Images, Text and Life’s Lessons

Some photographic images stay in your mind forever. Family albums are unforgettable events. Yes, I say, family albums are ‘events’. They capture the deepest memories of life events and store it for the posterity. But there are some other images, which are out of the family albums that travel along with you in life. They could be from some books, from some newspapers or from some cursory references. I remember the image of Kim Phuk, the Vietnamese girl, running nude with her skin peeling off after the Napalm bomb attack. I remember the young man receiving a bullet at his temple from a fellow Vietnamese man. I remember the three men in their Sunday best, a picture referred by John Berger. I remember the dark long penis of a black man, jutting out from his pants, a picture taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. I remember a photoshopped image of a vagina wall- I don’t know whether it is a work of art or the outcome of a perverse genius’ work, later found its due place in the virtual world. Images haunt you, stalk you, titillate you and at times they make you to think about the beauty of life.

I was sitting with my artist friend, Deepak Tandon on a cold evening. He is an abstract artist who debates abstraction as a ‘linguistic structure’. He loves traveling and taking photographs. Of late he has started doing video works also. I like to spend time with Deepak because his interests do not simply limited to abstract art. He loves life, likes to have a few pegs of rum with close friends and also takes a special interest in seeing the works of young artists. He does workshops for children and his philosophy is simple: “You give the children the best equipment you have and show them how to use it. They would give you wonderful results.” I love that idea because I too have observed one thing, if you use any equipment with responsibility before children, they too would handle the same equipment with responsibility. If you warn them, be sure, they are going to break it.

Discussing general aspects of life took us to the topic of traveling. I have never been a serious traveler. But life has taken me to several places. Now I am at a point in my life, where I feel that it is necessary to go out to see people and places, not in foreign shores, but here very much in India. I was just mentioning this idea of a road trip (of course I don’t belong to the generation of Jack Kerouac) planned to start by mid-February 2009 with artist friend, Somu Desai and photographer friend, Feroze Babu, who gives me technical assistance in doing www.artconcerns.com. Then Deepak told me about his road trip with a friend, two years back. In 2007 March, Deepak took his SUV, Scorpio and hit the road. For almost a month he drove around in India, mostly clicking photographs. He expressed his interest to join our road trip also.

I was interested to see the photographs that Deepak took when he was on road. He kindly opened the computers folders for me. There are a number of pictures in this collection, some of which Deepak has worked on according to his fancy, but keeping the raw image intact. These photographs reveal the beauty of India, not seen through exotic eyes. What attracts me in this suite of photographs is the beauty of people, the real Indian people. They are not stereotypes and these people have a story and the places have a story. They are not just frozen in time. They move the time, they activate the time and they tell us about a country, which we fail to see in our life time!

Deepak seems to have fallen in love with ‘this’ lady. I don’t present the picture of that ‘lady’ here, but I would like to say a few words about her. She is not a she! But she is a eunuch. She is not a part of any gay movement or hijra group. She ‘mothers’ three children. Look at her dress; Deepak says her shirt is of her brother-in-law and the skirt is of her sister. Both of them died in some calamity. She wears their clothes as a memorial and she mothers these kids and the youngest child calls her ‘mother’. She is bold and beautiful. Deepak, obviously is in awe of her personality. The photographs tell the tale of his admiration. Another picture is from a village near Aurangabad. In this village no house has got a door. There is no concept of door there! People live in trust. I remember the documentary film of Michael Moore, ‘Bowling for the Columbine’, where he contrasts the gun culture of the United States with the ‘open door’ culture of Canada. I also remember my childhood when all the houses in the village kept their front door always open.

But I want to write about two photographs that touched me a lot. One of the photographs shows an old woman, bent in age and walking towards somewhere. Deepak recounts the story of the photograph. It was somewhere in South India. Deepak was just standing in a small street (that runs between two rows of houses) with his camera and he saw this old woman coming out of a house. Her gaze was fixed on her foot steps. She was keenly watching the floor and her left hand automatically touched whatever support she could find on her way. First she touched the left wall. Then on the composite idol of bulls and….And next to that Deepak was standing. He extended his hand as a support. She held on it tightly and crossed the street and walked towards the other row of houses. She never saw who held her hand in support. She never waited to say ‘thanks’. She trusted the supports on which she placed her hands. And each support was a ‘god’ to her. I love this photograph. May be I am too sentimental. No problem.

In the other photograph, you see a couple in road going towards somewhere. This young man has a huge hunch back. According to Deepak, ‘he was seriously malformed’. But the energy of their gait and the strength of their bonding are quite noteworthy. They don’t have any doubts about their existence. They like their life and they progress in their life, together and with love. ‘They walked before me, crossed me like a king and queen. They were feeling as if they were on the top of the world. I was humbled,” recounts Deepak. I like this photograph because this ‘positive’ gait you don’t even see even on the faces of the highly salaried corporate couples; they are always in doubt. They doubt their clothes, their shoes, their kids, their shopping, their eating outside and their looks. But look at this couple…they are so confident and cheerful despite all their physical problems. Again I am sentimental about it. But I like this picture.

