A Forgotten Danish Cartoon Strip and the Way We Eat Chicken

(Moco, a forgotten Danish Cartoon strip)

People in north Kerala read Mathrubhoomi weekly, in central Kerala it was the rule of Malayala Manorama weekly. In south, we proudly read Kalakaumudi, which was a recent launch in 1970s. While both Mathrubhoomi and Manorama could cut across the invisible north south boundaries made distinct by curious differences in language, culture and eating habits, Kalakaumudi most remained as a South side weekly and took its own time to become a pan Kerala magazine. People read each magazine for different reason; Mathrubhoomi exuded both literary verve and a sense of conservatism, Malayala Manorama treaded along a middle path entertaining mostly the semi-literate and low brow-ist readers. Kalakaumudi, in a way set the editorial pattern for many other magazines which would start in 1990s; the first half of it had daring investigative political reports and the second half was a treasure trove of modern literature. M.S.Mani and S.Jayachandran Nair, an editor-duo worked hard to make Kalakaumudi a pride of the reader.

( a recent cover page of Kalakaumudi)

It was mid 1970s. India was reeling under the Emergency and its aftermath. I was hardly seven or eight at that time. My father being a political activist and a reformist subscribed most of the journals then published in Kerala and my mother was an avid reader of literature, eking out time for reading from her domestic as well as professional responsibilities and saving up money to build a home library slowly but steadily, which satisfied my quest for reading as a young boy. I eagerly waited for the latest issue of Kalakaumudi, brought by the newspaper boy every week on the stipulated day. What attracted me most in this journal at that time was a small strip cartoon which did not have any name. Each issue carried two or three cartoon strips, spread out in different pages almost giving a pleasant surprise to the reader. The cartoon had no title and no dialogues. Each cartoon had three columns and invariably in one of them there would be a vertical inscription along the dividing line, which read MOCO. As we did not have any search engines in those days, we called it Moco and almost had decided that the name of the protagonist was Moco. Hence, my mother called his wife (a spoiler of Moco’s adventures) Mocochi. Looking at this cartoon strip just before sleeping, lying down on one side of my mother brought smile to our lips.

 (Indira Gandhi and Leonid Breshnev, the then Soviet Union president)

Those were the days of India’s or rather Indira Gandhi’s tilt towards the Soviet Union for cultural and militaristic support. So more than the American popular culture we had Russian popular culture to grow up with. Stories of Leo Tolstoy, translated and illustrated folk tales distributed in Kerala by the Prabhat Book House, Russian calendars that extolled their achievements in the fields of astronomy and agriculture and the grand literature of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and so on were the cultural backdrop against which we grew up. An occasional documentary or cartoon films that we could see in Trivandrum museum were from Russia. Before we knew any name of the western publication houses, we were fully aware of the publication brand, Raduga, which was a major Russian publishing house. Hence, naturally we thought MOCO was a Russian cartoon. And without any speech bubbles and specific cultural suggestions we thought it could be from anywhere in the world but it was satisfying to believe that it came from Russia. For us then all good things came from Russia.

 (one of the Moco strips currently available online)

To tell the truth, I have always been very curious to know about MOCO. The reason is slightly un-academic though. If I say cooked or fried chicken was the reason that inspired me to know more about MOCO, one would feel that I am exaggerating. But that is the truth. In our childhood, with India holding up its protected nationalist economic policies, the markets were starved of modern products. Our food staples were always the usual fares; preferred meat was that of buffaloes or cows (we called it then beef generally. Though India is inching towards a total ban on beef for the coercive political reasons, Kerala is still one of the high beef consuming states in India and you would surprised to know that Maharastra where a strict beef ban is in place tops the chart). Vegetables were stereotypical and thankfully more organically produced. Eating chicken was a luxury as there were no organized poultry farms or chicken import from the neighbouring states as we see today. Hens and cocks were reared at most of the homes mainly for eggs rather than for their meet. Therefore people in Kerala ate chicken only on very special occasions like Christmas or special dinners. Killing a chicken from the backyard was an emotional as well as ethical affair in those days therefore the life expectancy of these fowls was more than what is today.

The cartoon strip MOCO had at times a dinner scene in which we found a ‘dressed’ fowl on a plate with its two legs raised up towards heaven; two wavy lines that went up showed that the cooked bird was just taken out of the oven. It looked so tasty then. Our mouths used to water when we saw that particular frame. As there was nothing to tell us that it was a chicken (it could have been a duck, a turkey or any bird), we assumed that it was one. We craved for eating chicken but in vain. I remember when the poet Kumaran Asan’s birthday was celebrated in our neighbouring village on the month of April every year, one benevolent uncle used to feed us chicken curry and appam. Kumaran Asan who in his poems propagated the ideas of non-violence was somehow remembered wistfully by me in the beginning because of this chicken association. People refrained from eating chicken because of economic reasons as well as emotional reasons. Killing a home grown chicken was a crime, felt by many. To neutralize the guilt of killing a poor bird in Kerala we had developed a maxim that went like, ‘the sin of killing would be erased with the eating of it’. However, I remember most of the women resisted killing a chicken and the abattoir in back yard was often handled by men who had been dreaming of eating chicken on a Sunday afternoon and obscenely eying the proud hens and cocks loitering around the courtyard minding their own business.

MOCO disappeared from the pages of Kalakaumudi after a few years. The magazine also took many avatars by changing its looks, content and even changing the editor. S.Jayachandran Nair went on to start Malayalam Vaarika but he did not carry over MOCO to the new publication though he could wean away the start writers and artists to his fresh editorial venture with the New Indian Express. My curiosity about MOCO simmered down as time went by. At times I used to think wistfully about this character. Perhaps, he was indirectly responsible for many glad eyed cartoon characters in the world. MOCO was married man and a declared skirt chaser. But each time his attempts to get a young woman in his bed were spoiled by his obese wife ‘Mocochi’.  In this way this cartoon based itself on a cheating husband and an unrelenting spoiler of a wife. They too have their nice moments and mind it, those moments are propped up by Moco only to hide the nubile one behind the curtain or under the bed. Moco and Mocochi had a son, a small version of Moco and the expression on the Moco Jr’s face was that of a child crook; really the father’s son. As none spoke anything in this cartoon strip, we did not know what they were talking to each other. The actions were enough to conjure up mischievous conversations all by ourselves.

