him that there was no guarantee that I would stop writing altogether even if he transferred the desired amount in my bank account. A bank account cannot stop a nuclear reactor. Fission or fusion of atoms is not bothered about the health of a monetary account.

That’s why when another friend called me a few days back and told me that he had fallen in love with idea of love. And he told me that he has been keeping himself out of all confusions that the very thought of falling in love could bring to one’s life. And suddenly he started getting bored of such a clean, arranged life that would soon send him mentally deranged. So he started looking at things around him with a different perspective. He told me that he looked at a coffee mug with lot of love and things changed for him since that moment.

Word and meaning, coffee mug and passion and anything that could be paired up and seen in a new perspective would give rise to a new way of loving things. Word and meaning are like Shiva and Parvati- like father and mother. Their relationship is romantic, tumultuous and passionate. They are in love that’s why we are. We are the living evidences to prove that our parents had a good time some time ago. We were not brought to the world by some pelicans and cranes. Parents tell a lot of lies till they realize that their kids are making love like bunnies in their pads up there. Then what they could do is just like prisoners, keep an account of their games, on the wall by drawings vertical lines crossed by a diagonal one.

So friends, fall in love with whatever you could in the world. See meaning oozing out of the objects of your desire and filling you in with a sensation of fulfillment and pain at the same time. Then you postpone your desire to articulate and then you will realize that how difficult it is to keep yourself away from your love: the words.

When Irom Sharmila Reclaims Her Sexual Body for Herself

2011-09-12T08:50:00.002+05:30

(Irom Sharmila- The image that has become now etched in our minds)

The followers of Irom Sharmila are an agitated lot today. In an interview published in an Kolkata based English newspaper, Irom says she is now in love with a forty eight year old British man of Goan origin, namely Desmond Coutinho. Thirteen civil rights organisations in Manipur have come together to ban the interview being published in local language. They say that this is a planned move to curtail the force of Irom's ten year old fasting agaist the draconian law of Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Anywhere in the world, a person who stands up for the rights of the people and suffers immensily for it automatically gets an aura of a divine personality. The more he or she is in public the more he or she becomes an intensly aloof and inaccessible personality. The more the person becomes detached from the emotional and sentimental pangs of the milling masses the more he or she becomes an intellectual representative of all those feelings. Look at the film stars. They are very much there in our lives. They make public appearances and do live perfromances. But like a work of art they too are three times, in a Platonic sesne away from our realities. The latest case of Anna Hazare illustrates how a person who is so accessible to people could be detached from them once he gets an auro of a semi-divine personality.

A work of art is three times away from the reality because first of all a work of art represents an original idea within a pure creative realm; the idea is the real reality. Then it is translated into an obejct or an image, which is a step away from the original idea. And it is in the teritiary reality that we perceive the original idea manifested in the form of work of art. Hence, what we see as a work of art is three times away from the original reality. Irom Sharmila, over a period of time has become a work of art, three times away from the `real' Irom Sharmila.

(The mother suffering for us)

Interestingly, the 'real' Irom Sharmila is an imaginary personality as conceived by the people who has been seeing her over the last ten years. So the making of Irom Sharmila happens in a reverse order; the Irom Sharmila who does the fasting is a final out come of what we have created in our minds as the original Irom Sharmila. Once that idea of or the ideal Irom is formed we translate her into a personality who could endure inexplicable pain for a noble cause. And the body of Irom Sharmila that fasts becomes an object of desire for the people who see her through various mediums. Therefore, the Irom Sharmila of in our eyes today is a creation of our own fantacies about the idea/ideal of Irom Sharmila that we have formed all these years.

So how an ideal could fall in love with a mortal being? Falling in love, the very expression is ideologically loaded. You don't 'rise' in love; but you 'fall'. This notion of falling has something to do with the myth of genesis where the human beings are created directly by God and then they sin out of their own will. So entering in a relationship with the opposite gender comes to have a connotation of going out of the 'ideal' realm of creation and enter into a zone where carnality is involved. When the working of the supreme soul is sidestepped in order to make the bodies as agencies for human bonding, as per the religious ideological views, it becomes a way of 'falling out of' God's favor. So even if you are in love, you, in fact fall into it.

(A body claimed by the State)

Hence, Irom Sharmila falling in love with a man becomes a ideologically driven discursive realm for us as the idea of an ideal Irom Sharmila going out of the 'orignal' pristine purity of godliness and enterning into a social engagement where her body would directly enjoy the pleasures of that engagement. We sincerely would start thinking that the suffering body of Irom Sharmila, which is for us now is transparent and visible to our perceptions, desires and imaginations, suddenly becomes private, with mechanisms to control a person's desire and this body steps out of a the divine realm of public discourse into a carnal realm of private discourse.

In fact what appals us today is the fantasy of Irom Sharmila having sex with a man. This collective fantasy terrorizes us while it makes us equally curious. It is almost like seeing one's mother's nudity accidently. We as children all have seen our mothers' nudity while they change clothes or take bath. But as grown up people, we don't really like the idea of seeing our mothers' nudity. However, this is one possible area of our private desires where we would like to see our mothers' nudity. The very thought of it would terrorize us to the fact that we would rather prefer to go blind than having a vision of our mothers' nudity. We desire mothers as semi-divine personalities but the moment she shows the potentiality or her body shows the idea of having sexaul engagement with another person, we tend to feel threatened as there occurs a fear of not only replacing a Freudian father but also a son or daughter who could enter into a sexual inter/discourse with an ideal mother.

(Oedipus, a painting by Brian Curtis)

We are driven by this fear and we don't want Irom Sharmila to have sex with another man who would replace us as a collective. We don't think of her falling in love as another possibility of extending the discourse of social resistance against the draconian laws of the state, through the publicly claimed body of Irom Sharmila that now rebels to claim it back to herself.

What if Irom Sharmila decides to get up, remove her nasal tube, start taking food, make love with a man whom she likes, and would still continue with her protest against AFSPA? Would it demoralize us? Or should it? If so why at all? Or is that the fear that Irom Sharmila's abdication to the zone of love would eventually collapse all the myths that have been built around her for the last ten years, by none other than us?

On the Edge of Water: Atul Bhalla at Vadehra Gallery

2011-09-06T09:28:00.000+05:30

(Atul Bhalla)

A plasma television screen at the second floor space at the Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi beams the image of a kaner plant (Nerium Oleander) with flowers. A closer look reveals that this is a zoomed in video footage of the plant that is generally seen planted by the authorities in the small strips of land marked out for/as road dividers. As a common sight in Delhi, none gives too much attention to these plants waving their heads, not exactly in the gentle breeze but in the slapping air movements created by the speeding vehicles on the road. When Atul Bhalla zooms in his video camera on this plant, it becomes a metaphor, a surrogate being, a person and someone or something destined to be there only to receive the worst treatment that one could ever have.

(still from Kaner Kaner)

This video titled, ‘Kaner Kaner’ is a part of a solo show of Atul Bhalla, ‘On the Edge’, currently on at the Vadehra Art Gallery, Okhla Phase 1, New Delhi. Though Atul has been hailed as an artist who has a ‘sustained preoccupation with the eco-politics of water’, this particular work does not connect directly to the water politics, but it connects very subtly to the politics of urban existence. When you see the Kaner plant getting slapped by the strong air generated by the speeding motor vehicles, if you are sensitive person, you feel like getting slapped left and right while standing in the middle of a road, in fact for no fault of yours.