Once I was down in the dumps. Things were not going smoothly. Dilip Narayanan, my friend too was also going through the same phase. While sharing our mutual woes, he told me the story of these two women in his town. When he drove to his office every morning, on the way, he saw these two women walking vigorously towards somewhere. They were twins and they were dwarfs. They were middle aged and were from the lower income class. They wore cheap sarees but in those clothes they carried themselves with dignity. They could not have aspired too much in life. But they walked every morning to somewhere, with a sense of mission and accomplishment. “Even they feel happy about their life, what about us? Why don’t we learn something from them?” Dilip had asked me then. Yes, life’s lessons always come from the street. Life has a lot to teach us. Such images as captured by Deepak give us a lot of lessons. That’s why, they never fade away from our memories.

Shock Doctrine of Simple Things

Naomi Klein is an author and a logo. She wrote one of the best selling anti-consumerist literatures, No Logo. Then she came out with her anti-imperialist critique, ‘Shock Doctrine’. In this book she speaks about the use of shock therapy, first in treating mental cases and then in military torture plans. Shock therapy is a way to clean up the mind; shock and erase the existing inscriptions out and re-inscribe it with a new history. In military torture plans, shock treatment grows in scale and dimension. In torture chambers, prisoners of war are treated with electric shock in order to yield confessions and revelations, then they are shock treated to clean up their minds. In war fields, precision bombing is one way of shock treating the people of the target country. Bombard a particular area continuously, destroy it beyond recognition so that people would come out as clean slates, where the aggressor can inscribe his ideologies.

In Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein reveals the story of an old woman who was a political suspect during the Second World War. She was captured by the military and put her in a hospital accusing her of mental illness. She was treated with electric shocks continuously for several years. At one point of time, she even believed that the shocks were doing good to her. After her release, slowly she realized that she was erased of her memories. Her hands were shaky and needed constant self reminders to stay in life. Whenever memories flashed before her mind, she wrote it down in small bits of papers and pasted it on the walls and furniture. She remembered her life, about her own self by looking at these small notes. When Naomi Klein met her for doing an interview for the book, this woman was living in a small apartment filled with notes stuck all over.

Recently I watched a movie titled ‘Ghajini’ with Aamir Khan in the lead role. He suffers from memory loss. And he is here to avenge the villain who killed his girl friend and made his life terrible. He needs to write down things on pieces of paper or take photographs to remember things. His room is also filled with notes and photographs. His body is tattooed with reminders of revenge. He needs constant reminders to fulfill his mission. And finally he does it. I am not going into the details of the movie. But I want to ask a question myself: are we also not suffering from memory loss and we need constant reminders to live our lives fruitfully. We may not be writing reminders and pasting them everywhere. But everything seen around us behaves like reminders of our own selves. We may not be mental cases. We may not be here to wreck revenge upon a villain. But we are amnesiac and we need reminders.

But we refuse to remember things. Forgetfulness is an easy way to survival. We like to think about complex things and analyze them deeply. We feel that life is a complex thing and we need to analyze it thoroughly. We don’t understand life is a very simple thing that is why it is very complex. When we approach complex things, we get an escape root from the simple facts of life, which we don’t want to face. But simple things always remind a creative person of his own self and his relationship with the people and things around. The world is filled with such simple things, the reminding notes and we refuse to see these notes. And let me tell you, those people who are shocked and awed by the complexity of things, should ultimately see these small reminder notes.

I chanced upon a book in one of the bookshops in Bangalore. It’s name was ‘Simplexity.’ In normal case I would not have bought that book. The title attracted me and I bought the book. This book deals with a simple fact in life: it says, complex things are not complex as we think. Simple things are not simple as we imagine. The author takes the example of pencil to prove her point. She says, pencil is such a simple thing in our life. But if we think about it, it takes us to very complex problems. Where does the wood for making the pencil come from? Where does the graphite for the pencil come from? Does the making of pencil lead to deforestation? Are the mine workers in the graphite mines happy with the working conditions? Is there a monopoly in pencil industry? Who are the victims and who are the gainers in this industry?