Finally, my interest in the topic of chicken consumption in India and particularly in Kerala took me to MOCO again. And with the help of Google, I found out that MOCO was a Danish cartoon. Created by Jorgen Mogensen and Casper Cornelius, this cartoon strip was started as a Pantomime cartoon in 1940s. The name of the protagonist, which I thought was Moco all this while is Mr.Alfred and his wife is Mrs.Alfred and the son is Alfred Jr. A Pantomime cartoon is something that does not have a dialogue and initially it was created for scuttling the problems of translations when it was syndicated to various publications in different countries. Though it was a Danish cartoon, it appeared first time in Le Figaro, the French magazine, where the character was identified as Presto. Later on the syndicating agency P.I.B took it and rebranded it as MOCO by taking two letters each from the names of the creators. Moco became a household name in Australia and the USA, from where it got syndicated to many other countries. Moco was a bold experiment in cartooning because Alfred the protagonist could transcend time and become a character anywhere in the world any time of history. He could be a Roman, an Arab or even an Indian in certain strips. However, considering the thematic orientation of the cartoon strip (skirt chasing which was detrimental to the family concept of the conservative America), in the US, this cartoon was seen as a low browistic one catering to the semi-literate class. Whatever it was, the appeal of the cartoon was global to certain extent.

Today, perhaps very few people remember MOCO in Kerala. My experiment proved it beyond doubt. I sent the picture to my mother and sister via Whatsapp and asked them to identify the character; unfortunately those two people who had laughed a lot looking at this cartoon years back, have absolutely forgotten him. I just wondered whether this oblivion came from the consumption of chicken, a blow of fate. MOCO had allured with his cooked chicken. Today we eat a lot of chicken. The change in global economy has changed our eating habits and chicken tops the non-vegetarian menu in India today. Market studies show that there is a 12% growth in chicken consumption in every year in India. Kerala is a very special case. The data of chicken consumption make sweep you off the feet. Kerala has a total population of 33 million of which 80% eat chicken on a regular basis. Kerala’s monthly consumption of chicken is 5000 tonnes of which only 264.3 tonnes are produced in Kerala itself. Rest is imported. In a year Kerala spends an average of Rs.2844 crore for eating chicken and each year Rs.1752 crore goes out of Kerala in chicken business. And rightfully, out of the five obese states in India Kerala stands second, a real gain indeed! When I think of those days when we had to look at a cartoon strip and imagine the taste of chicken, the change that has taken place within forty years is enormous. Moco has been forgotten by most of the Keralites but they have carried forward one thing from the cartoon strip: the chicken.  

A Dramatic Monologue of an Ageing Body

This is about old age. When I was in my teens I was impatient to grow up. The very idea of growing up intoxicated me like everyone else in my friends’ circle. Like many of them I too did not know that there was an economy of growing up. It was not just a Complan thing. What I meant by growing up was all about setting myself free, free of all hurdles and shackles that the grownups had imposed on me.

I dreamt that once I became a grown up person I would do all what the grownups did, including smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, sporting a beard and moustache, wearing a lungi, folding it up to the knees, doing a job, getting married, setting up a home, making kids, sending them to school, seeing them growing up, getting them married, becoming a conformist citizen of the country and so on. I never thought then that those were in fact leading me to a larger and wider trap quite challenging and enticing at once.

In retrospect I understand that most of the people realize their dreams, if those dreams are the dreams that I have just recounted. To realize those dreams one does not do too many things. Just go by the flow you would reach your grave, passing through those milestones in life, experiencing them to the hilt, smiling and shedding tears, if your journey is not abruptly curtailed by an accident or illness. Life is fascinatingly ordinary for many of us and most of us do not think about treading a different path. Ordinariness and the quotidian is so alluring that the exceptional things look blasphemous if not dangerous.

At some point I decided not to be ordinary. I think that was when I really started growing up. When I dreamt of the grown up days, it was peculiar that the age group was not set. Had I wanted to become a twenty five year old man? Or it was an effort to become a thirty year old person? Was it the maturity of the people in their forties that had allured me? But one thing was sure that in my dream of becoming a grown up man there were no grey hairs, weakened muscles and wrinkled skin. That means I wanted to be grown up but eternally young. Growing up did not mean getting older or aged then. Youthfulness was the basis of all enjoyments and happiness in life.

(Literary critic, late Dr.Sukumar Azhikode)

Now standing at the threshold of forty eighth year of my life I no longer think about growing up but I do think about ageing. And it is nothing related to the fear of being discriminated, nor is it about becoming weak.  But it is all about seeing life in a new perspective. It is about slowing down. It is about really understanding one’s own body and mind without attributing any spiritual dimensions to it. One could approach one’s mind and body in a strictly rational and scientific way. What does the body want and what does the mind crave? Do they want the same thing or different things? Do the former respond to the demands of the latter and vice versa? And if they are growing incompatible how are you going to hold them together? Will you leave one for the other jeopardising your very existence? Questions are abundant in this case.

There are chronic bachelors and spinsters who live their lives as they want and beautifully age and pass out of the academy of life. Married people also do the same. However, the loners get more time to contemplate on the mind body relationship after a certain age. If the partners are compatible they could grow harmoniously together and walk into the night of a life holding hands and disappear into the horizon of memories lashing in the minds of their progenies and successors. Such cases are increasingly becoming rare though these days. A great literary critic in Kerala, Late Dr.Sukumar Azhikode was a chronic bachelor and he had written in one of his autobiographical pieces that he used to caress his own body and tried to know what it wanted. Mind would respond in such moments and one could feel one’s mind in the finger tips.

(Chikungunya scare in Delhi)

Ageing is a beautiful thing. Recently I was downed by the Chikungunya virus as it reached epidemic proportions in Delhi. While recuperating I went to the doctor in order to find solutions for the resultant joint pains and muscle cramps. I told the doctor that I felt suddenly I became old or rather I felt the waves of ageing in my being. The illness has made me weak; my bones and muscles ache as I sit, get up, sleep or walk. Over a period I started understanding slowly my body which I thought was like a stallion held in control by an expert rider, had fallen prey to the virus. Today I have to respond to the movement of my body; how my wrists move, my knees bend or straighten up, how my ankles react when I climb flight of stairs or climb down.

It was then I turned my attention to the old or aged or ageing people around me. Now I understand how they exactly feel and cope with the surroundings. Dyeing one’s hairs is not always a way to look young and healthy. But ageing is something that could be healthy (despite many physical ailments) and beautiful. I have started seeing beauty in aged and ageing people. I feel, I am an ageing person now. People say that age is just a number and it is all in mind. Yes, it is all in mind. Most of us do not grow up at all after certain age. The same people who used to crave for growing up now wish to go back to their younger days when they were absolute carefree. If you are in a whatsapp group where you have your college or school friends you would know how you desperately want to go back in time and to be again young.