(Kaner at Shahdra Drain. series of photographs)

Kaner plant, a simple google research would tell you that, is a toxic plant with a non-toxic appearance. Toxicity of anything is nature’s attribution for survival as some animals and plants resort to camouflaging and secretions. However, studies have proved that it’s pronounced toxicity is not fatal and the calamities caused by this plant are negligible. Seen against this backdrop, a kaner plants, planted along the road dividers could represent the urban underlings who are ‘toxic or waste’ in planners’ parlance but still a necessity in the name of construction and beautification, for paltry remunerations. Then seen within the actual context of the plant, and also seen along with the eighteen frames of photographs titled ‘Kaner on Shahdra Drain’ one understands how the ‘toxicity’ created by the urbanized, fast moving, affluent classes, in fact, could ‘kill’ the so called ‘toxic’ but beautiful plants. In Kaner on Shahdra Drain, Atul, through these eighteen photographs shows how the ‘ever green’ kaner dries up or dies within the days of its flowering thanks to environmental pollution caused both by the drains and the vehicles.

(Peripheral God- from the installation)

Somehow, death vis-a-vis water and environment comes to Atul as a recurring theme. It could be subconscious response to the idea of depletion and decay of the environment but Atul connects it with larger ethical issues when it comes to an installation like ‘Peripheral God’. A few tree stumps are strewn on the gallery floor as if it were a site of deforestation and on the wall, a hazy picture of a dog is framed in a diptych format. The ethical issue that drives Atul seems to be the breaching of invisible social contracts such as love, trust, co-habitation, protection by the government and so on. The narrative that Atul adopts to underline this breach is from the last phase of Mahabharata. Yudhishtira, after the victory in the war and after the realization of nothingness in victories, walks to heavens only to be followed by a dog in this arduous journey. The eldest of the Pandavas was denied permission to enter heaven because of the dog as he insisted that only when the dog is allowed entry, he would go inside. Finally, his wish is granted and the dog reveals himself as Yamadharma (the God of death).

The journey of Yudhishtira, after all kinds of victories, emphasises the presence of Death in anything that man does. Dog therefore becomes a memento mori, a reminder of death. And as a faithful animal it follows man wherever he goes, like a shadow. Dog obeys so long as he loves it, gives it food and shelter. Even when man chases the dog away he comes back. This metaphor that Atul uses in his work also implies that all kinds of human progresses have death as an assured and ingrained entity in them. Besides, there is a sort of word play, as in Dog becomes God and vice versa. Dog, as manifested in Dharmaraja (Yamadharma) , God of Death, becomes a peripheral dog, a perpetual companion of human beings but always pushed to the peripheries.

(still from Yudhishtira washing)

When Atul works on ‘Yudhishtira Washing’ an eight minute long video, he deliberately chooses an old man at an unspecified ghat (river front). Here we see this impoverished old man, with a body vandalized by time, sitting and washing a piece of saffron cloth in the water. The more he rinses and wrenches it the more the water turns saffron. The process continues endlessly. Does it remind the viewer of the water that washes away all the sins (could be relevant when seen in Atul’s concern with the political meaning of water)? Or more politically, the ideology in you that had been leading you all the way to victory, one day manifests before you in the form of death and revelation? Death is a very palpable feeling when one watches this video.

(from Listeners from West Heaven)

For me, the notion of death in Atul’s concern, vis-a-vis his aesthetical involvement with eco-water politics, once again comes to manifest in his video titled, ‘Listeners from West Heaven’. I don’t know why listeners and West Heaven as I am not provided with textual clues than the title. But what I could read out from the 23 minutes long video where Atul himself is seen harking for some sound on the ground in different locations, is the nuances of his artistic enquiries into the waters that are lost, controlled, tamed and eventually disappeared. The death of the River Saraswati comes to my mind. In Hindu mythologies we find River Saraswati disappearing from the face of the earth. Disappearance is a sort of death or vice versa. Atul, an artist from India, while keeping his ears closer to the ground, either it should be to listen to the music of grasshoppers or to hark the gurgling sounds of all those ‘dead’ rivers like Saraswati. I would like to believe in the latter reading.

(Basel Walk)

Training his ears for listening to the voices of the lost/dead rivers, has been a pet theme for Atul for some time. In one of his previous works, he walked along the shores of Yamuna river only to document the number of pump houses installed along the river bank. Pump houses not only pump water for domestic and agricultural use, a linking thread between the urban and rural economy perhaps, but also control the amount of water that has to be used by the people in different localities of the city. So, even the water distribution could be controlled depending on the social hierarchies and locations of power. Taking this inquiry into a different dimension Atul also had documented the manholes and drain covers in different cities and assembled them to produce a visual ensemble of control and power. The same method he employs while working on his ‘Basel Walk’. In this work, Atul documents the water valves and their bronze and iron covers seen along the paths of Switzerland.

(Aaj Bhi)

In an overtly political work that Atul did in Bodh Gaya, Bihar as a part of the international workshop organized by Sanjeev Sinha and Dianne Hagen, he had created a huge flex board that says, ‘Aaj Bhi Vahi Sab Hota Raha’ (Those Things Keep Happening even Today). It was performative, collaborative, participatory and public in nature when the actual work was done and the banner later floated along the Ganges and documented from the Mahatma Gandhi Setu Bridge, the largest bridge in the world. In ‘On the Edge’ show Atul presents digital photographs from the project, highlighting the environmental, political and ethical depletions still keep happening in the body politic of Bihar in particular and India in general. Atul abstracts the political critique by giving emphasis to the pillars of the bridge in a couple of digital works titled ‘Distant’.

(Distant)

As an end note, I would like to say that one of the highlights of the show is a wash basin with a faucet spluttering water through some kind of automatic mechanism. The wash basin becomes a new altar and to worship that one could sit in a chair that is strategically placed a few feet away from it. You sit and wait for the tap to eject a stream of water. And after sometimes it becomes a game between you and the water.

Bhavna Kakar’s Love is a Four Letter Word

2011-09-04T08:03:00.001+05:30

(Bhavna Kakar, Director Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi)

‘Chai keliye jaise toast hota hai’ (The way toast is needed with a cup of tea) is the new anthem of Airtel, one of the mobile phone service providers in India. Somehow, when I see the show, ‘Love is a 4 Letter Word’ at the Latitude 28 Gallery of Bhavna Kakar, this line comes repeatedly in my mind. Why? I ask myself several times. Finally, yesterday evening while I was driving my car and listening to the same anthem in my FM Radio, I got my answer. There should be ‘some’ reason to have ‘something’; that something could be anything.

As a title, Love is a 4 Letter Word is catchy. It has been inspired by a Joan Baez song, one of the write up says. From movies to novels to serials to dialogues, this phrase has been there everywhere ever since man realized that ‘love’ is also a four letter word like many other four letter words. The phrase is intense, at the same time tacky. It is emotional and serious, at once it is sentimental and ironic. I don’t know whether Bhavna while organizing this show thought of all these multiple possibilities of this popular phrase. However, the wall text by Avni Doshi gives a very sincere effort to define love. Love is this that.....what not. But then after three lines it goes blah blah blah. If any doubt please go to Latitude 28 Gallery, enter, turn your head to your right and it is just there.