A simple thing like a pencil can lead to a world war. Simple things are just reminders. We don’t see the reminders. But artists and creative people can see these reminders. Only an artist can say that she ‘could be as identity-less as an ‘M’ sign of the Macdonalds in any city in the world’. An artist could see what an M sign speaks to her. May be to someone else it means nothing but meaty burghers. Another artist friend of mine, while walking together along a street, asked me once, ‘Where are these nuts and bolts coming from?’ He had noticed several nuts and bolts lying in the middle of the road. “They must have fallen from some moving vehicles,” I told him. “What might have happened to those vehicles?’ he wondered. Then he developed a series of drawings based on these fallen nuts and bolts. Another friend of mine went to Chandigarh and he was supposed to participate in a public art project. He did not do anything till the last date of the art project. On the final day, he stood in the middle of the road and painted the image of a needle at one of the yellow broken lines that divided the road into two lanes. “This needle is stitching the road,” he said.

The yellow line was just a reminder for him. He saw that there was a reminder. While driving, I look at these small reminders; the simple reminders. A shoe suddenly appears from nowhere in the middle of the road. Where has it come from? I think about all the abandoned shoes in the world. I remember the installation of Christine Boltanski. I think of Vincent Vangogh’s shoes. I remember Jalianwala Bagh. I remember my college days and the streets after a police lathi charge on a students’ procession. I see a helmet kept right in the middle of the road. I see a patch of red and imagine it as dried blood. I drive through a dead man’s soul. I see a doll, fallen from the hands of a child who was sitting at his mother’s lap, behind a scooter. I can hear the cry of the child for his lost doll. Life becomes so meaningful when you look at the simple things around you. Life is full of associations.

I wrote all these because I was just looking at a yellow cup kept in the middle of a chair cushion at the right corner of my office room. A couple of hours back I had a visitor, a young woman artist from Chandigarh. Whenever she comes to Delhi, she drops into meet me. My office assistant makes the famous ‘nimbu chai’ and she likes it. She could not find a place to keep the cup and I told her to keep it on the chair cushion. She has gone now. But looking at that cup, sitting alone, lost and silent, I remember her aspirations and frustrations as an artist. I think of her story as she had recounted. I go to Santiniketan, cycle around there, go to the Kopai river, see several angels there at the river bank. I see a face blooming into a spring. I see a face fading into the vibes of a Baul song. I see a life beckoning me from a garden of peacocks.

The Chance Beauty of a Grocery List

‘The chance beauty of a grocery list’- I was waiting for some expression like that to occur in me. But like the beautiful lady who never talked to Gabriel Garcia Marquez during a long flight, such expressions, at times evade you. They would be very much there, right in your vicinity. You can feel it, but you fail to give a verbal form to it. But if you intensely desire for it, it would come to you, may be through someone else you know thoroughly. This expression, ‘the chance beauty of a grocery list’ came from an artist friend of mine. She was referring to some conversations with her friends, who talk of many things that apparently look insignificant and out of context. However, suddenly she felt that these conversations too had ‘the chance beauty of a grocery list’.

“When you write a grocery list, you are completely yourself, unaware of watching or of being watched. Things fall on the list just through memory and not according to order. The flow of something not being structured is also a flow. It is like a hastily written post-it note stuck on your cupboard. Such haste and brevity can be shared only with familiarity,” she explained it to me. While listening to her words, I was thinking of a poetic expression by Comte de Lautreamont, the French poet. This young poet, who died at the age of twenty four, while narrating the beauty of a young boy wrote, ‘as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’ The Surrealists and Situationists were influenced by Lautreamont’s poetic masterpiece, Les Chants de Maldoror.

Chance meeting of disparate ideas and imageries would cause the birth of terrific beauties. The beauty of a grocery list is that chance meeting of disparate elements. Going by the definition of my artist friend, I would say, grocery list is one of the best form of poetry. It is not premeditated. It is not consciously conjured up. It flows from memory, may be not as emotions recollected in tranquility, but as necessities recollected in urgency. Then grocery list and the post-it list on the cupboard, on a fridge door or on a notice board, must be the most beautiful forms of spontaneous poetry. The poetry that cannot be avoided. The poetry that is to be performed. Grocery list is a poem in performance.

Grocery list, going by Lautreamont, is surreal too. It can bring in two different and disparate elements purely driven by chance. The chance could be another term for auto association, a sort of writing and imaging practiced by the Surrealists. An item in the grocery list leads to the other one. The monthly need for a new tube of tooth paste can trigger the image of a tube of cold cream. Grocery list has no apparent logic in it. There kitchen towel could be followed by the name of a shampoo. But read together or in a sequence, it has a logic in it; the logic of poetry. It is the poetry of every day life. The items in it become the metaphors for energy and beauty; appearance and reality, illusions and desires.

The chance beauty of a grocery list cannot be wished away by citing its quotidian nature. Art is all about chance beauty. All great works of art have got this chance element it; the chances that thwart the premeditations of the artists. The chance beauty of a grocery list is the stuff that gives the final quizzical twist to a work of art or a piece of literature, which otherwise would have gone flat. But chances are not to be sought, they have to happen on their own. Chance beauties are chance beauties. That’s why art happens even during the saddest moments in an artist’s life.

