bodhi'shop

Pir Pressure

2011-12-17T05:01:00.001-08:00

Somewhere in the spleen of Karachi is a moss pond. It is populated by a bask of creatures that one only sees in zoos and sanctuaries and of course on Natgeo and Discovery. But here this creature is the object of much veneration and supplication. This is most surprising to see in a country that is as far from animistic thinking as George Bush is from books without pictures. Yet the place is amply visited by devotees and curiosity-seekers, like myself, who’re keen to find what lies in the depths of this goldfish bowl. Mungo Pir is a dargah that is reached after driving through the poorer parts of Karachi. The parts where the roads are more gravel and dust than asphalt; where repair shops far outnumber those that sell new things. These parts are in fact the very anathema of the sea-facing Clifton from where we’re coming.

From the outside, Mungo Pir looks no different from any other dargah, fronted as it is by kiosks of red-rose garlands and incense sticks and gold-silver embroidered dust-sheets. This changes when you enter the pond area. For one, there is the stink of rotting flesh. Then, there are the flies that are drawn to the flesh. Hovering further above are the birds of prey waiting to swoop down on the feast below.

The pond area is split into what looks like a wrestling pit and the actual walled-in pond. The mud in the wrestling pit is marked by the slithering motion of long scaly tails. They look like tyre marks but one where the driver’s clearly lost control. The pond is green from moss and weeds. There are the occasional scraps of putrefying leftover flesh. Amid all this unholy squalor float the fat and scaly backs of Mungo Pir’s crocodiles. A big fat one is lolling in a sort of canopy in the wrestling pit. A fearless cat tiptoes around him to take her share from a large leg of lamb as he looks upon it indifferently. We have bought him this piece and we’re in danger of our prayers going unanswered as he shows no interest in it. But the handler tells us not to worry as he casually opens the big one’s mouth as if it were a car trunk and chucks the leg in it.

The handler tells us these are pirs or saints who were turned into crocs. That is why keeping them happy is important. The explanation hits me as outstanding. It also makes me realise a very significant aspect of humanity: that as a species we aren’t very different from other so-called lower animals whose natal instincts we use to ‘domesticate’ them. Animals whom we’ve reared in captivity generation after generation till they’ve become absolutely useless to fend for themselves in the wild. In Mungo Pir however the crocs seem to have the upper hand. They have, perhaps psychically, convinced the humans that they’d be safer both here and in the afterlife if they cared and provided for them. And thus generation after generation of Mungo Pir handlers serve and protect these croc-saints as they dwell upon the nature of the Universe and man’s place in it.

Dusk & Dawn

2011-10-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

Our small school bus stops near the handicrafts emporium near Dal Lake. We’re waiting for some of the other artists to come back from shopping. Just then a head pops through the driver’s window and lands a fat slap on the driver’s head. We’re all startled by the suddenness of the intrusion. Ashfaq, the driver, however quickly regains his composure. He is smiling when he tells us somewhat indulgently: “Uska dimaag theek nahin hai.” The slapper has now moved beyond our bus. We can see him more clearly through the panoramic back window. He’s dressed in a filthy pherhan and is muttering to himself. Soon he disappears in the growing number of Sunday shoppers at the Dal Gate area. Later while sharing the incident with our friends back at the art camp we are told that the number of psychiatric cases in the Valley has reached unimaginable proportions.

It’s almost as if the collective mind of the Valley has begun to shut down. Many people, including the unmistakably original Dr Freud, believe madness to be a defensive function of the brain, when it tries to brush traumatic events under the proverbial carpet. Gradually over time, this carpet gets far too heavy or should we say ‘embedded’ by traumatic memories. And then clumps and tears begin to appear in its fabric.

Artists, creative people and psychologists are often able to tap into brushed-under carpets. They’re able to ‘see’ things that others miss. It’s a bit like staring into a well, and shining a torch in it or yelling at its mouth so that the return yell gives a sense of its depth and inner form. It’s something bats and dolphins are able to do quite naturally. But we humans need practice. However, this kind of seeing has its limitations as we’re often wont to colour our perception with our biases. Many spiritual traditions hold a view that compares the mind to a mirror or a pool of water that can distort truth because of its limitations of form and function. Something like the rear view disclaimer that says: ‘Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear’. So while the rear view is not a true representation it manages to give a sense of what’s in the background.

The two works I made at the Srinagar art camp I call ‘Dusk’ (above) and ‘Dawn’ (below). Both for me represent two liminal states where it is difficult to achieve resolution as something which is wholly this or wholly that. Dusk and Dawn are also two times when the Valley sky is the most beautiful. On a more worldly plane, Dusk and Dawn represent the curfew timings imposed on residents due to outbreaks of violence or fear of outbreaks of violence. So while I’ve painted my sense of Srinagar, the place with all its baggage and beauty, I am not sure I have been able to keep my evident biases out of the picture.

Acrylic on canvas
91.5 cm X 122 cm each

Nebu

2011-09-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

35.5 cm X 35.5 cm
Acrylic on canvas

Why I do what I do…

2011-08-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the Google universe there is a line that describes me—an Eighth House Pluto—as one who ‘dwells in the underworld of the mind’. It is an intriguing description. But it can get a tad injurious (to my reputation) bringing as it does to mind the image of a D-Company operative or more recently, Dexter Morgan. But am not crushed by that! An Eighth House Pluto gives a lot of pluck and fortitude. It also heightens ones interest in Sex, the Occult and Regeneration. So yes, fate has endowed me well… to mind-fuck i.e. But that’s the easy part. The tougher part of this planetary line-up is Regeneration.

How does one regenerate? Does it call for special powers? A lizard-sense perhaps. A clue to that lies mummified in the Osiris myth. The Egyptian god of the Underworld was also the conductor of the seasons that mirrored his death and resurrection each year. In the afterlife Osiris ‘weighed the hearts’ of those who wished to enter it. Not surprisingly, the Osiris legend has echoes across cultures where the death of a god is followed by his resurrection. Some notables of this group include the Phrygian Attis, the Greek Dionysus, the Babylonian Tammuz and most famously, the Jewish Jesus.