Bhavna has always been interested in tongue-in-cheek titles. We should not forget how she, for two seasons continuously asked us, ‘Does Size (really) Matter? (parenthesis mine). So that pre-occupation with ‘size’ is over, now there is no problem to move on to the ‘four letter words’ like love. After D.K.Bose lyrics from ‘Delhi Belly’, now if some Lado Sarai Gallery comes up with other famous ‘four letter words’ starting with ‘F’, don’t feel surprised. I am talking about words like ‘Firm’, ‘Form’, ‘Farm’ (Strength, Shape, Environment and so on. I know you all think the other way round. We are dirty minds).

(Invitation card for the show)

My revelation through Airtel anthem was simple: During recession (is it an illusion?) to sell works, without losing the name, fame, dignity of the gallery, there should be a (curatorial) theme that justifies a show with a collection of works by a set of artists who have already a niche market. There in Palette Art Gallery, the show ‘Red’ was one such effort (Will come to that in another review). So Chai keliye jaise toast hota hai’, waise, sales keliye ek theme hota hai. There is nothing much to think about the title as it is not argued well by the gallery or the wall text writer (no curator’s name is mentioned or did I miss it?)

Now to the artists and their works. There are four dear artists in this show. Fifth one I don’t know personally. Manjunath Kamath, Bose Krishnamachari, Chintan Upadhyay and Chitrovanu Majumdar. Sana Arjumand from Pakistan is the fifth one. And their good works together make a ‘dud’ show. As an art critic who is a close friend of the participating artists it is very difficult to say something like this. But let me clear the air: Good works, but together they don’t make much. Each work is marooned in their own island like lonely travellers waiting for a saviour ship to appear there in the horizon.

(Bose Krishnamachari and his work)

Braille paper and script has always been an inspiration to Bose Krishnamachari. During 1990s he did a lot of portraits of artists and philosophers on the Braille paper. Also during his abstract period in mid-90s, he had experimented with the Braille papers. But with his NO solo in Dubai (2010), Bose became a full-fledged lover of Braille systems by converting them into certain wall sculptures (relief sculptures). In this show, he comes up with the word ‘Love’ written in Braille script. It is sensuous and invites touch, though none is allowed to do so. ‘Going blind’ is a theme, I believe, that has been pricking his conscience for a long time since his ‘NO’ show. We can expect more Braille works from Bose in the near future. The present work in this show is quite successful within the given context of theme and engagement.

(chitrovanu Majumdar and his work)

Chitrovanu Majumdar surprises with his sculptural installations and reassures the viewers with his paintings done in his hallmark style. In the paintings that depict the most passionate moments between a male and female, with so much of aesthetic discernment the artist removes the ‘points’ of encounter through the hazy blacks and reds. He inscribes the surfaces of the paintings with letters (as if they were culled from love letters) at once giving the pictorial plane a pattern orientation and design as well as an abstract quality. Chitrovanu’s sculptural installations with two metal blocks stuffed with artificial rose flowers, vertically fitted on a wheeled platform, interestingly remind me of the male-female principles, hard and soft cores, reversed and inversed quite consciously and made ‘kinetic’. In Latitude 28, I thought it needed a different display space. Perhaps, right in the middle of the upper gallery with darkness surrounding it with only two spot lights from up illuminating it.

(Chintan Upadhyay and his work)

But in the upstairs we have Chintan Upadhyay’s new avtar; two huge paintings and one series of digitally manipulated photographs. Love has been a problem for Chintan for a long time. So there is no problem if he paints like a wounded soul. So in the paintings we have two huge bouquets with blood dripping from here and there, also now the smart alec babies playing the role of cunning cupids. It is like that, when people fall in love cupids wound them. The bloodshed is ironic; real/suffered and the unreal/aspired. The paintings are framed in decorated frames with golden sheen. They are aptly melodramatic in their imitation of the baroque. The digital photographs of house burning have a direct resemblance with the performance that Murali Cheeroth had done in Sandarbh 2010. Murali also had used a ‘home’ image and burned it down in a slow process. Anyway Chintan Upadhyay is unlimited. And the Dabaang sculpture of the smart alec baby head with punkish attribution is interesting. One is sure that Chintan is going through a period of ‘f**k off’ attitude. But I wonder why he did not present anything from his series ‘Love’ where he asked thousands of people to write the word ‘Love’ in their respective languages.

(Manjunath Kamath and his A Fake Love Story, Digital work)

Manjunath Kamath never fails to live up to the themes in his own quirky ways. He is a maverick who could play between the large and small scales and formats. The large paper work, which is curiously titled, ‘Tree Lover after Benod Behari Mukherjee’ has a man wearing a deer’s antlers and growing branches out of that. Those who are familiar with BB Mukherjee’s ‘Tree Lover’ would really be amused to see how the philosophical mood of BBM is inversed to create the dumbness of beings that mindlessly destroy their own surroundings. Manjunath does not connect love to the ‘love affair’. In his series of small works sizing up to a few inches (Does Size Matter?) Manjunath spontaneously creates a series of images that could connect with the so called ‘love’ between a man and woman. Hence, the shoulder strap of bra becomes as important as a young man enthusiastically wearing an Anna Cap (Gandhi cap is old fashioned) that has an inscription, Mein Kaun Hun? (Who am I?). The digital work of Manjunath looks a bit less inspired though it has all twists and turns and puns of a quintessential Manjunath.

Neo-Monster- A Project by Vibha Galhotra- Story and History

2011-09-02T08:35:00.000+05:30

(Neo-Monster by Vibha Galhotra at Select City Walk Mall atrium, Saket)

In Delhi we don’t have a turbine hall. We don’t have a Thames either. But now we have the atrium of the Select City Walk Mall to make a comparison with the great hall of wonder at the Tate Modern in London. And of course we have our own Yamuna but no luxury cruises and no Delhi Eye to see the whole of city from a bird’s eye point of view.

I cannot argue that the Select City Walk Mall’s atrium is equal to Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. But what makes it equally fascinating for me is the reach of the people who could take a view of a work of art displayed in the atrium from close proximity to different levels of perspective as the structure of the mall provides an ascending and descending view of the atrium as well as a 360 degree view of the same.

(Vibha Galhotra)

That’s why, the ‘Neo-Monster’, a public art project by a Delhi based artist, Vibha Galhotra looks really impressive at the Select City Walk Mall’s atrium. ‘Neo-Monster’ is an inflated balloon in the shape of a heavy earth mover, often called after the company that made it famous in India, JCB. This JCB machine whirrs to life as a hot air pumping machine works from inside. At the shape of the mechanical shovel on the front side, a video of an actual JCB uprooting a tree is projected.

One could easily understand the interest of Vibha who has been living in the city of Delhi for almost a decade, witnessing and at times guiltily participating in the changes happening to it. JCB machines have been a part of the urban landscape of Delhi for a long time. Also the cranes that mark out the sky with vertical and horizontal lines, full-stopped by a pair of heavy concrete blocks. Anyone who is interested in the theme of fast urbanization of the world, would recall the Dubai skyline during global market boom, criss-crossed with cranes.