That’s the mind. If the mind accepts the age and be alert for the age that your body feels then everything is fine. That does not mean that an ageing person’s mind should be showing symptoms of ageing therefore ceasing to be productive, imaginative and creative. But the difference is that in order to be productive, imaginative and creative one need not necessarily be young in body and mind. One could create wonderful works of art or anything of that sort even at the age of eighty. Suddenly someone will pitch in and say that it is what exactly about a young mind in an ageing body. I say, a young mind inside an ageing body is an anachronism. An ageing body learns things from the surroundings by testing and also by imbibing. Similarly, a mind within the ageing body should also learn the lessons of the ageing body by testing and imbibing (here I avoid a further complicated notion of mind being inside and outside the body at once and for the sake of argument, I maintain that the mind is inside the body). Once that is done the mind will not behave like a young person who has a young body.

                         

The difference between the young mind and the older mind, in an ideal situation is that the younger one while showing its tendencies to be vigorous and fast therefore prone to make mistakes due to lack of empirical experiences before, the aged or the ageing mind always knows how to slow down and avoid mistakes. I cannot help the people who keep committing mistakes after certain age; that means they have not learned the lessons of ageing in the right sense. Working out in gym, maintaining a comparatively healthy body and having enough medical attention around do not assure the ageing body’s abilities to perform like a young body. As that is the case a mind that resides in a well maintained old body would automatically correspond to the apparent youthfulness of the body and could commit a few mistakes (given that there are no warning signals sent out on the right time) and make the person ridiculous in public, if not unto himself.

Nature is a wonderful engineering system. We have been created by nature through natural selection, adaptation and improvisation over a period of time. Whatever deficiencies we had in the beginning, at the points of evolutionary junctures, have been corrected by the nature and it continues even today. This correctional process also includes slowing down. When a person becomes old he learns how to slow down. When we age we start seeing things around us as if they were absolutely new. They have been there but we were not seeing them because of the speed. Everything would look strange and unfamiliar in the beginning as you age. It is exactly like you drive down to your work place and one day decided to take a public transportation system. Sitting at the window seat you start seeing sceneries that you have been missing for many years. The same landscape, the same urbanscape, the same roads, the same streets, the same buildings, the same wayfarers all would look new to you because now you have unshackled yourself from the view that is given by the driver’s seat. Ageing is a shifting for good; you start seeing things in a different light.

When you slow down you start feeling one with the nature because nature is not in a hurry. The things that you want to do it in eight hours are perhaps done by nature in eighty years. That’s how the trees grow in nature. They are more enduring because they do everything slowly. That does not meant that one should assume the snail’s pace. No, I am not making any unearthly demands or suggestions. It is about the body slowing down, letting the mind to register everything and becoming harmoniously blended with the pace of the nature. Old age they say is the second infancy. Shakespeare also had said the same in his poem, All the World is a Stage, where he qualifies the last stage of life as: “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history/Is second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” If we could avoid the cynicism of the great bard, we can say that the slowing down in fact helps us to be children for the second time in life. Yes, there would be a stage where the sensory faculties deprive us of their service; but there is a stage till before that when we could see everything afresh, without committing many mistakes that we have done during the struggles to really grow up. 

The Curator is Dead and Long Live the Curator: Search for a New Word Instead

( a conservator at work)

Recently I had an opportunity to attend an international conservators’ forum which was held in Delhi’s IGNCA. Conservators from Mexico, Spain, the United States and so on presented the problems that they face while going around and ahead with their works. For me, as an Indian it was quite heartening to listen that they face bureaucratic hurdles and they too have brainless councillors and politicians who give conservation works to contractors who in the name of beautifying and conserving either wash down the patina-ted bronze sculptures with acid or over paint them with black paint. It is not just an Indian problem. Suddenly came another issue that the conservators in the public museums face there; the ego of the curators. In the hierarchy of museum administration, it is generally viewed that curator wields more power than the conservator. Or at times, the curator him/herself doubles up as a conservator often challenging the specialization of the conservators. Luckily in India the competition and the hierarchic disputes within the museums (and the museum discourse as well) remain as ego issues between ‘officials’ who carry these designations around, without never flowering into a full-fledged discourse that would make the museum practices more sophisticated than as they are today in our country.

(a conservator at work)

What caught my attention was the curator-conservator tussle that had been irritating the conservators from the foreign countries. It put me into thinking. In India we do not have so many celebrity conservators as we treat them as mechanics who mend cars and motorbikes. The kind of reputation and regard that the vintage car restorers get these days still evades the Indian conservators who toil with the paintings and sculptures in the dusty store rooms and workshops of the museums. We do have organizations like INTACH that does large scale conservations in India and elsewhere. Interestingly, the name INTACH also reminds one of the institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India that does very interesting and important excavations in different parts of India, at times helping in changing our historical views and at other times paving way for ideological disputes that involves not only scholars but also ill informed politicians. Unfortunately, like any other excavation agency in the world, due to the fear of changing the historical discourse which is conducive for maintaining the history as a given, the ASI is also forced to suppress many of its findings and interventions in the historical narrative. I am not scholar to comment on either the practice of conservation in India or the excavations that have been happening under the aegis of the ASI. However, I would say, the specialisation that several of our conservators and the excavators has been underused in our country. When conservation and restoration together slips over to the practice of authentication of a work of art, it suddenly enters into a different economic discourse, which takes away the technical as well as historical nature of the work. This issue has to be discussed further by the experts in the respective fields.

(Curator Scot Schaffer- all pics for representational purpose only)

My interest here is to discuss the role of the curator in today’s art discourse. It has become a child’s knowledge that the world curator comes from the Latin ‘curare’ which means ‘to take care’ or manage. There is also a saying that the word curator comes from the root ‘cure’ which means ‘helping something out of a bad physical condition’. That’s why Carold Duncan once observed that a work of art is ‘sick’ in a museum that needs a ‘curator’ to nurse it out of a sick condition. The world curator also has references to the medical practice of preserving dead bodies. That means whatever art objects that we see today in a museum are dead bodies because the word museum comes from the world ‘mausoleum’ which means a place where the dead are preserved. That means both literally and metaphorically a museum means a house of the dead. Interestingly, we have contemporary museums where living artists’ works are also preserved and exhibited. That means, those works that are capable of reaching to a museum, whether they are the works of a dead master or a modern contemporary living artist, we could say they are dead bodies. In the economic circuit of art, which is the auction circuit, it is said that a work of art becomes economically dead when it reaches a museum. That means museum is the ultimate space where the dead objects are brought to rest. When a work of art plays out all its economic values and is transacted in the market, it is a body in action which needs rest. The death of a work of art is celebrated in the museum and the curator is the presiding official of that death ritual.