So is regeneration only about death and resurrection? I think not. It is more like a simulacrum—as it often happens in myths and legends—of something more regular. Let me give you an example. The first time I used X-rays in my art, the reactions ranged from snarky dismissals to open-mouthed bewilderment. In the middle of this sweep were some who were genuinely wowed, in the same spirit (I’d like to think) that John Berger dwells upon in his postmodern manifesto ‘Ways of Seeing’. I assume those who made the snarky jabs were being witty and vicious without trying to understand my ‘way of seeing’. One critic blithely pointed out that my stuff lacked mystery, which he said was the cornerstone of all art. The bewilderment was actually comforting. Because it came from a desire to understand what had gotten in to me. My X-ray art is for me a way of using the dramatic and the otherworldly to shed light on the regular and the immediate.

Pic: Sahar Z

I think my fixation with X-rays has its roots in my childhood. You see, I grew up in a mental asylum. Not quite inside it, but in the same compound because my mother worked there and we had a house in it. Growing up was like being in a human zoo. There was a window from which I used to watch the patients do some very odd things. These were certified ‘mental cases’ on the way to being cured and rehabilitated to go back to the world stage and play their parts. To do this they received a daily scoop of medicines and the odd electric shock.

I often watched these people with a huge fascination as they orbited around the TV Room and the Recreational Therapy Room like weightless moonwalkers. It helped complete the picture because the verandah around these two rooms was circular. The patients were often very bright people, with above-average IQs, but in the midst of all that brightness they’d lost track of both time and space. Surprisingly, I didn’t see these other-siders as damaged goods. To me, a weird Plutonian child, they were gifted individuals. I didn’t have the word for them then but now I think they were as close to shamans as people could come to in our urban setting. Because they could sniff out things and feelings from the ether and project them on to the sleeping majority. There was a school friend of my sister’s who was later sent inside because she believed the CIA was tailing her. Every time we sat down to speak with her she would leave mid-sentence and go out to check if the CIA satellite had changed position. Of course none of us could see the satellite, but she could, very clearly, as it tried to read her thoughts. Some days she would cover her head in a towel in order to stop the satellite from tuning in to her mind. There was a man who relived the passion of Christ everyday. Sometimes he could be seen walking with hands outstretched. Other times he’d cry out at the floggings of an invisible centurion. There was also a Krishna, who sang beautifully and had long conversations with himself. A former nun was fighting Indira Gandhi in the elections and she went waving to crowds that no one else could see. A smack-addict would parkour (another word I learnt much later) in and out of the hospital to get his daily fix and then promptly jump back at lunchtime. These folks kept coming and going but their projections stayed on in my mind. It was almost as if they’d been X-rayed on to it.

In school I felt out of place. There was just too much sanity and uniformity, in clothes and behaviour. Our world was strictly limited by consensus, by what everybody could see and hear. There was no place for dissent. We were after all being given our first lessons in group behaviour. Or the ability to look and sound like everyone else. We were expected to mug things up and then regurgitate them on to our notebooks. Every day at school my heart ached to get back to my window and watch the patients.

This strange childhood was compounded by the fact that I was a sickly child. I spent more time on examining tables than I did with on the playground. I was often ill with some fever or cough or this -itis or that -pox. I was a fount of mysterious illnesses that came and went with terrifying regularity. I was also a kid prone to cuts and bleeds. I had my face stitched up thrice, had two minor operations on my foot and thigh all before my 10th birthday. My olfactory centres were well acquainted with the smell of Dettol and antibiotics.

On the face of it I did have a regular childhood. But beneath the surface I was pretty mixed up. Because I had seen far too much that my child brain could process. However there was a silver lining. I’d developed the ability to get in and out of different realities. I realised that there existed an enormous and fantastic mystery around us, which the adults were always eager to cover up with (scientific-sounding) explanations. It was a discovery not unlike the one Truman Burbank makes in ‘The Truman Show’ when a spotlight from the sky falls on him.

I was bad at most things in school. You could say I was an Indian family’s worst nightmare. My report card often came with red marks. Except in Class 1 when I stood first. All thanks to a Mrs Speake, our teacher who left us quite speechless with her array of canes, displayed in a glass cupboard. I suppose she had taken me on as a challenge.

Because of my illnesses I was also not very good at sports either. But what I did have was an ability sponge up experiences. Unfortunately there were no marks for that in school. There were no marks for originality either. We were all being schooled in a system where we were expected to express only the expected and nothing else.

Now when I look back I think fondly of my early acquaintance with illness, both mental and physical. It brought me face to face with the last frontier of our existence. The human mind. I have often felt like Freud and Jung in my attempts to get a handle on what really makes us tick. The memories of my childhood often leak in to my present. Like a heady Christmas Punch. A cocktail of impressions and my responses to them. Surely not all the other-siders were benign. Some also came in chains and had to be sedated. Some threw water and stones at my iron mesh window. But somehow the Pluto child remained unfazed, expanding his knowledge of the human race through its exceptions.

My X-ray art is an attempt to essentialize my experiences. Pare them down to their bare bones. A friend once pointed that I may have been inspired by the skeleton in the school bio-lab. Perhaps I was. I do remember studying it quite carefully. I studied it enough to know that there were steel wires that held the skeleton together. X-rays have for me become a way of seeing things without the stuff that holds them together. It’s a way that reduces human form to its essentials. In grey and black and some white.