(Neo-Monster)

Here, in ‘Neo-Monster’ project, Vibha is at once a hard truth teller and a romantic soothsayer. The machine that reminds you one of those works by L.N.Tallur or Mark Streicher who had worked with Abhay Maskara or even the works by Jeff Koons, works well in the atmosphere of a mall. Neo Monster is a plain name as it directly suggests that this is ‘new’ and it is a ‘monster’. The JCB s are the new monsters that gnaw the essence of the earth.

But as a soothsayer Vibha directly connects JCB as a tool of urbanization with the same machine as an enemy to nature. She subtly brings the ‘culture-nature’ polemic within the visual discourse of this work as she projects a footage that she had captured during one of her trips to the hills in North India. This footage shows an actual JCB machine ruthlessly bringing down trees causing de-forestation and realizing/making way to urbanization.

(Mark Streicher at Abhay Maskara Gallery)

The debate is as Rahul Bhattacharya, who has given a verbal back up to the project, puts it, that of fear and desire. Urbanization has become a perennial desire of most of the human beings on earth. They want to move into the city centres or suburbs and live a life that is mechanically devised the urban systems that include both human beings who are in power and the machines that are in control. At the same time, this desire engenders the fear for the uprootedness or the impending dislocations. Caught between these two emotional states human beings live in edge, expending their ultimate doom or deliverance.

I appreciate Vibha’s decision to show this project in the atrium of a mall. Mall is a place where fear and desire manifest literally amongst the people who visit there. I have observed the emotional status of the people who hang out in malls; they believe in what they see and what they experience. The temperature controlled and glass cased atmosphere of the mall give the people a feeling of eternity. Mall is like a film or like poetry; it helps you to suspend your disbeliefs willingly. You completely absorb the ‘given’ reality into your system until you are rudely shocked to the ‘real’ real once you step out of the mall. Mall is an ultimate example, a micro world of spectacle as envisioned by Guy Debord.

(Shoppers walking past Neo-Monoster)

What Vibha does is placing a spectacle within the spectacle. Hence, even a non-citizen of the art world, an ordinary loiterer, a casual visitor, a discerning shopper, or a shopaholic, would find this spectacle believable and its ideas palatable. Could the ideas be thought, discussed and debated by the onlookers who just pass by? I don’t think we need to expect them to do so. Neo-Monster stands as a gentle reminder of the shocks that we otherwise receive in our day to day life, as we witness the expansion gears shifting to top by the developers. The very spectacularity of the work invites the viewer to it.

As I stand there at the atrium witnessing people responding and reacting to the work, I realize one thing; people touch anything fluffy and soft. And also they pose before anything that is big, spectacular and eye catching, for a photograph. Irrespective of the discursive meaning what attracts people to Vibha’s works or in that case anything that is put it in a public place like the atrium of a mall, is the tactile and visual presence of it. The surprise and joy comes from the realization that they too are familiar with this ferocious machine called JCB but not this cute and ‘Disney’ version of the same.

(Neo-Monster, detail)

In due course, the visual discursive zone created by Vibha’s Neo-Monster, opens itself up to be more participatory acts. From caressing to poking, from patting to punching, from sliding to leaning, from frowning to smiling, a series of physical and emotional responses are evoked amongst the people on the very witnessing of it. Unlike the huge objects, commercial product promotional activities pepped up with light and sound, this object of Neo-Monster does not try to tell people anything. It does not ask the enthused and amused viewer to do anything with it. But the very presence of it is provocative enough to land them up into sort of discourse, which could eventually reach to the intended idea of the artist.

(Settlement, a painting by Gigi Scaria, 2007, from the show Absence of an Architect)

Art historically speaking, earth mover machines or JCBs have been a major inspiration for many artists for quite some time. Gigi Scaria, in 2007, in his solo project painted a JCB, which was structured as a building complex in itself. Though Gigi was not debating the romantic involvement with nature, he was addressing the fast changing landscape of an urban location. The brutal mobility of the machines that could primarily deconstruct and then construct a space was implied by Gigi in his work. This work was later done in a site specific sculptural installation in 2009 and was exhibited at the Christian Hosp Gallery, Berlin.

(Gigi Scaria's sculpture, 2009, before it was sent to Christian Hosp Gallery,Berlin)

Lijo and Reni Jose, two architects and artists, who excel in site specific installations and performances along with their architectural projects, had done a project with an actual JCB machine in 2007. Titled ‘Earth’, this work was performative in nature as Lijo drove a JCB machine over the earth collected from different dislocated sites.

(Site Specific performance by Lijo Jose, 2007)

Kochi based Mathai Tom had been painting the scenes of a small village near Kochi for a long time and his major concern has always been the JCB machines gnawing away the earth from the habitats, leaving houses and agricultural fields marooned in stacks. In one of the paintings, he paints a boy playing with a plastic toy while a monstrous JCB works behind him, taking away his earth.

(Paintings by Mathai Tom, 2007-08)

Shivananda Basavanthappa is another artist who has painted JCB as a monumental icon, almost loveable and worship-able in his paintings.

(Painting by Shivananda Basavanthappa, 2008)

Prasad Raghavan, in 2008-09 painted a JCB machine as an emblematic mover of the deluge. He connects its presence with the judgement day and final escape of a few species to safety as in Noah’s Ark. In his video titled Noah’s Ark, Prasad shows a JCB machines eating away earth within the Noah’s ship.

(Work by Prasad Raghavan)

To watch Prasad Raghavan’s Noah’s Ark in youtube, follow this link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFI-nzgGaj8

In Love- To My Children Series 22

2011-08-31T10:29:00.000+05:30

Love has a cupid and a devil playing in its vicinities. When cupid takes the upper hand love happens. But to let the cupid play a role in your life, you need to let the devil also play his role somewhere. Cupid’s effect is felt only when the devil in you becomes so determinant to make you forget things so far happened in your life. The devil was always there in me, lingering in and around my eyes, my lips and my finger tips. He made me remember the insults and he forced me to explore the velvety darkness of wet dreams. He was ruthless enough to make you one in his own resemblance. His power was so much on me that I could just forget the girl who was giving me all her love, her innocence, her smiles, her tears and her youthful intelligence. I could just walk over her shadow and sit next to a person who had just happened to my life on that fateful day of our fun trip to Kallar.

The one whom I pushed into the gutters of oblivion was one of my students who came to my home to study English. She was studying in one of the best convent schools in Trivandrum. She was fun loving. Adolescence is a phase in life that either puts everything into the zone of triviality or joviality. You live on the edge during that phase. Even the fluttering of a leaf could send you into ecstasy. A whimper of a baby could make you cry for the whole night. Wherever you look at you find only beauty. I am not talking about those hapless children who have been made destitute by fate and circumstances. I am talking about those kids who are blessed with protective families and caring people around. My student was from one of those families.

The relationship between her and me was more than that between a student and teacher. She came to me for classes one hour before her school bus came. She always came in her school uniform. She wore a light blue skirt, a cream colour shirt, a blue tie, plaited hairs tied with white ribbon, white socks and black shoes. Girls have a special fragrance. I have always tried to discern what it could be. I check out the smell of all the available talcum powders and body sprays. But when the girls pass by your side, from their presence there emanates a sort of fragrance that is unique to each of them. It is quite surprising that even in a park or in a gym where generally people sweat it out, girls have a fragrance. They smell good always.