 (Inside a mausoleum)

Today, however, both these words, Museum and Curator, have been taken out of the old discourse and are used for the contemporary purposes. Museums, moving away from the conventional sense, have become to play the role of expansive galleries that could afford to showcase high value art objects for longer durations and in the meanwhile, curators have come out of the old museum practice and have become itinerant professionals who do not really need specialization in any particular area of art. Pushing further for contemporary purposes, the word and designation ‘curator’ has migrated to various areas of commercial market where utility objects are sold not just for their functionality but for their aesthetical value. That means today’s curator is not simply a specialist who ‘takes care of the works of art’ or one who arranges the works of art. Within the museum as well as gallery parlance, the word curator till recently had some umbilical relationship with the original word but that too seems to have severed by the market forces. When the discretionary status of the word curator is collapsed for accommodating various practices within its blanket coverage, it has become a word that connotes someone who arranges a few examples from certain disciplines tastefully, intelligently and convincingly. This fluidity of position that the word curator has acquired by now helped not only the gallerists and freelancers to call themselves curators but also it has helped those people who delves in the business of life style products and home interiors. (To cite a stray example, recently I came across a news item in the reputed Hindustan Times newspaper, in which Gauri Khan, wife of the super star, Shah Rukh Khan has been qualified as the curator of her life style shop in Mumbai. Interestingly, Sakshi Gallery of Mumbai had collaborated with Mrs.Khan in showcasing some works of art in her shop as ‘curatorial efforts’ befitting for the new market realities. I am yet to know whether such a collaboration has given Mrs.Khan the confidence to use the term liberally in her business activities or it was just an attribution of an over enthusiastic journalist).

 (Gauri Khan, life style curator)

I am a curator (with a post graduate degree in curatorial practice from the Goldsmiths College, University of London) who curates very less number of shows and of late I have been feeling a strong urge to call myself something else other than a curator in the professional context. The reason is simple: when everyone in every field is a curator, within the art sphere it does not make much a difference. We have curated talks, curated seminars, curated film shows, curated food festivals, curated furniture expos and so on. (It is just a question of time we have curated medical attendance. I think the medical packages offered by the high end private medical facilities in our country are nothing but curated medical packages which for some reason the doctors are not yet calling them, and themselves curators). We need to find a different word for this. In the case of music, sampling and arranging were started long back with the advent of the music and sound softwares. In India, A.R.Rahman is set to have pioneered this way of music production in mid 1990s itself. Luckily we have not yet started calling him a music curator but we have music curators and I have been hearing the name of TM Krishna, the rebellious Carnatic musician for quite some time and many other previously unheard of names. In a forth coming art festival Goa, I am told that there are fourteen curators from different creative disciplines that include the noted singer Shubha Mudgal.

 (A.R.Rahman)

If sampling and arranging could make good audible music, why the same couldn’t create good art, food, textile, theatre, dance, literature and so on? If that is true, then curator is a word that has lost its meaning and purpose. The word curator has become an obsolete word in the contemporary art practices and expose. This word should be replaced by something like ‘sampler’ or ‘arranger’. There will be many questions raised at this juncture, of which the main would be, if museums are still called museums then why can’t the word curator remain in parlance. This is where the old habits of the market come to take an upper hand. Market always plays with the familiar and the comfortable. Even if the product is radically different and new, the advertisements use the age old belief systems to sell the products. If at all there are locations and events depicted in the advertisements that are unfamiliar for the consumers for the time being, the underlying message would be the same as in any conventional belief system; trust in the family unit, live and die for it. There are several advertisements that ask women to be bold and more forthcoming in the social life. However, the point of reference for them would be eventually to confirm with the familial values.

 (DJ)

Hence, even if museums are dead and the curators also have become an extinct category, the parlance has to remain the same for some more time and in due course it will migrate to other practices in order to confirm the patterns of the market, the desire that it creates and its ultimate target, the family unit. Immediately after the Abstract Expressionist period in 1940s and 50s in the US there was a short lived movement of photo-realism (not the same photo realism that resurfaced in 1990s). The critics and writers found it difficult to find a suitable jargon to qualify the new style of art and due to this lack they resorted to the previous parlance that was used for writing about the abstract expressionist works. In this curious mixture we got Zen Buddhist and oriental spiritual jargons desperately trying to highlight the concentration and meditation of the artist to make the verisimilitude of an image. This has just happened in India, in the case of curatorial practice. I would say, it is time that we rethink on it and call it Art Arranging or Art Sampling or Art Jokey, Visual Art Jokey or something that would find place in the art historical and critical discourse of our times.

Think Before you Paint a God: Indian Artists’ Gods and the History of their Evolution

(Krishna, in a miniature painting)

In May 2014, when Narendra Modi became the 14^th Prime Minister of India with absolute majority for his party, BJP in Parliament, I had noticed how several of my artist friends changed their track of thinking. For some reason, I was staying with a friend of mine and he was euphoric about Modi’s ascension to power. He thought India would change for good and it was going to be a superpower. Without a roof above my head, I knew it was difficult to get into a political discussion with him for the simple fear of getting kicked out of his home in the middle of the night for telling what I really thought about the BJP and the Prime Minister. Slowly, as an act of survival I realized how I too was changing my track while nodding in agreement with him about India’s future development and appreciating his absolute faith in the new Modi regime. The picture of Narendra Modi sitting under a tree, wearing a pair of very expensive jogging shoes and impeccable clothes, with a book half read in his hands, sporting a benevolent smile and conveying friendliness through his undecipherable eyes covered with a pair of gold framed specs that I saw in an English weekly (I remember it was in the Outlook) kept coming back to my mind each time my friend mentioned his name and his own optimism. Things were not going to be easy for the artists under his rule, I knew, but I refused to tell this to my friend.

(Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister)

I did not stay with him for long. However, while staying here I had gone out in the evenings to catch up with some exhibitions that were on in a few Delhi galleries. To my surprise I noticed one of my friends who was an avowed secularist and humanist suddenly incorporating certain motifs selectively culled from the Mughal period in his painting in a condescending fashion. Known for his spoofs and visual satires, I thought this was the part of his pictorial scheme that used to be replete with social and situational lampooning. But the sense of timing of this new body of paintings made me a bit conscious about his other works. A quick mental review made me aware that this artist had brought in a lot of Hindu gods and goddesses in his paintings (even in sculptures) without hurting anybody’s sentiments. So I thought my friend was in a sense balancing his pictorial thinking evenly to avoid the future comments that he was only satirising Hindu gods and goddesses, definitely in an innocent fashion. With the Mughal motifs precariously placed in his works, I found somehow justified. Any other point of view which would implicate my friend of nurturing right wing perspective in his works could have been an over-reading which I sincerely wanted to avoid. However, the memory of those works was refusing to fade. Why suddenly there is an urgency felt by the artists to paint or sculpt Hindu gods and goddesses? Is it because of the changed political scenario in the country that demands more aesthetical respect for the Hindu pantheon? Or is it because the artists attempt to receive favours from the government and the affluent class that prefers to stand closer to the policies of the reigning government (of whatever ideological leaning or colour) and patronizes art?