© Dhiraj Singh 2011

A Wall's No Guarantee

2011-07-22T23:16:00.002-07:00

Pic: Sahar Z

Above: ‘When I am Pregnant’ by Anish Kapoor (detail)
In this dream I am inside an old building with naked brick walls. Something like the Residency in Lucknow. Maybe, it is the Residency, a place to which I feel deeply connected. The room I am in is bare but for a gaping hole fire-place and a bed on which I am lying. I am staring at the wall in front of me. Then slowly from the wall starts emerging a form, a humanoid form, as if someone is trying to enter through the wall. This human form comes out of the wall and stands before me. I am startled by the intrusion but say nothing. Then as if on cue others also start to breach the old wall and come into the room. Some walk through it while others fall out of the wall from different heights. They start to gather around me, not menacingly but in a quiet shuffling way. These are people, men and women, who’re looking at me with sad, pleading eyes and anguished faces. Some of them are also weeping. They’re trying to tell me something. They’re not speaking to me directly but somehow telepathically conveying to me a visceral sadness. Who are these people, I am wondering. And what is this place? Why are they telling me their stuff? Maybe, they’re victims of an act of mass elimination, I reason. But there's no telling what event has caused them to occupy the walls. My heart is beating very fast. I am terrified not so much by the scene before me but by the vague sense of tragedy that seems to connect these people to me. Have I entered some kind of a traffic post of journeying souls? I begin to think. And am I supposed to be a traffic cop here? I wake up feeling heavy and distressed as if I am carrying a huge psychic load on my chest. It feels like the wall people have embedded their stories into me. Stories that aren’t really told or shown but are conveyed, in essence. Like old and hard memories that stay with us as ‘feelings’, not in the original but in some isotopic form. Like a heap of black coal that is pressed and fused to form a clear and prismatic stone.

Walking with Husain

2011-06-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

Husain saab has probably already started making new friends in the next world as we sit on our bus to Dharamsala. My first time there was in July 2005, around His Holiness’s birthday bash. The reasons for this trip are more complicated. My friend wants to unwind before he starts a new job, among other things. And I want to unwind before I assume the responsibilities of new dad-hood, among other things. It is June 10, 2011. We reach Mandi (because we missed our Dharamsala bus from Majnu Ka Tilla) at 7 AM, tired but ready to go on further. To MacLeod as MacLeodganj is fondly called. A day earlier Husain saab has made international headlines, again. It is a sad piece of news. Sad, but not tragic. Sad, because he has left behind a lot of unfinished business. Not tragic—because Husain has lived the Sinatra Song. In my mind’s eye I can see him sipping green tea, painting furiously with his long brush as Sinatra sings ‘My Way’ in the background, as he sings…

For what is a man? What has he got?
If not himself—Then he has naught.

I buy a copy of the Hindustan Times in Mandi. It has arrived a few minutes before me. Husain is on the front page—he’s being bemoaned, bereaved, condoled and national-lossed by some of the best known people of our times. On the edit page is a piece by Sahar. She has done what is to become M.F. Husain’s last interview on Indian TV. It was recorded in Dubai in 2008 when she went there for the Art Fair. Sahar is a colossal fan of the man. She like many others thinks of him as a rockstar. Someone, in whose presence people turn to mixed fruit jam. Few artists-painters have that kind of zing. Not to say the artistry or the artifice to keep it coming. She sounds sad on the phone. She’s been on TV channels all day talking about her impressions of Husain. How he let her shoot him in his red Ferrari. Suddenly all her dreams of doing a film on Husain have come crashing.

During our cab ride from Mandi the weather gradually turns from sunny yellow to a more sombre grey. Both sides of our cab are covered in acres and acres of tea leaves. I had never known there were tea gardens in this part of the country. Tea is a complicated drink that can only be grown in certain parts but its appeal cuts across all manmade boundaries. From the humble street chai-shops to the scented chai-bars of south Delhi, much of the subcontinent is chai-washed... as much as it is complicated.

This being the ‘season time’, Bhagsu ironically isn’t the most welcoming of places. But it definitely has a heart. After being refused twice we find ‘Sweet Chilli’, a guesthouse with a view. The guesthouse dog is also called ‘Sweetie’. We are given a double room for 250 bucks a night. This price though irresistible has its drawbacks. We have to share the loo with four other double rooms. And the light bulb in our room is only about 2 watts or less. Like so much of Bhagsu, Sweet Chilli is a place frequented by Israelis.

Over our second lunch of the day we make friends with Marcus, Ida and Fabian. They’re living out their music karma in the land of karma. They’re from Sweden and have a djembe, a flute and a sarangi between them. Introductions at guest houses like Sweet Chilli often start with ‘So where you from?’ then they meander into a maze of nods and agreements. There isn’t much to say or hear here. There is of course hash. And then there is Trance and House and Club and Goa. And ‘Mal milega?’ a question that backpackers keep as handy as a password. “But doesn’t mal mean bad?” asks Marcus while rolling a spliff. “Yes but not in Hindi,” I explain, “here it means ‘stuff’… often stuff too good to be asked for by name.” We wink and smile. Marcus was born in Columbia. “We were very poor growing up so my mom used to give me water in rum bottles for school. I always had these drunkard jokes being cracked around me,” he says. Marcus and his family migrated to Sweden when he was young. Marcus is black and he has a lot of Freud-like insights into Swedish culture. He’s studied his adoptive country and has accepted its flaws with a maturity that could make his fellow Swedes squirm.

The next day at breakfast we discover the legend of Triund, a trek to the Himalayan snowline. Ajay, the owner of Sweet Chilli, has praised it to the heavens, which is what it feels like when we attempt it later in the day. Triund is an endless climb. It’s the second time I’ve wished for something to end fast. The first was when I was stuck at Khardungla, trying to keep my bike from falling in an open truck on a freezing night behind a slow-moving Army convoy. The memory of that trip alone gives me altitude sickness. Triund feels like that a bit. Conversation between Shekhar, my friend and I is kept to a minimum; a nod here, a smile there and a sigh somewhere else. “The Oxygen here is less, I think,” he says panting. I am reminded of Khardungla. “No way man, that only happens above 12,000 feet,” I say confidently, “I think we should take a break.”