A Story for the New Year 2009

(This is a story of four old women living in an Indian village. May be there is something in their story that makes our lives positive and sensitive. Have a great year ahead)

Blessy, Lucky, Grace and Angel lived in a small village somewhere in central India. All four of them were of sixty years old. They had well settled lives with daughters married off to rich families, sons married to beautiful girls and husbands happily retired from government services. They lived in the same locality in beautifully decked houses. They were friends for a long time.

When their doctors suggested that they should go for morning walk to keep themselves fit at this age, they decided to do it together. So they chalked out a plan- meet every day sharp at 6 am at Angel’s house, which was last in the row of houses in the same street and go for morning walk in the play ground which was almost half a kilo meter away from the street. Almost one year ago, they started going for morning walk.

While walking they talked about their lives, about their happy marriages, well settled kids and apparently satisfied lives. But one day Lucky said, “We are lucky but how unlucky we are!” The other three ladies were shocked to listen something like that. “Why do you say we are unlucky?” they asked Lucky in unison.

“We were born in some other places. And we all were married at very early age. We left our villages and came here to settle down. But what do we know about life? What do we know about the other places? We come to know about people and places through television programs. But have we ever thought of going out of this place to see the world?” Lucky asked her bewildered friends.

For the first time, they doubted the quality of their otherwise happy lives. Then onwards they started talking about places, where they had never been, or people, they had never seen in reality. They wanted to go out of that place at least for a day and experience how life and places looked like elsewhere.


There was a rich man in the village. With hard work and planned life, he had become immensely rich over a period of time. This man was not too old. He was in his late forties and had a good family and a mansion like home in the village. He had several business houses in several cities and he travelled all over in his own helicopter. The ground where the ladies went for morning was used as the helipad. When the helicopter brought the man back from his business trips, if it was in the morning, the ladies stood at the fringes of the ground, clutching each other’s hands in order not to be flown away by the menacing wind produced by the chopper’s fans.

“Why don’t we ask this young man to take us for a round in his helicopter? We can see the places and people from above and from there we can see a lot of places in one go,” Grace suggested gracefully. The ladies smiled to each other. “It is a good idea,” said Blessy.

One day, they were in the ground and they heard the sound of the helicopter. The ladies moved to one corner of the ground, holding their hands. The helicopter landed and the business man came out of it. His car was already there, parked in the other end of the ground. Grace walked towards the man and he stopped as the ladies approached him. He had a curious smile on his lips as he had seen them in the ground several times.

“Why don’t you take us around in this helicopter?” Grace asked straight away looking into the man’s eyes.

“Oh…errr…I didn’t get you,” he mumbled between his smiling lips. By that time, Lucky, Blessy and Angel had lined up behind Grace.

“We want to see the city and other places from up,” Blessy said.

“Oh..yes..now I got it…You ladies want to fly…Ok…let me think….well please take permission from your families and meet me tomorrow here,” he said.

“We don’t need to take permission. We are our own guardians,” Angel said. The other ladies were shocked for a while to listen that from Angel, but soon they nodded in agreement to what Angel had said.

“Ok..then..let us fly tomorrow morning…same time…here.,” the man said.

Next morning, Blessy, Lucky, Grace and Angel reached the ground a bit early. They were in their best dresses. They gave different stories to their family members as they were questioned about their finaries worn for morning walk.

The man was already there and the pilot had already started the engine. The ladies came to him, smiled at him and he led them into the chopper one by one. He held his hands above their heads as if they could protect them from the strong winds of the chopper fans.

The helicopter took off from the ground, raising a lot of dust, which for while blocked the views from the eyes of our ladies.

“Look…there…the temple…..hey…the market…….the tailor’s shop, there the mehndi wallah’s shop, Amir’s tea shop…..wow…its beautiful…” the ladies were screaming.

The man smiled. His eyes were moistened.

After one hour of flight the chopper landed back in the ground. A rustic cricket game was already on there. The boys ran away, taking the stumps off the ground and they watched the chopper landing down like a heavy dragon fly.

Then they saw Grace, Lucky, Blessy and Angel coming out of the chopper. The kids started hooting and howling. “Hey…see our flying aunties.”

But the business man’s driver was already come to the ground to shoo away the kids.

“Are you happy now?” the business man asked them with a smile.

“Yes…but we don’t want a free ride from you,” saying this Blessy took out a five rupees note from her purse and handed over to the man. He was astonished. The other ladies did the same.

The man stood there with four five rupees notes in his hands and a stupid smile on his face.

“Hey…ladies, why did you pay me this?” he asked.

“This is what we pay in bus when we go to the town to buy clothes….” They said in unison.