(Lok Manya Bal Gangadhar Tilak)

There is nothing odd, if you think straight, in Indian artists painting or sculpting Hindu gods and goddesses. They have been doing so for a long time. With the disintegration of regional courts as a result of colonialism and also due to the shift in patronage for visual art, art in India, following the western model of thinking and practicing, became an avenue for expressing progressive socio-political ideas as well as humanistic concerns. Putting the ideas of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘humanism’ together would result into the general idea of secularism, which India adopted as its official policy in 1947, which was given constitutional validation by including it as a foundational clause of Indian Constitution. As a result of it, India’s art, despite the religious and political leanings of the artists, remained more or less secular with artists often pitching for universal human love and tolerance. From this constitutional advantage we could look back at the artists like Raja Ravi Varma, Abanindra Nath Tagore and Nandlal Bose, and the innumerable named and nameless artists who followed Ravi Varma as well as their own traditions of icon making for public aesthetic and religious consumption, as secular artists who did whatever they did as a part of political and social integration through a common cultural strain or understanding, that is the Hindu religion and its mythologies of both classical and folk versions. I do not think, however we try we could position the above mentioned artists as Hindu artists or artists with right wing leanings.

 (Ganesh Festival in Mumbai)

Hindu-Muslim conflict had a longer political history though it does not reach up to those ages, as right wing ideologues claim today, when the Arabs came to the Kerala shore first by 9^th century CE. The Muslims thus came as traders let themselves to be integrated with the natives through marriage and conversion, and it has been undoubtedly proved that the early conversion were not political at all. Those who got converted to Islam, then to Christianity and even to Judaism were not coerced to do so, on the contrary did it willingly to escape the third class treatment that they got from the dominant Hindu religion. The political other-ing of the Muslims in India started with the establishment of the British rule here because they knew that considering the history of Islamic invasions in the northern part of India, it was best pitch to incite the Hindus against them, diverting the possible ire against an external power towards a historically integrated community of Muslims. This worked well for the British and the history of 20^th century is full of instances of Hindus and Muslims fighting against each other. Though the national movements had already started by the second half of the 19^th century, the Indian mainstream life was yet to join the resistance for the movements primarily led by the Indian National Congress were predominantly elitist and to certain extent aided by British ideologues. In that context there were two major attempts to get the larger Indian population for the anti-colonial moves; one, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s decisive move to bring the Hindus in Maharashtra through Ganesh Chaturthi Processions. In the East it was done via literature and reformation movements of Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Upendra Kishore Roy, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore and so on. Two, the strategy that Mahatma Gandhi used for involving all the regions of India accepting the linguistic variations meanwhile upholding Bhagavat Gita as a book of codes of socio-political and moral conduct.

 (Changing iconography of Lord Ganesh)

Hence, it would be fallacious to think that the artists including Ravi Varma were unaware of these socio-political changes. However, they were not imagining these as primarily Hindu movements. The Hindu thread was seen as a cultural adhesive or a common cultural backdrop against which a political drama could have been unfolded. Ravi Varma was not aspiring to be a Hindu painter on the contrary he was trying to be at par with the European masters who worked in the medium of oil on canvas but without adhering to their dominant Christian thematic orientation and the pertaining moral values. Ravi Varma wanted to create something similar yet different in thematic and he found that while the Christian mythological characters had well established iconographies so that the artists since Renaissance could more or less work on those givens (Ravi Varma does not seem to have referred anything beyond the Renaissance art or even if he had, the pervading two dimensional nature must have dissuaded him to follow them thoroughly. Besides, he did not have direct access to the Greco-Roman classical art for reference except the Neo-classical art works that he might have got to refer from journals and photographs), Indian artists had nothing other than abstractions of visual values and qualities from textual sources translated into figurative modes as seen in the temple murals and temple sculptures. Ravi Varma wanted to break these visual codes which he felt as shackles and archaic and the aspiring modernist in him was trying to be at par with the western art by giving iconographic features to the Hindu gods and goddesses (We should also know that Ravi Varma almost ignored the ‘contemporary’ art movements of the west like the Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Cubism and Dadaism which were almost famous when he was alive) for establishing a modern ‘Indian’ art against the modern ‘western’ art from within the limitations of his understanding of both modern Indian and modern western. While painting Bharat Mata, Abanindranath Tagore was not giving a cultural weapon for the future right wingers. Nandalal Bose was not attempting anything ‘Hindu’ when he was painting the image of Shiva drinking poison.

(Ram breaking the bow- Ravi Varma)

The subversion of such images which were primarily used for imaging and imagining a nation which was still trying to understand its own boundaries and political courses, in the contemporary times is menacingly palpable in the Ganesh festival processions in Maharashtra. Though the Prime Minister of India, Mr.Modi once made a tall claim that India or more precisely, the Hindu India had the science and technological know-how to perform plastic surgery in ancient times and the proof of which could be seen in the image of Lord Ganesh, who has an elephant’s head and human body. The development of the iconography of Lord Ganesh is also around the 9^th century CE and previously the references of Ganesh were as a minor deity along the bhoothas and Ganas. Ganesh got absorbed into the Hindu Brahminical narratives as a part of the possible integration of Shaivism and Vaishnavism. The idea of Ganesh as an elephant headed deity itself is a proof that he comes from the nature worshipping tribes. An elephant headed deity can be absorbed into the main narrative only when it has a supporting mythology; that’s how we see Ganesh becoming the son of Shiva and Parvati and how a familial misunderstanding leads to the beheading of Ganesh and later reviving him with an elephant head. A very complex Freudian reading is possible to further interpret this origin of Ganesh but I would like to deal with it in another essay.