The total trek is about 9 km from the starting point at Gallu Mandir. The height from the top down to sea level is nearly 9000 feet. We’re tempted to turn back from Magic View chai-shop (The Oldest Since 1984) which we’re told is the halfway point. We’ve walked uphill for what feels like eternity. And we still have a long way to go. Triund, we agree while taking pictures during a breath-catching stop, is a metaphor for Life itself. We often don’t know where we’re going but we keep going… in the hope of finding something important.

But where we are going is hidden behind the clouds. So we keep walking. We’ve run out of water. The next chai-shop is not until further nearer to the top. Life is often like that. That’s why we keep doing whatever it is we think we’re good at doing. That’s how we get better. So the two of us keep walking in the hope of getting better… at walking and at life.

But it doesn’t help. I’ve made up my mind about strangling Ajay. “Did we do him any wrong? Why did he suggest such a trek?” I ask Shekhar. “No bro,” he says laughing, “he did it because he we asked him for a good trek.” But the thought of strangling Ajay gives me a sense of purpose.

Later at night when we’re nursing our achy feet we’re joined by Omri. He’s a rare Israeli, rare because he is travelling alone and not with a mini kibbutz. He says there are two kinds of Israelis: “One that go to Latin America after the Army service and those who come to India. I chose Latin America after my Army service... some 10 years ago. So this is my first time in India.” When Marcus leaves the table, Omri says the lad is too mature for his age. Marcus is 23, running on 100. Omri is 33 and an Arab Jew whose grandparents came from Yemen. “On my father’s side our national epic—which is the Holocaust—doesn’t quite fit in. My father’s parents never had to flee their country. But on my mother’s side, they were Polish and there they had concentration camps and everything.”

There is half a moon watching over us as we rip across centuries trying to find our roots and branches. Omri wants to know why the Indians in Himachal look different. “They’re a different species of Indians,” I say, surprised by my gumption. “We come in many different colours, shapes and sizes…” We all start laughing. “Yeah, true,” says Omri who with his dark Yemeni skin is often mistaken for an Indian. Back home in Israel he’s also regarded as an Arab, as someone whose fondest explanation for his name is Umm Kulthum’s legendary ‘Inta Omri’ or as they say in Arabic ‘You Are My Life’.

Talking to Omri, I am suddenly saddened by Husain’s passing away. By the fact that he died a Qatari national when India was his life. But inside my head I have no doubt that he’s right now pulling strings… to be reborn… back in India.

© Dhiraj Singh 2011

The Throne & The Sky

2011-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Developing Delhi-2011

2011-03-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

My Show on LSTV

2011-02-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

Dhiraj Singh, who has made a successful shift from journalism to art, worked with X-rays for his installation Black Tide. “I think Black Tide is the best name I could think of for my work. It’s got X-rays of skulls captured on acrylic sheets cut out in the shape of surfboards. I look at it like Time, or as we say in Hindi kaala, which means both time and the colour black, dissolving away scars from the sands of human memory. The surfboards in this work act as totemic portals representing Dreaming, the Aboriginal idea used to describe the beginningless-endless journey of things and beings.”
--Open

Dhiraj Singh's 'The Black Tide' is a piece made up of X-rays of skulls on a sheet in the shape of a surf board. The work plays with the tourism industry image of Australia--beaches justaposed with the symbol of death. This evocation of a black tide of racial assaults condemns racism undauntedly.
--Art Slant

Dhiraj looks at the issue with his Black Tide... taking from the 'Time and Tide...' saying... where Time or as we say in Hindi 'kaal', which means both time and black, dissolves away the scars from human memory. The surf boards in this work act as totemic portals representing the Dreaming, the Aboriginal idea used to describe the journey, without beginning or end, of things and beings.
--Indian Link

Black Tide @ Racism & Reconciliation Show

2011-01-30T10:09:00.000-08:00

Racism & Reconciliation

2011-01-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

Love Stories-2010

2010-12-17T05:34:00.000-08:00

The Greening of Icarus

2010-12-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

Wings

2010-11-24T09:42:00.001-08:00

Dilkusha, Lucknow

2010-10-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

You Are Invited

2010-09-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

CANDYISTAN

2010-09-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

114.5 cm X 114.5cm
Acrylic on canvas

Is a place that evokes happy memories and feelings. It has the colours of candy or the boiled sugar sweet often associated with childhood mollification and indulgence. 'Candyistan' therefore becomes a country (with the suffix 'istan') that is the equivalent of childhood memories, laughter, playfulness, splashing around in water, climbing trees, falling and getting up again. 'Candyistan' is a place far away from the enervating concerns and demands of adulthood. It is perhaps an expanded 'cake-house' of the Hansel and Gretel story that I greatly enjoyed as a child, more for its abundance of cake, biscuit and candies than anything else. This one is an attempt to evoke a non-terrestrial country, whose sweet, dreamy and nebulous landscape exists within each of us but whose inherent elusiveness leaves us sad and wanting and fantasising about a time when we had no abiding cares or fears or worries.

An Intercourse with the Natives

2010-05-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

WE STAND IN THE middle of New South Wales’ Royal National Park holding hands and looking heavenwards to invoke Yullangur—‘the dreaming’ of the creation serpent—as our guide Les Bursill starts us on a tour of Australia’s sacred sites. ‘The Dreaming’ describes Aborigine Australia’s curiously Brahma-like worldview. According to it, all our realities lie subsumed by a ‘dreaming’ that started at the dawn of time, whenever that was. The fact that the phenomenon is still referred to in the present-continuous is interesting because it speaks of a larger inclusion of the timeline, especially since the arrival of the white man, a moment in history that has spelt nothing but doom for the ‘dreaming’. White Australians first came as a fleet of convicts and prison-guards to serve what was to be a very rigorous punishment. But strangely, they stayed on to give birth to a white nation, very different from what the Aborigine dreaming had ironically intended.