The man laughed. The ladies too.

“You young girls are mischievous,” he said.

Blessy, Grace, Lucky and Angel, laughed and held his hands to say good bye. They felt that they had never laughed in their lives like this before.

The man, as he entered his waiting car, looked at the four ladies walking away from the ground. He took out the kerchief and covered his face. He did not want his driver to see him weeping.

“Where sir, home?” asked the driver through the rear view mirror.

“No…to my mom’s tomb,” he told the driver after putting his dark goggles back.

(I dedicate this story to a friend who gave me the thread of it)

Rip Van Winkle in Kochi

This is a magic land. People here look as if they were coming straight out of some magical realist novel.

On Sunday morning I am at Gallery OED, Kochi, using its office facilities to finish some of the works for the latest upload of www.artconcerns.com that I edit. The gallery is closed on Sundays. Before leaving me at the office, Dilip Narayanan, my friend and director of the OED Gallery warns me about the gallery visitors who could disturb my work.

“People will come and ask you to open the gallery for them. Just tell them that the keys are not with you,” Dilip tells me and I nod in agreement.

Morning half goes fine and I am left alone to do my work. In the afternoon I hear the footsteps of someone climbing the stairs. I wait with some kind of curiosity. Perhaps, I want some human presence around to validate my existence. This is something awful; you prefer to be alone and suddenly you feel this sudden urge to meet people. At times you hate people coming around you and at other times, when they are not around, you crave for them to knock on your door.

I see this man coming and standing before the closed door of the gallery. He looks at me and I look at him. I don’t want to get up and greet him. I remember Dilip’s words. So I ignore the visitor.

But suddenly I realize that every human being has a magnetic field around him. However you try to avoid the presence of another person in your vicinity, his presence suddenly changes the ambience of the atmosphere.

I could feel that change. I look at the visitor. In his white cotton dhoti and shirt with rolled up sleeves, he could be easily passed for a Youth Congress activist; an aspiring politician in his nationally accepted uniform. He looks young, though his hair line shows considerable receding. I could almost judge his age, late thirties.

“Can I go inside?” he asks me.

“Today is a holiday,” I tell him.

“But I am here to see the show,” he insists with a smile.

I am interested now. In my writings, I have mentioned several times why the galleries should work on holidays. A common man who wants to see an exhibition might take out some time on a holiday to visit the gallery. So the galleries should work on Sundays too. Here I am, the same person, asking someone to go back from the door of a gallery. I feel a strange guilt. I get up, pick up the key and open the doors. Inside the gallery it is dark. I go inside first, train my eyes to find out the switches.

Now the gallery is lit. He comes inside and shakes hands with me.

“I am Mukunda Kumar,” he tells me. I get the smell of his breath. He is drunk. But he is not inebriated.

“Your good name please…” holding my hands, he asks me. Malayalis (people of Kerala) are like that. They can drink at any time. They find out a reason to drink. Once they are drunk, they speak only in English.

There is a sociological reason why Malayalis speak in English once they are drunk. The Malayali society considers English speaking people are well educated. People here learn English and Hindi at a very early age itself. But they are never asked to use it on a daily basis. So, they understand English and Hindi, but when asked to speak in these languages they fumble. They are too conscious about the grammatical mistakes that they would make. This society loves grammatical rules and they are afraid of grammatical mistakes. And this society loves breaking grammatical rules in surreptitious ways. For that they need to get out of their inhibitions. Once you are drunk, your inhibitions vanish. Then you start speaking in English. You just don’t care about grammar. English gives you an authority; an authority on any subject that you speak of at that given point of time. Liquor dispels your inhibitions and English dispels your fear for the social authorities. And the most hilarious but magical scene in the world is two Malayalis speaking in English after considerable amount of liquor intake.

Mukunda Kumar speaks to me in English. “Your good name please,”

“Johny,” I don’t add my surname to it for keeping my anonymity intact. My name used to be one of the very familiar bylines amongst the reading public in Kerala during the late 1990s. I think, this man might recognize me if I tell him I am JohnyML.

“So Mr.Johny, don’t forget my name. I am Mukunda Kumar,” he smiles and looks around to see the works on display.

“Are you an artist?” I ask him.

“Me no artist. But a kind of artist. Half time artist,” he turns around and tells me.

“And half time actor, I believe,” I add to it with a tinge of sarcasm.

“You know why I am drunk in this hot afternoon?” he asks. “I went to see the Chitram Art Gallery in MG Road. I asked many people where it has vanished. None knows about it. We all know the galleries in Delhi, Mumbai, Dubai, London and America. But we don’t know where is Chitram Gallery. Malayalis are bullshit.”

Chitram Gallery was the only commercial gallery in Kochi. A few years back it was closed down.