 (Ram Subduing Sea- Ravi Varma)

The iconography of Ganesh, as we have been seeing him for a long time, is very clear. Like the Indian gods and goddesses Ganesh too has four arms. He holds a broken tusk, a sweet, an axe and a piece of rope in each hand. In some of the depictions we do not see an axe, instead we see an ankush (an mahout’s crooked knife with a long handle). As he is an elephant the Ankush is justified. In some other depictions he is seen with a stylus and a set of palm leaves suggesting that he was the one who wrote down Mahabharata as Ved Vyasa was reciting it to him. So we have a benevolent Ganesh with most of the mythological retellings underlining his ability to remove obstacles (Vighneshwara). That however does not mean that Ganesh is a warrior God and the title of the Commander in Chief of the God’s army goes to his brother, Lord Karthikeya (Murukan). Of late, if you have noticed (just go through the Ganesh images posted in the facebook during this Ganesh Chathurthi), you could see Ganesh idols, pictures, statues and all other forms of visual depictions with Ganesh holding a huge axe in his hand almost minimising rest of the attributes. It is a clear example of a deliberate subversion of a benevolent mythology. Ganesh no longer is the Ganesh of the yester years; even Tilak himself would find it difficult to recognize him if he comes across him somewhere in the heavenly path). This transformation is not accidental but a conscious conversion that the right wingers facilitated in the consciousness of the public. During the Ayodhya Movement in the late 1980s and in the terrible culmination of it on the 6^th December 1991 with the demolition of the Babri Masjid, we had seen how the image of Ram changed ‘radically’ and strategically. In Anand Patwardhan’s pivotal documentary on the Ayodhya March and its culmination, ‘In the Name of Ram’ he repeatedly shows the shots of the hoardings erected all over India depicting an angry and belligerent Ram, muscular like Rambo, armed to kill towering over the architectural model of the future Ram Temple. In these hoardings Ram’s gaze goes towards the horizon and there is no enemy in the vicinity. But the suggestion of the gaze was clearer than many words about it. The gaze had finally landed on the enemy, Indian Muslims; incidents of riots and pogroms since 1991 December are watched over by that single angry gaze.

 (Coronation of Ram- after Ravi Varma)

It is interesting not only art historically but also politically that Ravi Varma who had given a clear iconography to Lord Ram never anywhere presents him as a belligerent warrior. In Sita Swayamvara, where a young Ram is seen breaking Trayambaka (the bow of Lord Shiva) to win the hands of Sita, we do not see a muscle man who is capable of lifting that mighty bow. Instead, Ravi Varma depicts him as a teenager about to be twenty, all enthusiastic at the prospects of a marriage but reverential to the elders and the king, his would be father in law, Janak, earnestly breaking the bow in the presence of his appreciating brother Lakshman. Of course we see an angry Ram in another painting where Ram is about to send an arrow at the sea (Lord Varun) for not parting to show the path towards Lanka where his wife has been abducted by Ravan. But here too we do not see him as a Rambo. His body is slightly effeminate with no muscles clearly defined (all the Rams with cylindrical limbs in all the films and even in the legendary Ramayan Serial were based on Ravi Varma’s Ram) but his determination to subdue the mighty god of the sea is seen in his anger filled eyes and raised eye brows. Again we see Ram in the Pattabhisheka picture (the Coronation Ceremony after Sita’s retrieval from Lanka) where we see him as a head of the family too benevolent to be rash or authoritative. His smiling face and kind eyes dominate the picture; what missing are the muscles. Only muscled being in the frame is Hanuman, the devoted servant. Ravi Varma was not a ‘Hindu’ painter and we do not need more examples to prove it. However, Ravi Varma is an artist who could imagine a nation with all its linguistic and cultural varieties, which becomes evident in his Galaxy of Musicians. If Gandhiji had asked the Indian National Congress, which was a ‘Lawyers’ Club’ to include the regional members in order to bring ‘India’ as a geographically imaginable nation, Ravi Varma did the same by incorporating different cultural traits in a single pictorial frame.

 (Ayodhya poster as used as a cover for Anant Patwardhan's documentary)

As I mentioned before, after placing the constitution of India as the guiding principle for all the Indians, the apparent religious freedom allowed the artists to be truly secular. This secularism in my view was not just a clear case of artistic decision or pure optimism and trust in the government of that time. I would say, it was also a sort of wishful thinking of the artists to deliberately avoid mentioning religion and religious iconographies from their works. Let me explain it how. When Hitler was forced to commit suicide and once the Allied Forces freed Europe from the clutches of the Nazis, there was a total silence in Germany because the Germans were a defeated people then; their leader failed to lead them to a pure Aryan country. The liberal ones who opposed Hitler too were silent because the amount of injustice and death revealed before their eyes had literally rendered them speechless for a long time. They had to conjure up a new parlance to face the world and talk to it while looking at its eyes, without feeling any sense of shame. Due to this, for a long time (even today) Germans wouldn’t like to talk about the period of Nazism (while the rest of the world speaks about it). Similarly, India had seen gory sights of Hindu-Muslim fights and pogroms. India had just witnessed partition and its gruesome aftermath. There was nothing to rejoice in fact; sooner than later Gandhiji was assassinated. The artists somehow tried to wish away all goriness therefore all the mentioning of religion from their works (while the men and women of letters kept on writing about partition woes). There were only a few, very few artists who depicted the partition (read religious) strife of that time. For a long time, Indian artists did not touch on the issue of religion. It was rather a dangerous area to venture in because it would create unpleasant discourses. Investing the energies in the socialist, secular and progressive was more conducive for the artists. In that sense we could say our art for a long time has been the art of silence, and by now most of the art works have become the art works of compromise.

(a Buddha painting from India)

At this juncture, against the backdrop of whatever I have said so far, it would be interesting to see how and why in India we have a lot of artists who somehow instead of depicting Hindu gods or goddesses straightaway went on depicting the images of Buddha and Jesus Christ. Today, we know that both Buddha and Jesus Christ are not only religious figures but also philosophical and political figures. People from various strata of the society have used these icons the ways suitable to their purposes. The Indian artists who have painted Buddha and Jesus Christ somehow have felt that both these images are ideologically neutral. It is ironic at the same time painful to understand this surrogate representation of religious fervour of the artists. Most of the artists who paint or sculpt Buddha and Christ believe (yes,  I say Believe) that they are the icons of peace. Even though I cannot and I do not dispute the fact that Buddha and Jesus are icons of peace, I want to say that there are socio-political and religio-cultural reasons for the artists to choose these two icons for their purpose. First of all, by the time India became independent Buddhism was almost a long lost religion (we forget the history of it being brutally decimated in the subcontinent since 9^th century AE with the arrival of Sri Sankara) but was chosen by Dr.B.R.Ambedkar for his political purpose of converting the Mahars (the Dalit community to which he belonged) into Buddhism. As it was a non-Brahminical movement and still had to prove a political force of some reckoning, Buddhism remained ideology free in the public imagination. Artists too took to this line; they thought Buddha is ideology free and simply a universal symbol of peace. The Christian community of India was rather powerful educationally and economically because of their allegiance to the colonial power, which later turned out to be a relevant and reverent ally for the future course of India, and it was more integrated than Muslims with less and less affiliations with the various Christian denominations in the world and their respective heads. So it was easy for the Indian artists to choose Jesus Christ as a symbol of sacrifice, suffering and endurance. Jesus was an icon which indirectly reflected the tortured artistic selves too. And interestingly, the ideological connotations of this icon got submerged in its universalistic stature.