White Australia’s experience of the dreaming has ranged from outright rejection to utter moral confusion. From the early colonists point-of-view the native culture (or what was often seen as a lack of it) was in a need of a civilising influence. And they were more than happy to provide it. This began with the taming of Bennelong, a male aboriginal who in 1789 was abducted in keeping with King George III’s wishes “to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections…” Bennelong thus became the first Aboriginal to speak English, dress up like the white man and even cross the seas to pay a visit to England—not quite like a caged exotic, but close.

Since Bennelong, white Australia has time and again tried to ‘conciliate the affections’ of those whom it has tried to rule. The dreaming since then has become an object of much research and creative exploration by white Australians. A sense of this ‘terrible fascination’ (to paraphrase Rudolf Otto) is visible at the souvenir shops and Aboriginal art galleries that have turned sacred totemic art into novelty pieces. It speaks of a process of exoticisation that has squeezed Aborigine culture of its values and humanity. But signs of a cultural sensitivity are gradually showing up. In Warwick Thornton’s touchingly unsentimental film Samson and Delilah (2009) an Aboriginal teenage couple escapes to the city from its community only to find city-life terribly harsh and unforgiving to moneyless wanderers like themselves. It is a fair portrayal of two opposing cultures that have unsuccessfully tried to negotiate each other’s mind space. There exists an interesting Aborigine corroboree or oral narrative about a massacre by the white man whose cow they had stolen and eaten because they were hungry. Since in the Aboriginal sense life is a dreaming it requires no further elaboration; in other words it has no need to assert notions of ownership, enterprise and other capitalist biases. These very ideas, on the other hand, have become cast in stone in the mind of the white West since it was industrialised.

Art has in fact served the Aborigine cause better. As its numinous appeal has been more in keeping with the dreaming way of life. But the wedge driven by the racial policies of the first white settlers have had a lasting effect. Aborigine poet-artist Maggie Walsh speaks of the lack of faith her community feels about the double life most of them live. “When I go back to the community they say, ‘So you wanna become a white woman, eh?’ and here in the city I meet all these wonderful artists and poets who treat me so fine and seem to understand me. I have no choice but to choose a double life.” Most Aussies of a generation or two ago are all too familiar with their treatment of Aborigines, who were often accosted at street corners and told to ‘go back to their own country’.

Internally, Australian racism is often viewed as a ‘hot-blooded’ response to immigrant presumptions but nonetheless it has deeper roots. Australia has been for over 200 years a society running on auto-pilot; a loose mix of white, imperialist and Christian tendencies. And now it suddenly finds itself having to make room for the ‘other’, largely non-white, non-Christian immigrant populations that have been gravitating towards its shores from all corners of the Earth. It is pertinent to recall here that for a long time Australia insisted on a ‘whites only’ immigration policy. It has only in the recent past opened its doors to other races. This makes Aussie claims to a deep-rooted cosmopolitanism rather facile. It’s like a big woman trying to squeeze into a size zero dress.

The ‘Indian issue’ has pained much of the left-leaning press and the intelligentsia but to the majority of Australians ‘it is not a race issue’. Till as late as 2005 white Australia had been at war with its ‘otherness’. In 2005 riots had broken out in Sydney’s Cronulla Beach between Lebanese Australians and whites over a few drunken remarks. A year before that, riots between Aborigines and white Australians had shaken up Palm Island over the custody death of Mulrunji, picked up for being ‘a public nuisance’. A few months before that, Aborigine residents had clashed with the police in Redfern, a Sydney suburb, following the death of Thomas ‘TJ’ Hickey, another Aborigine teenager under police surveillance.

The attacks on Indians have a terrible ring to them, a sense of déjà vu and yet the police and lawmakers continue to treat them as stray disturbances. This betrays an attitude that as a country Australia has not been sincere in facing its demons. It has in fact chosen to look the other way or pride itself for its many ethnic enclaves as a sign of cultural mixing. But in truth mixing in the Aussie sense carries a lot of baggage, especially from the days of its ‘white occupation’. Newcomers to Australia find themselves in a surfacely friendly country that scoffs at any real understanding or abiding interest in the ways of life of its ethnic minorities. It is not surprising then that the exchange between the dominant ethnic group (of white Australians) and the rest gets limited to a cursory stereotyping of the rest by the majority. There is a heart of Australian conservatism, visible some years ago in the anti-immigrant remarks of politician Pauline Hanson, that hasn’t been able to keep up with the spacious geography of the land. Hanson in her book The Truth, had parodied the idea of multiculturalism by suggesting that by 2050 Australia would have a woman president who would be part Chinese, part Indian and part machine. This February she announced her decision to move back to England, the country of her birth. Hanson is not alone in feeling a particular fondness for the ‘mother country’. Australian society, despite appearances is remarkably old-world, attached through a well-tended umbilicus to the idea of an imperial Britain that may itself now be a speck in the amber of time.

In a country living largely in denial of its racist background it is a peculiar group that has taken upon itself to ring the alarm bells. It is a group of artists who have since the Sixties been ardent iconoclasts. Most active among them is ‘light-sculptor’ Roger Foley-Fogg, who also goes by the stage-name of Ellis D. Fogg. Roger tells me how much he is in awe of the Indian idea of ‘Vasudev Kutumbakam’ or the idea of the world as one family. Roger’s February show in Sydney was titled ‘Fire 2010: The Spirit of India’ and it gathered rave reviews from the art world especially because of its timing and its unqualified love for India. The show had featured ‘lumino kinetic’ works or sculptures made of LEDs and inspired by Lakshmi, Marut, Agni, Jal and the mandalas. “These were my personal impressions of the spirit of India,” says Roger, “the subtext of which includes the idea that all matter is made from light and music and the harmony created by their mixing.”

Roger’s ideas about the dreaming and the world as one family go back to his Sixties peer group. “I was first moved by this concept at the Yellow House (a former artists’ commune) nearly 40 years ago through an unpublished cartoon by Martin Sharp titled ‘We are all islands, joined beneath the sea’,” he remembers. Today, the thought of Indo-Oz relations being at their lowest ebb pains him. Roger’s light and film projects about Aborigine culture have tried to hold a mirror to mainstream Australia’s clumsy track-record of handling its otherness.