“Then I called a couple of people and they told me Chitram Gallery is closed down. I could not stand that news. So I went straight to the next BAR and drank a few pegs to drown my sadness.”

“Where do you live, abroad? You did not know Chitram is closed down?” I ask him.

“I live here, right here, in this city only. But I live in underground,” he smiles sheepishly.

“Underground?”

“Don’t ask me….” He continues. “I went to this bar and just above my table I saw a print of Starry Nights by Vincent Van Gogh, framed and hung. It was covered with cobweb and dust. I picked up some paper napkins, climbed on a chair and cleaned up the picture with a lot of reverence. The waiters came around me and asked what I was doing there. I told them I was cleaning it. They asked me why. I asked them, who kept the picture there. They told me, the owner of the bar put it there. I told them that the original of this picture was auctioned for phenomenal price that their owner could not even imagine. I also told them that it was painted by the great painter Vincent Van Gogh. They asked me to leave the bar. But I ordered for one more drink, had it silently and walked out.”

This guy has studied art, I think.

“No…your good name please…..ah…Mr.Johny….yes…I have not studied art…But I belong to an artisan’s family. Art inborn and art made are different…you see.. I am an artist in my own terms. I used to do cartoons. I published a few cartoons in one of the Malayalam journals but the management found that my cartoons were going against their editorial policy. So I stopped cartooning also. I live underground…”

“But how do you know the artists and art?” I insist.

“My interest…I know artists…You know what I studied. I studied Sanskrit in Maharajas College. Then I joined Ship Wireless Communication. When I finished this course, Satellite Communication system replaced the wireless system. So I never got a job…” he smiles again.

I remember one of my friends who left Art History and went on to study film cutting. When he finished film cutting course, digital editing technology replaced manual film cutting.

I want to know what this guy does in his life.

“Your good name please…oh..yes ..Mr.Johny..I am a framer. No, I used to be a framer. I used to frame the pictures of all those artists here in Kochi. Now I don’t have a workshop or shop. I stopped everything a few years back. Now I live underground….”

I want to know more about this man; a man who lives in underground, whatever he means by that and a man who does not know the changes happened in the art scene in the last few years. I note down his phone number and promise him to call sometime.

“My name is Mukund Kumar….don’t forget…Your good name please…oh..yes….Mr.Johny. We should meet. Call me….if I am available we will meet…..”

He looks at me, smiles and walks off.

I stand there, with a half finished article in my computer screen, and look at his mobile number. May be I will never call him. I am afraid, if I call him and meet him over a drink, the spell that he has casted on me would break.

I want to know him forever like this: “I am Mukunda Kumar. I live an underground life. Your good name please….oh..ah…yes…Mr.Johny.”

A Chance to become Jesus Christ

Christ performed wonders. He fed five thousand people with five pieces of bread. He converted water into wine. He performed magical acts because he had to convince the doubting people around him. Then he became the bread itself and wine too. He chased the speculators away from the temple of his father, God. He walked with the poor and the suffering. He neglected the invitation of the rich and went to receive the humble offerings of a prostitute.

In childhood he learnt carpentry from his father. When he grew up he learnt about the exile of his parents, he became conscious of the political structure, he understood how the corporate of that era functioned, how the money launderers and speculators played in the market. As a rebellious youth, he went out to learn the reality of life, he went into the forests, walked up to the hills, he suffered from his internal conflicts and he could overcome the temptations of the body. He came back to the town, educated with experience, enlightened by religio-political thinking. He worked like an artist, an artist who could re-draw the destiny of people. He went to the fishermen and asked them to follow him so that he could make the capturers of human souls. He was a great artist. He was a performance artist and he filled each of his acts with convincing symbolism. His final journey was the ultimate performance of silent suffering. Then he came out of the cave where his mortal body was confined. He was the ultimate artist.

In the airport, almost ten days back, on my journey towards South, I entered one of the eateries and ordered a cup of coffee and French fries. They charged me hundred and twenty rupees for that. When my token number was called I went to collect my food at the counter. To my shock I found the French fries packet contained around 15 pieces of potato, which in total hardly weighed fifty grams. I remembered ordering a packet of French fries at a Macdonald outlet in Delhi. They too had charged me around hundred and twenty rupees for the fries, a burger and a medium cup of cola. Then I went to a vegetable market and asked for the price of one kilogram of potato. It was ten rupees per kilo then.

George Bush Jr., former president of the United States says the hike in food price is caused by the erstwhile third world countries like India. People in India eat too much, he found the reason. Yes, we produce potatoes and the corporate houses based in the United States of America process our potatoes and sell it back to us for phenomenal prices.

What shall be done? I ask this question to my artist friends. I don’t want to ask this question to agricultural scientists, politicians, policy makers and economists because I don’t know them. I know the artists because I know them and I know that of late they have earned a lot of money. It is now their turn to pay back to the society.