She came with such fragrance that made the poet in me intoxicated with imaginations. I taught her lessons and her friend who also came to study with her gave us full support through her covert glances and pinches on her thighs under the table. Girls are like that too. I am talking about a time when it was a taboo for a girl to be over friendly with a boy. During those days, girls conveyed their feelings and messages between and amongst them through covert glances, pursing of their lips, pinches and giggles. I have always observed that girls could speak eloquently through their eyes. With a single glance they could comprehend a whole world. Often I have observed girls crossing men in the streets. From a distance they look as if they were looking directly at you, scanning your face and so on but the moment they come closer to you, however you try to make an eye contact, they just look through you. But today I think things are a bit different, with desire machines overworking in the public domains, girls and grown up women have learnt to look at strangers straight into their eyes.

This girl was in love with me. I was in love with her. But there was no definition to that love. We were not thinking of the future. Any simple mention of the future from my side would make her giggle endlessly. In certain occasions, she used to become very serious. And when she became serious and when she spoke at length about our future, I also laughed it off because I knew that we were not prepared to take up any of those grand ideas at that time. But the popular films that all of us watched in those days made us think in a different way. At times I also thought of eloping with this girl and setting up a family elsewhere and live a life of hardship and struggle. The imagination was quite sentimental and naive. I thought we would elope. Then we will go to a place and live in a shack. I will go find some work in a local workshop of somewhere. Then by evening I would come back with grease all over my shirt and pants. She would be waiting for me with love and food.

That part was not so palatable. We were not prepared to live either in a shack or work in a workshop. So we continued with your respective lives as students and a couple of years went off like that. Now she was a pre-degree student in the Women’s College, Trivandrum. We were not meeting that often during those days. So we planned to meet at my college. She was planning to wear a saree only to appear before me as a grown up woman. But things were happening in a different way. A day after I had asked her to meet me in my college, I had this tryst with destiny in a bus on the day of our fun trip. When the girl in her saree came to meet me with a couple of friends in tow, I was sitting with my new found love at the threshold of one of the classrooms in my college. From a distance, my student could understand what was actually going on. She just passed us as if nothing had happened. She had come there just for me and I was sitting with another girl and from the way we sat she could read everything. I told you, girls could speak to you through their eyes. There was an ocean on pain in her eyes. The devil in me prompted to forget everything. It was time to explore a new paradise.

(Gas Welding)

I did not know whether I was going to explore a paradise or a hell. But for the time being it looked like I was at the threshold of a paradise. I pushed that girl out of my mind. I chose to avoid the places where I could bump into her. I stopped going to the alley where her home was located. Something different was happening in my life. To describe the story further I need to find out a name because the girl who fell in love with me on that day at the threshold of a classroom is still alive. She leads a married life in some part of the world and interestingly, after eighteen years we happened to meet each other in facebook. All these years I have been waiting for that one meeting. And that happened. You may ask how was it like. Before I go into those details let me get on with the story.

Let’s call her ‘Kalpana’. Kalpana in Malayalam means ‘Dream’. Today, with a smile I could say Kalpana made me an art critic. Had our love affair been a success story and had she become my wife, my life would have been different. I often think what would have happened if I had married her and settled in Kerala. Definitely, I would not have taken up a government job. When I was desperately wanting to marry her by the end of my Post-graduation, to prepare myself for the life ahead I had already started teaching in a few parallel colleges in a nearby town named Attingal. For one hour of Shakespeare I was paid Rs.20/- I knew it was not going to work. If at all I wanted to make it work I had to spend all my life in these parallel colleges. In the meanwhile I got a job as a temporary lecturer in a Senior Secondary School. I was grappling with so many things at that time.

When things became really serious I placed a few options before me. I was learning the lessons of practical economics and I felt the urgent need to make some money. Some of my friends were in the gulf countries. I thought of going there and making some money before I could come back and marry Kalpana. But then my friends told me that I should have some job skills. What job skill I had? I knew typewriting. I knew teaching. But there was no surety that I would get an office job in Dubai. Also there were no parallel colleges in the gulf countries. So I needed some job skills. Which was the skill that I could gain in a month’s time? Someone told me that one could learn ‘gas welding’ within a month. In my village there was a welding workshop run by a person I knew. So I approached him and placed my demand. Are you serious, he asked me. He could not have imagined that a person with a post graduation in English literature would do gas welding for a living. He asked me to sit and watch his work. I did and within a couple of hours I realized that I was not cut for gas welding.

Today you may find this very funny. I also feel the same today. But then the feeling was different. I was going through the thick of it. There was not a single night that I spent without shedding tears. My mother was threatening me with dire consequences. My sister was crying because I was desperate to get married at the age of 21. There was a Eureka moment in every one’s life. I found it one of those days. I used to be an actor in school level dramas and also had worked with some professional drama actors in some amateur dramas. Television serials were catching up with the people in general. I thought of becoming a full time actor. Then my mother asked me a question: Suppose, your character needs to drive a car, what are you going to do? It was then it dawned upon me that I should know a few basics. So I went and joined a driving school and in a few weeks time I obtained a driving licence. Deep in my mind I thought if it was not becoming handy in acting, at least I could become a taxi driver somewhere.

I wanted to hone my skills in all the departments of acting. May be, yes may be my television career would launch me to the real cinema. Then I should have been prepared for that. I was already doing Karate in a local dojo under the training of Sensai Siva who was the first black belt holder from our village. Sensai Siva ran the dojo for a few years and one fine morning he had a revelation; he needed to find his Guru. Leaving everything behind, Sensai Siva wandered all over India, searching for his Guru. Each time he sought the chosen one, he was shown the way to elsewhere. Finally he found his Guru in an old man in a village near Kollam district. He went through several years of penance and yoga and came back to our village. Then he made a house on a tree and lived in the tree for a year or so. In 2009, I was sitting in the lounge of the Trivandrum Airport and an old man with a strong presence came to me and asked me whether I was JohnyML. To my surprise I found it was Sensai Siva. Now he looked like a saint with all those closely cropped white hairs and beard. He appreciated me after making an overall look at my body. “You look fit,” he said. I told him it was all thanks to his training. He smiled at me and gave me a copy of his book which detailed his journey from being a Sensai to a Yogi. He was on his way to Dubai where he is settled now. From there he runs a yogic life centre.

(Brilliant Tutorials, Chennai)

Sensai Siva trained me well. He did not know that I was preparing to become a ‘star’. I knew that things would not happen just like that even if preparation was on. So I decided to start my own ‘institute’ to earn for my married life. Marrying Kalpana was the sole aim of my life at that time. ‘JohnyML’s Institute of English’- a sign board saying that came up in one corner of the plot where my home was located. People started looking at the board and wondering what I was up to. It was purely an one man show. I went to Sobhana Press, a rotary press that printed bills and notices and got a notice done. I went around the village by a cycle and distributed the notice that announced the inauguration of my institute. On the opening day most of my neighbours came to attend the function. I called all of them ‘Chechis’ (elder sisters). The class was run from a small one room and one veranda house built specially for brining Kalpana as my bride because I thought that my mother would not allow me to live in the main house.