The biggest part, I believe, of any healing between cultures that have been at odds with each other is a dialogue. And what better way is there than using the language of music, art, literature and films to start that dialogue. Aussie filmmaker Albie Thoms made a case for exactly this kind of a movement in his Seventies’ book Polemics for a New Cinema. Surely there’s no better time than now for Australia to open itself for some healing. To tell stories about its struggle with its otherness, especially through films such as the Aborigine saga of Ten Canoes (2006) or the cross-cultural love story of The Combination (2009). And to take on the bigger challenge of getting mainstream Australia interested in the dreaming.

© Dhiraj Singh 2010

Yullangur Trail

2010-04-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

It was a chance meeting that brought us face to face with Les Bursill, a one-man authority on Sydney's Aboriginal history and anthropology. And we were lucky to have him as our guide to the sacred sites located in the Royal National Park in Sydney. A descendant of the Dharawal community of southern Sydney, Les is a walking encyclopaedia on his area and its unique customs. He is also a seasoned bushwalker as we found out while trying to make way through the thick foliage of the Australian bush. We took with us bottles of water to pour on the awesome engravings to make them visible in the glare of the midday sun, while Les took us on a fascinating journey to the beginning of 'the dreaming'... when Yullangur or the creation serpent first appeared... and how the 'celestial sisters' came to give birth to the first humans and how the early Aborigines carried out their Orca hunts in the Sydney bay area.

Sydney Serenade

2010-04-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

"I wanted to wear something bright and Indian," she said when we complimented her on her choice of colour. And that did make us happy. Happier still was her rendition of 'My Funny Valentine' on an amazingly overcast day (I love clouds!) at a bar overlooking the Sydney bay (wow, that rhymes!).

Edwina Blush writes her own songs, songs that her website describes as pithy, catchy pieces bringing lightness and balance to big heavy issues (environment, sexuality, politics, love...). To top it all she has a rich, soulful and mellow voice that adds layers of lustre to her songs.

She is also a three-time winner of the (Australian) National Poetry Debate and is often in demand at international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Helsinki Amorph!, Woodford, National Folk Festival Of Australia, Sydney Festival as well as social forums and business conferences. She appears regularly with her jazz quartet at the Opera Bar on the forecourt of Sydney's most famous cultural icon, the Sydney Opera House. Sahar and I had the privilege of meeting her at Roger Foley-Fogg's show opening and then later listening to her at the Opera Bar which was followed by a sumptuous Japanese lunch where she enlightened with us about the huge benefits of Mycology or the cultivation and use of various mushrooms species.

Edwina says she'd love to come to India and perhaps perform at one of our own jazz festivals.

Talking About Palm Island

2010-04-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

Talking About Palm Island happened quite by chance while sitting in Elisabeth Cummings' beautiful home-and-studio in suburban Sydney. Elisabeth is one of Australia's most respected living abstract expressionists and a wonderful human being. In this clip she's telling us about The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, a book that's impressed her immensely. The award-winning book by Chloe Hooper traces the custody death in 2004 of Cameron Doomadgee Mulrunji, a 36-year-old aboriginal man believed to have been a victim of the police's racial prejudice. The coroner's report tried to show Mulrunji's demise as a case of accidental death, which led to violent riots and sit-ins by the Palm Island aborigine community who alleged that Mulrunji was beaten to death. For me the incident is an important part of understanding race-relations in Australia and perhaps even back home in India where they take on a casteist colour.

Elisabeth, like many other Oz artists whom we met, also spoke about her deep fascination with the colours and sights of India. She was in Vrindavan recently where she had a great time visiting the temples and watching underprivileged kids paint.

Also at the table are Oz light-artist Roger Foley-Fogg, Hollywood film editor Francesca Emerson, CNN-IBN art correspondent (and wifey) Sahar Zaman and of course yours truly who's behind the camera.

A Place Called Gymea

2010-03-26T02:16:00.001-07:00

It's no coincidence that these (this and the one below) are inspired by Gymea, the place where we stayed in Sydney, Gymea, the native Australian lily and Les Bursill's amazing tour of Aborigine sacred sites.

The Gymea Lily (Doryanthes excelsa) is a flowering plant indigenous to the coastal areas of New South Wales around Sydney.
The plant has sword-like leaves more than a meter long. It flowers in spring and summer, sending up a flower spike up to 6 m high, which at its apex bears a large cluster of bright red flowers, each 10 cm across.

The name "Gymea Lily" is derived from a local Eora dialect. Dory-anthes means spear-flower in Greek, and excelsa is Latin for exceptional. The Sydney suburbs of Gymea and Gymea Bay are named after the lily.

The genus Doryanthes was first described in 1802 by the Portuguese priest, statesman, philosopher and botanist José Francisco Correia de Serra (1750–1823), a close friend of Sir Joseph Banks. Doryanthes excelsa has also inspired the naming of Doryanthes, the journal of history and heritage for Southern Sydney founded by Dharawal historian Les Bursill.

Source: Wikipedia

46 cm X 46 cm each
Acrylic on canvas

Spirit of India in Oz

2010-03-15T01:40:00.000-07:00

Pix: Sahar Z

“MOST of the work here is inspired by my interpretation of the spirit of India and the meaning of Diwali, the largest light festival in the world.

My original Sixties’ lightshows were inspired by India’s colourful gods, mandalas and the concept of Karma and in my innocence and naiveté I must confess that India seemed a particularly attractive society because Coca-Cola and other suspect symbols of the corporate world were banned at that time.

Recent trips have strengthened my impressions of the spirituality of India. Not the spirituality of any one religion or particular belief but the way that the belief and social systems in all the many different ‘Indias’ add up to manifest a harmonious whole. One family.