I want the intellectual community including the artists to become Jesus Christ, great performers. I ask them to start farming and agriculture. Establish co-operative chains and food outlets in cities, airports, small towns and villages and sell food for affordable rates. Art cannot change society, but artistic acts can. Jesus Christ did this.

When my young artist friend Reji Arakkal recorded a series of interviews of local farmers and showed it to me, I asked him to extract one interview of a thirty two year old farmer from Vynadu district in North Kerala, who has spoken so well about his agriculture strategies and criticized the corporate houses for patenting seeds and introducing genetically modified seeds. He is a school final pass farmer. But he speaks of the issues of agriculture much better than any agricultural scientist. I asked Reji to show this thirty minutes interview, subtitled in English and show all over the world. People have a lot to learn from such inland farmers. No public art, no performance art, no gallery based art can address the issues as effectively as this simple farmer’s observations. “Return to earth that is the only way to save ourselves,’ this farmer says.

On this Christmas Eve, at 11.42 pm, I imagine all my artist friends spending part of their creative time in agricultural lands. Many artists in India have already started thinking in these lines. They are all on the way to become Jesus Christ. Yes, minus the Cross. The symbolic cross is carried by all. No need to receive flagellation while carrying a wooden cross.

I say this because, many of the public art performances, site specific art making, science related art production etc started looking like primary school level science exhibitions- innocent, naïve and almost stupid. Only parents would take pride in such activities of their children.

A friend of mine asked me, ‘any new year resolutions?’ Then she corrected herself, ‘oh, it is a cliché. Resolutions are taken only to break them in a few days.’

But I think, I have already taken my New Year resolution. I am going to talk to all my artists friends to become Jesus Christ and I will play the role of John the Baptist, one who walks before and humbly accepts who is not even worthy enough to carry the footwear of those who are coming behind.

I am going to go to the places in India and ask the people what contemporary art has done to their lives. And I am going to come back and tell my friends, what they people have to say about their contemporary art. I am going to participate in small little activities that would help to make human lives worth living, of course using art and art critical mediation as my tool.

I am going to ask my rich artist friend to help me to establish day care centers for the children of the working people. I am going to ask my rich artist friends to help me in establishing old age homes for old artists, who may be rich but live in isolation and disgrace. I want to see the old people live in happiness, not as destitutes and dependents.

All these are done through the funds created by art and artists. I am just a church, artists have to become Jesus Christ. And there would be no Pope in this holy city of human beings.

Ten Ways to Overcome Writers’ Block

It was my decision to lock myself in a flat in Kochi for ten days and see how much I could write. This flat belongs to a friend of mine. On the first night of my arrival, my friend dropped me at the flat and warned me of two things. One, don’t open the door if someone knocks at it. Two, don’t pay any attention to the white figures if they come to the window and make some sounds.

His intention was to frighten me. And nobody likes to be told things like that especially when he is going to stay alone in a new place. I threatened him of dire consequences and sent him out. He had already prepared the flat for me, which was lying unoccupied for some time. I looked around and found a computer with internet connection, a television set with cable connection and a non-functional kitchen. I had some packed food and two bottles of beer with me. I opened the beer bottle, switched on the television and settled down.

Then suddenly the speed of the fan reduced automatically. I looked at the bulbs, which showed no sign of voltage fluctuation. But then how did this fan slow down? I got up, went to the regulator and turned it to full speed; the fan regained its speed. But then nothing happened. After food I went to bed, keeping all the lights on.

Next morning I got up, opened the window and found a beautiful garden down there. Some puppies were playing in the garden. They were playing with a grown up dog. I looked at them keenly and found that the dog was not their mother. It must be their father or brother from the previous delivery. Then I started counting the puppies. There were nine in number. Nine puppies, a good sight. I remembered the movie, hundred and one Dalmatians.

Luckily, I found an electric kettle in the kitchen. My friend had made minimum arrangements to make some tea for myself. I made a cup of tea and drank it. Then I went outside, bought some bananas. I had also decided not to eat more than one meal a day.

Now I am settled here. I have been writing for the last five days or so. Good experience. Minimum human contact and maximum output.

But then I face the problem of writers’ block in between. How do I get over this problem? I don’t want to speak to my friends or chat with them. I can see many of them online. But my location in Kochi does not make much difference to them because most often we see each other online only. When you meet in the virtual world, location does not matter.

Is it so? Location matters. If my friend pops up in the chat box and tells me that he is Spain, suddenly I find him distant and foreign. But if the same person tells me that he is comfortably sitting at his Delhi office, I feel a lot happy. Those friends who chat with me or telephone me usually, also feel the same about my locational shift. “When are you coming back to Delhi?” they ask. “Why?” I counter question them. “I feel a lot happier when I think you are sitting at your Delhi office space and chatting with me.”