Most of the time I lived in that small shack and taught students in two shifts; morning and evening. It was a summer vacation time and the parents in my village wanted their children learn English from a fresh post graduate. They all were supporting me with a lot of love and care. But they did not know the hidden plans I had in starting this institute. I knew that people would be shocked when they come to know that I got married in a few month’s time. Again, within a few days after commencing my institute I realized that it was not going to happen the way I wanted. Though I was ready to marry Kalpana and bring her to this shack I was not cut for a limited life. That was just a temporary arrangement. I wanted to make it bit in life. Marriage was the first step towards that though later on I realized that marriage could be as helpful and detrimental at once to your growth in life and career.

My nights were painful because I knew that Kalpana was under house arrest and I was not allowed to meet her. I was trying to reach out to her through some friends. Kalpana’s parents were negotiating with some of my family members through some of the important people including an MLA in the Kerala Assembly. They all wanted to tell me to go back from my decision to marry Kalpana. But I was adamant. I wanted to disprove them by proving my worth in some way. So I decided to appear for the IAS Examinations. Brilliant Tutorials, Chennai was one of the most acclaimed coaching centres for the IAS aspirants. I joined the Brilliant Tutorials, got all their notes and started spending days and nights in mugging them. I was like a possessed person. Somehow I wanted to get Kalpana in my life. I was ready to even become an IAS officer for that. But things were not happening the way I wanted. Man proposes and God disposes. One fine morning, without telling anyone, I left everything behind and went to Baroda. Was I running away from a reality that was too bitter and heavy?

(Sreekumar Theatre where we went to watch a movie)

Kalpana smiled at the stains of the flower petals that the other guy had crushed under his shoes on the previous day. She told me that the whole night she was thinking about me. I found it really encouraging. And I told her that the moment I met her in the class room I knew that I was in love. We sat at the threshold of a classroom just opposite to the place where the bus had left us on the previous night. I was looking intently into the big eyes of Kalpana. It was when the girl in saree walked into the campus. Kalpana did not take any particular interest in the people who were just passing by. So she did not notice this girl either. But she had seen everything. The girl in saree gave me a look that had all the sadness in this world. But she was so good that she left without a huff. I saw her walking away with her friends as if nothing had happened. Did she curse me at that moment?

They days went by. My relationship with Kalpana grew in leaps and bounds. One day I asked her to come with me for a movie. In those days, going for a movie with a boy or a girl, that too without the consent of the parents was a one of the biggest crimes that the college going students could do. It could even mar the marriage proposals of a girl had she been seen by someone. It could have given rise to major scandals and so on. So we went to the movie hall after taking a lot of preparations. We entered the hall just before the movie started. Throughout the movie I was making all the efforts to be normal and decent. I did not want to give her a hint that I was a lecher or I wanted to make use of the opportunity to touch her or caress her or kiss her. So I kept myself away from her even if my hand graced against her hand accidently I profusely said sorry. I was playing a perfect gentleman’s role. After the movie like two thieves escaping a place after pilfering nothing but with a sense of terror and inexplicable guilt, we left for our respective homes.

Next morning I went to the college with a strong sense of pride surging in my heart. It was in late September. The sultriness in the air was rather less with the cool breeze wafting through the layers of greenery around our class rooms. I had this habit of reaching the college early and standing on the platform from where the teachers lectured us, singing poems loudly till other students came in and became my audience. They like me reciting poems. And they asked me to recite certain poems by certain poets who were very popular in those days. Balachandran Chullikkadu was very famous amongst the college students. His poems ridden by existential angst recited in his gruff voice enthralled our generation. His cassettes were huge hits of the time. Then came O.N.V.Kurup, the lyricist and poet, whose poems were rich in romantic allusions and lyrical quality. He recited them in his cut glass voice and I was a great fan of his poems too. Then we had Madhusudhanan Nair, whose ‘Naranathu Bhranthan’ had become a rage of the time. Nair not only recited his own poems but also recited the poems by other modernist poets of Kerala.

(Balachandran Chullikkadu)

My tape recorder was a very old one. To listen to all those poems in their crystal clarity I had to go to my cousins’ place who had amplifiers and stereo boxes in their rooms. I spent endless hours in their home. They were kind enough to let me listen to the poems to my heart’s content. In fact the boys in that house liked me a lot and they encouraged me in whatever I did. Listening to these poems used to take me to a different world. I could levitate there and wander amongst the clouds as Wordsworth did above his Lake District. I had only the Chakka Canal to hover above. And it was on the shores of this canal, my friend John Jyothi Raj was living. He also liked poems. The interest in reciting poems reached its crescendo when I got an opportunity to recite my own poems in the Trivandrum Dooradarshan. The poem was titled ‘Avivahitante Nisaa Smaranakal’ (Night Thoughts of a Bachelor).

Doordarshan was the only television channel in those days. So on the day of telecasting my program, I called up a few people and told them to watch the program. I was wearing a red striped shirt and a grey pants during the recording. With shivering limbs and a racing heart I sat before the Keltron Television set (Kerala Electronics, a Government of Kerala Undertaking. And this company, always running in loses provides the traffic signalling technology all over India. You may notice the logo of Keltron in Delhi traffic signal lights also) with my mother, sister and a few neighbours. The program started. The set was designed as if I was sitting in a park bench. I sounded good and I was very happy. Next morning, my cousins told me that I should wear the same shirt and pants when I went to college so that people would identify me in bus and streets. I did not know they were joking or were serious. Anyway I repeated the dress code and as far as I remember none was turning their necks to see me for second time.

(Keltron Logo)

This appearance in Doordarshan’s poetry section and the publication of poems in magazines and local journals gave me an added confidence. Besides, I became friendly with poets like Dr.Ayyappa Panicker, D.Vinayachandran, Kureeppuzha Sreekumar, Anvar Ali, Madhusudhanan Nair and so on. Thanks to these connections I started getting offers to go to villages and recite poems in the Kaviyarangu (poetry sessions). I remember travelling with D.Vinayachandran and Anvar Ali to some obscure village near Trivandrum for a poetry session. We were served with baked tapioca and black tea. But I found a problem when I was sitting along with these famous poets. I was not able to remember none of my own poems. I tried my best but in vain. Then I asked Anvar Ali whether I could recite a poem by Balachandran Chullikkadu. Then he told me that it was always advisable to recite one’s own poems. Finally, with my brain malfunctioning on that crucial evening, I recited a poem by Balachandran Chullikkadu.

(Balachandran Chullikkadu in Pokkuveyil, a movie by G.Aravindan)

I was a fan of Balachandran Chullikkadu’s poems. I could recite most of his poems from my memory. Chullikkadu was the ideal of the 1980s. He was a wanderer. He acted in Aravindan’s movie ‘Pokkuveyil’. The character that Chullikkadu represented in that movie became an ideal for most of the rebelling youth of the 1980s and early 90s. They all copied his walk with his drooping shoulders, long loose shirt and white mundu and rubber chappals. When Chullikkadu was in the peak of his poetic career, he was invited by the University Union and he came to recite his poems at the University Students Union Hall near PMG Junction. I was one amongst the audience. I think Chullikkadu was drunk on that day. While reciting he forgot a few lines and he was fumbling a bit. Then from the audience I got up and recited those lines. The moment he got the cue he continued with his recitation. After the function I thronged at the door to catch a closer glimpse of the young and famous poet of our times. I pushed myself through the crowd and went and shook hands with him. He did not smile. He just looked at me and walked off with the university union leaders. Years later in 2000, when I was working as a special correspondent with Tehelka.com, I had the opportunity to interview Balachandran Chullikkadu at his residence in Eranakulam (Kochi).