 (Christ by Suman Roy)

Seen against this historical backdrop, one would think that there is no problem if Indian artists start painting and sculpting Hindu gods and goddesses. Why they should be deprived of cultural representation? But we would at the same time understand the danger of it. Let us see a scenario in which the gods and goddesses of India are seen in a certain confirms mode, that means, any god and goddess should look like what the Hindu men and women in the street imagine them to be. Their imagination comes from popular depictions which are wrongly attributed to Ravi Varma. He was just a trigger and the contemporary iconography of the gods and goddesses has completely changed according to the whims and fancies of the artists who are hell bent on pleasing the prevalent Hindutva mood (sometimes, artists who work in such image making factories work quite innoncently too. They do not understand the political and socio-cultural ramifications of it. An artist who makes a Ganesh idol with fiery attributes perhaps is trying make it as severe and imposing as possible as demanded by the society and also to vibe with the mood of the society). The Hindutva ideologues are changing history and in its place they are trying to bring in a quasi-mythological history which does not have any logical standing. But anything that is not scientifically proved could stand in our country provided that is believed by many numbers of people. This brutal majoritarinism would force the contemporary modern artists to ‘follow the mood’ of the times. And those who move against it would be punished by over reading the meanings (as happened in the case of M.F.Husain). Of late I see there are some artists and gallerists suddenly getting interested in having shows with ‘god’ as a theme. And I am sure these gods are not really non-muscular gods; they are going to be belligerent according the mood of our time. Such artists will be celebrated for the time being but they do not know that they are inaugurating a trend where the lumpens start accepting this aesthetics and demanding the change of any other aesthetics which is not palatable to them. It is high time that we think about depicting gods and how.

 (a Transformer)

In the Muslim countries, artists are killed for writing or painting Gods because the fundamentalists do not like the god to be depicted in any form because it is said so in the Holy book, Quran. In India, on the contrary, artists would be celebrated for depicting gods. But watch out; depicting gods in India also could cost the lives of the artists because the gods have already been transformed. They look like the Tranformers and the super heroes from the American imaginations. They are war mongering gods. Hence, if you depict a god as a subtle, submissive, caring, loving, genderless and benevolent being, remember, the street side art impresarios may not like it.

The Two Worlds that the Artists Inhabit

We dwell in two worlds; one inside and one outside. I have not just stated an earth shattering truth. I have said what everyone knows. However, if you ask what are these worlds, most of us would look here and there or give the readymade answer instantly; inside world is spiritual world and outside world is the real world. The romantics among them would further say that the inside world is the one where we hide ourselves and live our secret lives, play out our fantasies, pose all what we are not, cry to our hearts’ fill and outside world is where we live pretending that everything is alright. Interestingly, barring a few most of us have not reconciled with the internal and the external worlds. They remain as two different strange lands never to be bridged by anything.

Many people are still confused about the internal and the external worlds. They think that if you are a person who has realized the internal world, a spiritually enlightened person or a hardcore romantic, then one does not have anything to do with the external world. Similarly, those who delve deeply into the worldly matters leave the affairs of the internal world to those ‘enlightened’ men and women and believe that an occasional visit to them would be enough for them to satisfy their urge to realize an internal world, if at all such an urge exists anywhere. Seeing the number of people thronging around the sannyasis and spiritual gurus of both the genders I am reassured that the urge to realize the internal world even for the diehard worldly beings is so high that they could spend any amount of time, money and energy to do that. All of them unfortunately think that realization of the internal world is directly proportionate to the amount of time and energy (of course money too) one could spend on such matters.

I have a friend who constantly worries about his artistic growth and family life. Way into his forties, he feels that his time is over and the youngsters as well as his contemporaries have made it; he is the only one who has been left out. My friend, who is a freelancer, goes to his studio every morning, work religiously and he gets chances to exhibit his works in various shows, besides having opportunities to participate in workshops and camps held in different parts of the country. When he unpacks the bundles of woes before me I often ask him why he was so worried about his life and works. According to him, the others have ‘arrived’ in the art scene and he has not yet. I realize from his talks that for him ‘arrival’ means a sort of success enjoyed by the artists in terms of recognition of the works among the peer groups as well as among the younger artists, and is obviously iced with the selling of the works. To put it simply, what leaves him dissatisfied constantly is the fact that his inability to turn his works into liquid cash. In other words, he is worried about money.

This friend of mine is a disciplinarian; he goes regularly for meditation camps and does meditation for an hour every day. I ask him why he does meditation. He tells me that he does that for keeping an internal balance and to realize the inner world. I understand internal balance as calmness or the much talked about word, ‘peace’. What about the inner world? I quiz him further and he comes out clear by saying that inner world is the world where he could live his life. I ask him about the complexion of the world and how does it feel? He tells me that there in the inner world he lives an ideal life, creates his art and just does not worry about whether people see it or buy it. He is happy in that world where nothing worries and he floats in a sea of fulfilment. He also says that in that one hour of he understands that nothing matters; even his happiness does not matter. There is no need to prove anything, gain anything, lose anything and it is pure bliss. And do you like it in that way, I ask. Definitely, he answers. “I like it in that way.” In that state of mind aren’t you worried about your family, your wife and kids? “No. Nothing is indispensable. Everything would take care of itself.” Are you sure, I ask. “Yes,” he says. “But,” he continues, “But when I come out of it after an hour, everything remains the same. I am back in the same s**t.”

If meditation helps for an hour to be what you are and throws you back to the garbage after that hour, then does it fundamentally differ from the alcohol consumption and drug abuse? Logically speaking, any intoxicate would help you to forget the worldly woes for some time. This sort of alcoholic abuse has been given cultural sanction via popular novels and films. A spurned lover or a man who failed in life could always turn to alcohol or drugs to ‘forget’ his sorrows. His actions are justified and to certain extent sympathized by the public. He is a poor man and the ‘world’ is the villain. Meditation and medication do the same. Those who go for meditation are the people who have been wronged by life and it is important for them to seek balance and peace to continue with their lives. The imagery that comes to my mind is that of a public place that the municipality worker cleans regularly in the morning only to be littered by the people throughout the day and night till the cleaner comes back at the appointed hour next day. If we cannot keep our minds clean throughout the day and night there is no point in doing meditation or holding the bottle.