My advisor, friend and special guest at the Exhibition artist Dhiraj Singh tells me that this ancient Indian concept of Vasudev Kutumbakam which means—the world is one family—holds special relevance today particularly in our reaction to climate change and other world problems. We all have to work together.

I was first moved by this concept—of universal oneness—at the Yellow House, Sydney, nearly 40 years ago through an unpublished cartoon by Martin Sharp, once lost now found, titled—‘We are all islands, joined beneath the sea’.

My work is also inspired by the theatre and film of Albie Thoms from whom I discovered ‘the futurist manifesto for the theatre’. In recent years I have given a ‘futurist’-inspired lecture (‘7 Aspects of Light’) at the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, to a very mixed audience response and with the late Adrian Rawlins and the multi-talented Edwina Blush produced ‘Mr Fogg’s Music Hall’ as a chaotic, ‘futurist’ event.

On the other hand I also design, construct and production-manage the annual ‘Christmas Tree of Light, Darling Harbour’ in a highly organised manner for the children of Sydney and in support of the Starlight Foundation.

For this exhibition I have tried to get both sides of my brain in some kind of sync!”

—Roger Foley-Fogg aka Ellis D. Fogg
February 2010, Sydney

Bon Voyage, Pa!

2010-02-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

I believe we're most alive when we die... that's when we're liberated from the dragging weight of the body. On dying we become free and weightless as the sky. And like the sky we are given the gift of being present at many places at the same time.

I was in Sydney, Australia, when I received the news of my father's death. Just before he breathed his last he had given my mother extensive instructions about his funeral arrangements: how the family was not to be informed till it was a decent enough hour (he died at 4 am), how he didn't want his last rites to be delayed because of our (my brother's and my) arrival from two corners of the earth (my brother lives in the US). He died after telling my mother how much he loved her and how he was lucky to be going before her because he could not bear the idea of living without her. They had been married for 47 years.

In one of Roger Foley's interviews with Peggy Patrick, an aboriginal law woman, she tells of how her ancestors roamed the earth after they had been poisoned by their white 'owners'. She tells of another story where another white fisherman gives some fish to these dead ancestors and when he turns around he finds them gone. These ancestors then appear to their sons and tell them how they were murdered by the white men for stealing their cow. Peggy says how the dazed and surprised ancestors roamed the earth till they realised that they were really dead. They did not want revenge on the white man, they just wanted to pass on their stories to their descendents. Peggy Patrick's father was one of the men killed. Only her young uncle survived because he didn't eat the poisoned broth prepared by the white men of the village. He also escaped their shooting when they realised that he was not falling over like the rest who had had the broth.

I saw my father again five days after he'd died. We were at a hotel in Mumbai and I was there to see him off. He was taking a sea trip across to somewhere because his health didn't permit him to take the plane. Pa said he'd been very ill the night before but he had "survived" the night and was ready to take on the long voyage ahead of him...

Today we had a memorial service for Pa. We called it 'A Celebration of Life' and it was truly a celebration of what he'd meant to all three of us children, his wife and to his larger family that was really the whole wide world.

This one's for you, Pa. Have a great trip!

Our Friend's Show in Oz

2010-01-21T00:02:00.000-08:00

Roger Foley aka Ellis D. Fogg's lumino kinetics show, titled
'The Spirit of India--Fire 2010'...
We are honoured to be the 'special guests' at the opening :)

Cozmos 7

2009-12-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

36 cm X 36 cm
acrylic on canvas

Dialogue & Prelude

2009-12-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

Sigiriya

2009-12-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

My article in the Times of India's Crest mag (Nov 28, 2009)

Art Without Borders: Sri Lanka

2009-11-19T23:57:00.000-08:00

Interview in Young Asia TV...

A Testosterone-Fuelled Rebirth of Sorts

2009-11-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

107 cm X 76 cm
Acrylic on canvas

Sri Lanka Impressions

2009-11-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

(A report in Sri Lanka's DAILY MIRROR)

By Shabnam Farook

Abandon eight artists in a breathtaking location for four whole days, give them the freedom to draw inspiration from their surroundings and allow them do what they do best. Your guess is as good as mine - the results were magical and that was just what the organizers intended when the very first ArtEast Art Camp got underway at picturesque Jet Wing Vil Uyana recently.

ArtEast, founded by Mr. Karthik Menon (art enthusiast), is focused on promoting the development of varied art forms in Asian countries. As a first and inaugural event of ArtEast, "The Dialogue and Prelude", an interactive art workshop and tour was held in Sri Lanka from 26th of October to 1st of November for which five artists of repute from India and three well known artists from Sri Lanka participated. These artists who hail from diverse backgrounds worked together in a common platform with the intention of creating an opportunity of socio-cultural exchange among artists and art enthusiasts.

During the art camp, the artists were only too glad to share their experience in terms of their culture, thoughts, process, markets, audience, teaching and many more. The casual interaction was useful to see one another's cultures, styles and countries through their counterpart's eyes.

Prabhakar Kotle, who specializes in paintings was thrilled by his first visit to Sri Lanka and found the location inspirational. "It was like being at home," he smiled. Prabhakar, was excited by the idea of an art camp and pointed out "It is important to organize art camps like these which fuel dialogue and casual interaction between artists from different countries. There needs to be more co-operation among Asian countries in developing Asian art. It's time for Asian art to receive its independence. We should not be overwhelmed by western thinking, it’s time to look inwards for inspiration."

Dhiraj Singh an abstract artist from India, expressing his views added "During the art camp there were lots of ideas flowing. There was an informal exchange of ideas morning, noon and night, even during breakfast, lunch and dinner." For him, the art camp was an important event that succeeded in breaking down barriers and changing the artists’ attitudes...

Read full article here!