Balachandran Chullikkadu, in mid 1990s, through a magazine article expressed his decision to withdraw from the intellectual circle of Kerala by stopping writing poems. He said that he was no longer interested in poems as a vehicle of expression and he preferred acting in television serials and films. We all were shocked. I was in living in Delhi and the news was scandalous. Though Chullikkadu had acted in Pokkuveyil, we never thought that he would become a full time actor that too in the soap dramas and tear jerkers in television. But his stance was clear and he said that as a human being he wanted a dignified life and poetry was not helping him to meet his ends. I thought I understood Chullikkadu well as I too was struggling in Delhi to make my ends meet. However, when I see Chullikkadu today acting as father or caretaker of senior actors like Mammootty and Mohanlal, somewhere something stings. Chullikkadu has a different image in our minds; that remains strong till today irrespective of his forgettable roles in tele serials and movies. It is heartening to listen that he started writing again in magazines and started publishing books.

(ONV Kurup, poet and lyricist)

The craze for poetry amongst the general Malayali public was so maddening during early 1990s. We had a modernist tradition of reciting poems and it was made popular by Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, Dr.Ayyappa Panicker, Sugatha Kumari, D.Vinayachandran, Kureeppuzha Sreekumar, Kilimanoor Ramakanthan, Prof.M.P.Appan, Pazhavila Ramesan and so on. Inspired by them even school teachers used to recite poems written by themselves in the school functions. Any literary program was incomplete without poetry sessions. Kadammanitta, D.Vinayachdran and Kureepphuzha Sreekumar had star status amongst the poets. Then the cassettes of Balachandran Chullikkadu became the rage of the youngsters. It was carried forward by O.N.V.Kurup and Madhusudhanan Nair. There occurred a situation in Kerala that even in the marriage halls and public functions, people started playing these poems through loud speakers. Kattakkada Murukan gave a new edge to poetry recital after Balachandran Chullikkadu. Today, thanks to several television channels (in Malayalam) and youtube, young poets recite their poems and poems are once again getting public attention in Kerala.

(D.Vinayachandran, Poet)

My interest in poetry recitation comes as I grew up in this modernist milieu of poetry recitation. My village was next to a place called Kayikkara where the famous modern poet, Kumaran Asan was born. He was born on 14th April and every year there used to be grand celebrations for almost a week at the make shift pandals erected at the sea shore of Kayikkara. I used to be a regular fix of these celebrations. My mother helped me to join the poetry writing competitions and recitation competitions. Generally I used to be the winner in both the sections. My mother used to take me to the literary meetings held in those pandals. All the famous poets came there to recite their poems. And some of the poets were dead drunk. Some rebellious guys in the village even joined the recitation competition only to express their anger at these poets by mimicking them in public. I also remember, in this small village, a Senegalese Poet Dr.Sedar Sengor had come to receive the first Asan World Prize for literature. People, like my father, small people like school teachers, government servants and small scale business men were thinking about bringing internationally acclaimed poets to a small village like Kayikkara. Today, that glory and grace of the place have gone into oblivion. Every year on 14th April just for the sake of it, they celebrate a Kumaran Asan’s birth anniversary by lighting a lamp and having some cultural programs.

(Asan Memorial Hall, Kayikkara)

Class rooms used to give a good sound effect through echo. So it was always good to recite poems and listen to the textural and tonal qualities of your own voice through the echoing sound. I was madly in love with my own voice and also my classmates encouraged me to recite more and more poems for them. And it became imperative that I wrote a poem every day and practiced it in the class. I was on the platform and was reciting some poem. It was then Kalpana came inside the classroom. I stopped reciting the poem and I looked at her. She, though the movement of her eyes asked me to stop the recitation and follow her. I did so promptly. And we went to the corridor and sat there at the threshold in silence. I wanted to ask her whether she enjoyed watching a movie with me. She did not say anything. Then to ease the tension in the atmosphere I told her how gentle I was in my behaviour in the movie hall. “I did not even touch you once,” I told her proudly. Hearing this she just exploded. “I was waiting all those two and half hours for your touch. You are a stupid,” she said. It was then it dawned on me that girls also cherished similar emotional responses. Since then I was a different man.

(Godfather poster (malayalam). This was the movie we watched together)

Slowly my classmates also knew that there was something going on between Kalpana and me. Soon it became an accepted relationship in the college. Even the ferocious union leaders did not interfere in our affair. Lecturers and professors also thought that it was something quite natural. Then we, the people in the class decided to make some changes in the seating arrangements. We broke the age old norm of girls on the right side of the class and boys on the left. We started sitting intermingled. It was one of the ways devised by the loving pairs like Kalpana and myself to sit together throughout the day. I brought my tiffin from home and she became so demanding that I had to feed her everyday with my hand. It was seriously embarrassing for me in the beginning and slowly it became a habit.

There is always a villain in any love story. The villain in my love story made his grand entry in the form of our own professor. He was a good friend of Kalpana’s father, who was a leading advocate in Trivandrum. Our professor conveyed the message to her father and soon her movements were restricted. Initially, her family acted as if nothing had happened. Then, her father started coming to college to drop her at the gate just before the college hours started. I used to wait for her, singing poems and entertaining other friends in the class. Once she came in we went to our world.

(Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, poet)

Before things got really complicated, once I fell ill. Though there was a phone connection in her home, I was barred from calling her. So writing letters was the only way of communication. Even when we were meeting every day I used to write to her every day. The ritual was like that I brought the letter to the class and then read it out for her. She took it home read it several times and replied once in a while with similar intensity. As I was a compulsive writer and addicted to writing, I could finish several pages in a night with the words of wonderment and praise for her. So I sent a letter to her through one of my friends and she decided to come and visit an ailing boy friend.

She came and nobody was at home except this ailing young man. The moment I saw Kalpana my fever flew miles away. I was a different person. I looked into her eyes as if I were launching my boat into the unchartered waters that stayed calm in the depths of her eyes. I held her shoulders with both of my hands. I drew her to my chest and I could feel her softness against my body. Something moved. The eternal serpent that waits to raise its hood at any given time. I took her to my bed. The Keltron television set and the National Panasonic stereo tape recorder stood in silence watching me doing things that they had not seen me doing before.

Kalpana closed her eyes. I kissed on her eye lids. My lips started exploring the landscape of her body. I remembered Kalidasa explaining Parvati in Kumarasambhavam. The rain drop falling on the forehead of Parvati. It rolls down to her nose tip, then to her lips and to her chin, then into the spongy route between the breasts and splashing into her navel like a whirlwind only to become a watery feeling in the valley. I was just turning into a drop of rain; a big big drop of water. And I travelled the same route shown by Kalidasa and under me a forest sprang up into spring. My fingers plucked the flowers and the canopies were obstructing the easy movement of my fingers. With a twist of her hands she removed them and threw it on the floor. Now like a portrait painted by Modigliani she reclined before me.