As human beings, everyone lives in two different worlds; it is already said outset of this article. What I am going to elaborate here is the nature of those worlds. The internal world that one claims to habit is neither a spiritual realm that needs special exercises to be realized nor a definable one where one’s movement could be clearly chartered. It is an ideal realm. And ideal is thought about or imagined only when a non-ideal is seen, lived and experienced. Hence, we cannot be sure that ideal precedes the non-ideal, which could also be called mundane or the mundane precedes the ideal. According to the Greek Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, the ideal is already there in the divine realm and man’s job is to imitate it. It is slightly against our soonya theory, the theory of nothingness. There is nothing to precede or succeed therefore there is nothing to be emulated. Whatever be the case, whether an idea exists in the divine realm or nothing is there including the divine realm, a human being could live an internal life, by which one means which is not external and palpable, without all what he/she thinks limiting him/her in the external world. With all the limitations erased (which is not possible in the external world) what one lives inside one’s own being is the ideal world which is inside.

It is so interesting that we always say inside and outside. This binary exists because we contrast the external world, the world that we see, live in and experience, with the thoughts generated by it. Where do these thought originate? We say, in our minds (the scientific one would say, in the brain). There are thoughts which are felt not really thought about, and we say that is originated in our heart. When we know that as biological entities both brain and heart cannot show us proofs that they generate thoughts (brain mapping and related scientific fields have made attempts to see thoughts as ‘image’ entities and energies, which in fact could be quantified), we imagine them as streams of words or pictures because we are trained in these two systems or structures of comprehending the world we live in. Thoughts cannot be touched, tasted and smelt; but it could be seen and heard (muted hearing). That means whatever we consider as ideal world inside us are either created of words or images. And living in there means we live in two structures, linguistic as well as pictorial structures. Together they give birth to the three dimensional sensation of a life lived inside.

And what is this ‘inside’? Technically speaking, anything that is inside the outer skin (epiderm) is ‘inside’ for a human being. Ironically, that internal world which is manifested by two structures and is felt as an ideal world without any societal limitations, is neither muscles and bones nor veins and blood. That means what we imagine as the ideal world inside (in mind, in soul, in heart etc) is just a ‘virtual reality’ which we have willed to be. We feel a child like bliss and innocence there because whatever we see and ‘live’ there ‘inside’ are fresh and new to us and always prod us to further our journeys revealing avenues to encounter surprises after surprises. It is in this realm of virtual reality people ‘see’ things that have never been seen before, hear music that has been never heard before, feel ideas that have been never thought about before, ‘smell’ fragrances that have been never smelt before, touch various objects and things that have never been touched before and taste foods and pleasures that have been never tasted before. There are some people who live in these realms got this terrific capacity and skill to reproduce what they have seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted there through mediums that are known and identified in the outer/external world. They are often called as artists. That means, in the internal world of ideal things (sans any restrictions) every one stands a chance but only the artistic ones channelize those chances for the external world.

If so what could be the external world? The common definition is that the external world is what exists outside the human skin that means whatever we see, live and experience in the material world. This external world is so over powering that it hardly allows anybody to delve deeply into the internal realm. This world is the world of controls, habits and routines that people thoroughly enjoy. The external world as it is palpable and quantifiable imposes lesser fear amongst people. Erasing mystery is one way of making external world alluring everyone. Here everyone could think of becoming everyone else. Most of the human beings think of emulating those people who have done materialistically well. They have gone beyond the basics of roti, kapda aur makan (bread, cloth and home). They have improvised the basics to various forms of pleasure and everyone is seeking it. To achieve them, in the material world one has to have money because that is the only one way of exchange that the material world knows. And this is the world that people identify as the external world.

Here is a problem. External world is also a perception as intriguing as the internal world. The only difference between them is that in the internal world each human being rightfully inhabit, possess and occupy an autonomous world and there are no binding rules and regulations, and in the external world, every human being is meant to follow the rules and regulations created by the political authorities. Otherwise people coming from different strata of the society perceive and experience the material world in different terms and from different vantage points. That means even if there is an appearance of the world as seen in the photographs and maps, it is not so. People perceive it differently, interpret and understand it differently. That means depending on the number people on the face of the earth, there are as many interpretations and perceptions about the world, which in turn means that what we perceive is not what our neighbour perceives as the world. There fundamental differences. If that is the case, each perception of the world has to be seen as a virtual projection of the world which is given in the material form. Hence, the world we see with our eyes and experience with our lives is a conglomeration of various perceptions which at times nullify the other perceptions or confirm the. However, society as a whole with a political or military power to govern it standardizes these perceptions for keeping certain patterns. And it is interesting to see that to accept these patterns the people are prepared physically and mentally through various sorts of indoctrination by the authorities so that the people would eventually forget that they have two autonomous worlds (internal and external) at their disposal. They start believing that what is seen is reality and they learn to disbelieve their own perceptions. People do not have any problem to come out of home at a given time, take the same, go to office by same route, do the job, take salary, go home, do the same things and repeat the routine six days week for almost thirty to forty years, without any complaint. People who have fallen under the weight of routine not only have forgotten the internal world that they have but also the external world that they live in.

People try to rebel when the oppression of the rules and routine weigh down on them beyond a point. That’s why they go to the theatres, cinemas and art galleries. That’s why they listen to music and try to break free once in a while. What do they get when they try to break free by taking creative routes as mentioned before? What do they carry back once they get back to their routine? According to me, artists are those people who with their special skills express their ideal worlds through their works of art. Works of art are the bridges created between two virtual worlds; one, the world that exists somewhere else (you may call it ‘inside world’ but I would say that is the world where one realizes one’s own existence) and the one that exists right in front of you and you believe that it is ‘real’. As I said before, both are virtual worlds. Artists bridge them and the people who break free walk through these bridges once in a while and get the glimpses of the other world of ideals. I don’t insist that everyone stand on the bridge for ever or cross over to the other realms. They have their own priorities to do so. But I insist that those people capable of realizing the internal worlds for the external world, that means artists, are destined to be there in the internal realm and live an autonomous life without ever succumbing to the routine or rules of the external world. No meditation could help the artists to do better art or realize the internal world or gain peace provided if they are guided and goaded by the rules of the external world. As both the worlds are virtual the artists could make what they want; their comforts and luxuries irrespective of the rules of the outer world, but only catch is that those comforts and luxuries should be different from those of the routine world. To tell you the truth, the routine world works day in and day out for the artists to live their lives; one just needs to realize it.