So location matters a lot even when you are connected virtually. I know I am digressing a lot. My idea is to point out how I overcome the writers’ block here.

1) I walk along the wall, as close as possible and grate my body against the wall. I walk up and down keeping my body touching the wall and slowly I start thinking how people might be feeling in confinement. I think about the people in Auschwitz, Andaman, and Guantanamo Bay. Then I like to scribble my thoughts on the wall like graffiti. I imagine I don’t have a pen or pencil with me. So I use my finger nails to write down my pangs. In fact, I don’t do that. I imagine doing so. When I am able to imagine there is no writers’ block. It vanishes.

2) When I don’t feel like walking along the wall, I walk round and round, first slowly, then fast, till my head starts reeling. I count the mosaic tiles on the floor while I go round and round. I find shapes and forms evolving from the mosaic tiles. And I think about how artists arrive at certain forms and expressions. Once I get into that track my writers’ block starts melting down. I could then even visualize the book cover of Foucault’s ‘Madness and Civilization’.

3) Sometimes, I don’t feel like walking round and round. Then I open a shelf on the right corner of the wall and put my head inside and stand like an ostrich for long time till I feel suffocated. I try to close my eyes and feel the self imposed claustrophobia. Then I think about the men inside the hood, the ones in the torture camps, the ones in the gallows and the ones on the horse back. But the horse back ones have some difference. They can see the world outside through the holes cut into the hood. They are Klu Klux Klan people. They attack the black people. I think of black movies, black revolution and the paintings of Manjunath Kamath’s works, where he paints a lot of people putting their heads into buckets, shelves etc. Look my writers’ block is gone.

4) When I don’t want to torture myself like that, I go near the window and look down at the garden and find there are only two puppies left. They play with crows and the crows play with them. When the teasing of the crows increases and the puppies feel uncomfortable the mother rushes at the crows from nowhere. Then I smile and my mind gets filled by some inexplicable feelings. I think about my son, my mother, my wife, my girl friends and all those kids in the world. Mother rushes to save the child. I remember Maxim Gorky’s Mother. I remember Brecht’s Mother Courage. Above all I remember one line from my mother’s diary, which I accidently opened a few days back. It was written in 1997. ‘Johny is working hard and he is shooting up in life.’ I was not shooting up then. People were shouting at me. But I could make my mother proud even then. My writers’ block is gone.

5) When I don’t want to look down through the window, I just walk up to the television set and stand before it, imagining that I am a character in one of the television shows. I give interviews to imaginary people, I become Mickey Mouse, Goofy, I walk like Denzel Washington, fight like Wesley Snipes, then participate in the Star Singer program, act like Mr.Bean, go to bed with Julia Roberts (but they would sensor this scene. They did not even allow this scene with Denzel in Pelican Brief), walk on the red carpet, receive a Grammy Award, give a thanks giving speech at the Man Booker Prize ceremony. I act out all these for an imaginary audience. Then my writers’ block is gone because I have so many things to tell my imaginary audience.

6) I smoke a few cigarettes. But it never helps. May be rarely cigarettes burn out the writers’ block. Smoking tires you. But you smoke again and think about why you are tired. It may help, because a tired mind can bring forth weird ideas.

7) On can go into toilet and sit there for a while. Just concentrate on the bowel movements and think about existential problems of human beings. In flats, especially flats like this, the walls are paper thin, like the hotel room walls. You can hear the bowel movements of your never seen neighbor. Then you imagine the narrative traditions of India, in a tier system. You imagine the cross section of a flat, the anatomy of the flat. So many people in the closets, doing funny things. Yes, toilet is a place, which can dispel many blocks including the writers’ ones. I heard Shah Rukh Khan spends three hours in his washroom. He must be removing his actors’ block.

8) When I don’t feel like sitting like Thinker in a toilet I go before the mirror, strip my clothes one by one and stand in stark nudity. I examine my body inch by inch. I count the hairs inside my nose, make sure that my hairs are graying symmetrically. I look at my tummy, hold my breath and try to see any packs of muscle visible. I think about Arnold Schwarznegger’s documentary ‘Pumping Iron’, Sylvester Stallon’s Rambo and Rocky series, think about American politics and its imperial incursions, and my writer’s block is gone.

9) I wait for someone to call me and when they call me I refuse to take the call. When the ringing stops, I think about the person who rang me up, his/her location, engagements, attitudes, intentions, desires and the reason for calling me. I send sms to some friend and wait for him/her to respond. When the reply comes, I look at the icon of sms, without opening it and imagine what could be the content. Then my writers’ block is gone.

10) When none of the above works, I masturbate. That removes all the blocks.