“No, you should not,” she told me. If you are not a rapist, a woman can stop you with a glance. She can send you into the depths of shame with a single word. She could unnerve you and send the serpent back to its hiding with a single twisting of her head. I could not go further and she got up and dressed herself up. Crestfallen I too got into my role as a sick boy. Kalpana stood before me as if nothing had happened between us before a few minutes back. She made tea for me. This was repeated in a couple of days more and a normal fever cannot be extended to eternity so I had to go back to college after a couple of days putting an end to the unexpected but interrupted entry into a secret.

When young boys used to discuss their existential pangs with their confidents, they open up several things, which would shock the listener. One day a friend of mine told me how his father, in a fit of rage explained how women were all over the world. “They all stink,” his father said. My friend was very sad because his father said it to his mother. I did not understand why his father said it either. In my observation, each woman has a different fragrance. They don’t stink. But all the women have the same taste. If you taste, you get this slippery salty feel. Then you may wonder why you did it. There is no explanation for it. I think this slippery salty flavour drives the world. But knowing this is one way of demystifying the relationship between a man and a woman. Kalpana also tasted slippery salty.

(Kureeppuzha Sreekumar, poet)

The river life never runs smoothly, so is the river of love. The more you are into it the more you are troubled by it. Then your flow is obstructed by a huge dam. This time the dam was built by her father. Kalpana was put into house arrest. She tried to send me messages through some friends. It was almost the end of the second year and we were all going to be post graduates with small and big ambitions. As I told you, my one point agenda was to marry Kalpana. Now she was in house arrest. Then one day she reappeared in the college. She was wearing a white churidar with red flower prints. She did not look particularly sad, but she was silent. She walked into the class like an apparition and I was not expecting her on that day. I was in an emotional turmoil. I just walked out of the class while the professor on the platform looked at this drama with some sort of confusion. Now when I review this particular scene, I feel a bit funny despite the remembrance of the pains that I had gone through in those days.

I spoke to Kalpana and she told me that she was going to give examinations and will be put back in house arrest in his uncle’s house. I was depressed. The exams were over and we were communicating through letters sent across through the Indian postal service. Every day at noon 12.30 I waited for the post man to come and deliver her letter. I could not send replies to her as it was censored by her uncle. But she had taken one of her cousins into confidence. She was doing the courier work for Kalpana. It was during I did all those things mentioned at the beginning of this chapter; including learning gas welding, teaching, driving, karate and preparing for the IAS examinations.

The pressure on my family and me was tremendous. I was called to Kalpana’s uncle’s house. When I went to meet him, I could see Kalpana’s face through a window. She was locked up in that room and she was anxiously looking at me. Even in that critical moment she was complementing my new pair of shoes with her glances. Her uncle spoke to me at length; mainly about the pros and cons of a life like that. And he put a condition- I could marry her. And that should happen in a couple of days. It will be a register marriage and I should leave my family and live with Kalpana at her uncle’s house. I was not ready to listen something like that.

I looked at him and told him I was not ready to agree with both the conditions. Then he told me that then they had to think differently. I told him that if she really loved me she would wait for me- all those usual stuff that takes place in such situations. I left Kalpana alone in her confinement and came back to my home. My nights and days were becoming intolerable. Meanwhile, her people were mounting pressures on me and my mother. I remember my relatives were of no use in this matter. Politicians, advocates and other socially important people were sent to me as envoys. All of them were asking me to back out from this relationship. Some people threatened me and some people used soft words those were more threatening than the actual threat itself. Finally her father decided to meet me.

I was called to Kalpana’s father’s private office in Trivandrum. He was very calm and silent. He looked at me for a long time; then he asked me to drink tea. I sat before him. He did not speak anything about my relationship with Kalpana. Instead he spoke to be how as a father he felt. He said I was free to marry her but things would not work out the way I expected. Somehow I felt that this man was telling me the right things. He was winning me over. He was calling me son. I knew it that he was aiming big and he finally shot. “You can marry her but tomorrow itself and leave your family.” I got up to walk out. But he made me to sit.

Something was exploding in my head. I told him that I was ready to walk out of this relationship than yielding to their pressure tactics. He was waiting for this moment. He won the round. The he pulled his table drawer out and took out a bundle of letters. Suddenly, I felt like laughing because I could recognize them. They were all written by me. He handed over them and told me that it was now of no use. I took them back and carefully put them into my bag. “You should destroy all these letters,” her father told me softly. I smile at him. “And you should return all those letters given to you by Kalpana,” he said firmly. This time I was really laughing through my tears. “Sir,” I called him, perhaps it was the first time I addressed him, “Sir, all these could be destroyed and her letters could be returned but what about me? I would be alive. If you are thinking that these letters will be used against her at some point, I will destroy them. But I will be the biggest threat, right? How are you going to deal with me then?” He looked at me and he said calmly, “Sorry son..I should not have asked you this. Go in peace. I am happy that you are out of it.”

(G.Aravindan, Film maker)

Within three days I found myself sitting in a train to Baroda. I left everything behind. My students, my IAS notes, my aspirations and ambitions. It was the beginning of my exile. In Baroda I was received by Shibu Natesan. It was summer vacation in Baroda. I was a lonely man. I moved around with another lonely man like me. One day Shibu Natesan brought a letter from Kalpana. I had given my address to her through a friend. The letter said that she wanted to meet me just to know whether I walked out on her or not. She wanted to meet me urgently. Without thinking for a second, I took the first train to Mumbai.

Mumbai, Pune, buses, Ferries, boats and finally I reached Kannur. My friend from Kannur was travelling with me. He was the one who suggested a travel by road. From Kannur I got into a train and reached Trivandrum. In the letter, Kalpana had explained the place and date of our meeting. She would come to give a competitive examination for some job. The examination centre was a school in Trivandrum. She would meet me there immediately after the examination.

I went to that school well in advance. Mingling with the people and candidates I learnt more about the exams and seat divisions and seating arrangements. From the candidate list on the board I found out her hall number. And I went into a class room which was not used for the examination and hid myself there. I positioned myself under a desk from where I could see the main gate of the building. The first floor was a vantage point for me. Just before the exam bells were rung, I saw a familiar Fiat car coming and stopping in front of the school building. Kalpana came out of it and walked into the compound. I waited under the desk for three hours. Just before the last bell she came out and walked along the corridor. I came out from behind the door where I was standing to snatch her in and pulled her inside the class.

(Murukan Kaattakkada, poet)

Kalpana looked into my eyes. I was heaving like an animal after a race. I leaned against the wall. “So it is over, right?” she asked me furiously. I said, yes. She slapped me left and right. I stood there taking her wrath all over me. She scratched me with her long nails. I could feel skin peeling off from my stomach, neck and cheeks. She slapped me again and left the class room. I stood there with my eyes closed. I was crying. I sat there till I became calm.

In a month’s time I was again in Baroda. This time I was a different man. I had already made up my mind to join the Faculty of Fine Arts to pursue a post graduation in Art History and Criticism. I got a room in MA Hall in the Boy’s Hostel campus. One evening Shibu Natesan brought me one letter written in an inland. It was raining outside.

I took the letter from Shibu’s hands. With a single glance I could make out that it was sent by Kalpana. With the letter I walked to the window. The rain was pouring with shrieking sounds. The wind was howling through the branches of the trees in the campus.

I tore that letter into pieces and threw it down through the window. I could see them whirling in the flow of water and disappearing from my vision. I did not know what she had written to me in that. Still I don’t know what she was trying to tell me in that letter.