[120 cm X 80 cm (each), acrylic on canvas]
My works at the camp

(Another one in Sri Lanka's SUNDAY TIMES)

ArtEast, a workshop held in Sri Lanka opens up creative dialogue between Indian and local artists

By Megara Tegal

The treasure trove of distinctive art and architecture that is the Sri Lankan aesthetic heritage is yet to be unearthed and brought to the eyes of the world. This is the view of some Indian artists who were in Sri Lanka for a six-day workshop titled ‘ArtEast’ held at Vil Uyana recently to promote art between the two countries.

“The objective of ArtEast is to promote development of art forms in Asian countries. As part of the initiative we build relationship with artist communities through different interactive mechanisms. We have been meeting artists individually in Asian countries during our previous travels. However, the objective of this art camp is to meet them collectively and understand them by facilitating an interaction between artists from two countries,” says Saravanan Kandas, the main force behind ArtEast.

Sahar Zaman, a CNN IBN art journalist, who was covering the workshop for the art show she hosts, said, she thought the idea of the camp was great because she believes a lot of interaction should happen between artists in India and Sri Lanka. “It’s funny how close we are geographically and how close our culture, heritage and history are. But there’s somehow not so much interaction between our countries.”

“I don’t know what’s stopping that, it could have been the war that kept artists away, but I see a lot of promise and a lot of hope in this project and hopefully these events will set the ball rolling in spreading the word. When the news spreads about this artist camp organisers are going to follow suit and come here to Sri Lanka because it’s a place and a relationship that artists need to explore much more than we have,” said Sahar.

Other artists who participated in the workshop echoed Sahar’s sentiments about the connection between Indian and Sri Lankan art. Indian journalist cum contemporary artist, Dhiraj Singh, says “We are from the same cultural ethos. Art being a product of that ethos it’s inevitable that there are similarities. I see this (workshop) as a great platform for artists in India to reach out to Sri Lankan artists.”

Full article's here

Southern Lights

2009-10-17T00:21:00.000-07:00

This wonderful show was put up by our friend, Ellis D. Fogg (a.k.a. Roger Foley), who's been described by the Australian National Film and Sound Archive as the country's "most innovative lighting designer and lumino kinetic sculptor". Roger had been for some time playing with the idea of using his psychedelic, 1960s-inspired 'light works' in a uniquely Indian situation. Sahar provided the opportunity when she asked him to shoot a special Diwali story for her channel. The idea was to give Diwali a new twist and also make some kids at the Sai Kripa home in Delhi very happy.
In the video they can be seen having a blast on a specially designed 'light stage'.
Roger's works can be seen here...

Something to Think About

2009-10-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

This is the THE RAPE TUNNEL

My Favourites: India Art Summit, 2009

2009-09-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

Pix: Sahar Z

Artist: George K.

Artist: Princess Pea

Artist: Chitra Ganesh

Artist: Dhiraj Singh

Artist: El Anatsui

Artist: Anish Kapoor

Artist: Subodh Gupta

Artist: Ved Gutpa

Because, I think...
"(T)he new century has been seeing an expansion of ideas about art. Purists are beginning to see the avant-gardist’s desire to break free from the shackles of medium and message. Notions about art and authorship, originality and function, concept and technique are being questioned..."

Brides of Paradise*

2009-08-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

Though late by four decades, the subcontinent at the turn of the century has had it real good for Pop Art. It has been a time when recognition has finally come knocking down doors and glass ceilings that separated the street from the high-brow. Anything and everything can now be ‘artified’. A big part of this new openness is the IT boom and the unprecedented shrinkage it had caused to the world. A lot that was earlier considered un-doable is now possible. An image, for example, can be magnified 1000-fold and printed on to any surface. Art is slowly moving from the realm of visibility into that of thought. And it is within this realm of thought that a great creative convergence is taking place.

In India we had had a somewhat early start in the ’90s with shows of ‘calendar art’, installations inspired by kitschy juice stalls and with Bollywood making its presence felt in the works of serious artists. The new century has been seeing an expansion of ideas about art. Purists are beginning to see the avant-gardist’s desire to break free from the shackles of medium and message. Notions about art and authorship, originality and function, concept and technique are being questioned and the art of the soil is getting its place under the sun.

For most people anywhere in the world Pakistani trucks are like creatures of myth and legend. They may exist somewhere in the past (or future) but there’s just no scientific reason why they should at all. No one even knows exactly where they started to be like this. Or who was the first guy who painted his truck like that. Among the many versions I was to hear in Pakistan the one that sticks is that they are actually carts of long ago. They have over time developed steering wheels and acquired an engine. But essentially, they are carts that once pulled along the ancient Silk Route like herds of fiercely-coloured but harmless dinosaurs. Looking at them this way laid to rest a lot of speculation in my mind about their origins.

‘Truck Art’ as this growing movement is increasingly being referred to is actually an organic, indigenous Pop Art movement. A movement that is defined by its colours: shocking pinks, blinding yellows, fluorescent greens and iridescent blues. It is traffic- stopping stuff. Almost as if the painters have sponged up all colour from their surroundings, distilled it to a point of severe concentration and then used it on their vehicles. The resulting art is ‘folkish’ both in the repetition of its motifs and its acceptance of orthodoxy (its own), yet it sits very confidently at places usually given to showing all that’s considered high brow.

In other parts of the world communities that base their livelihoods on the movement of cargo don’t any more have the time to devote to decorating their vehicles. They have taken to easy-to-keep trucks with factory-made bodies. It’s not only cheaper and low-maintenance it also doesn’t attract too much attention. A big part of the trucker’s life is spent on the road where he’s only a number on the numberplate. He is after all a solitary creature. Although, he likes topping the road’s food-chain, he doesn’t like to make a big show of it. In fact he likes to blend in as much as possible. The fact that he is hidden from other ‘lesser’ vehicles is to him a very reassuring thought. He may be the king of the road but he doesn’t like to brag.
But the Pakistani trucker is a different kettle of fish. He is a man who loves his truck, deeply. To him it is not a ‘beast of burden’ but a piece of art that needs to be shown off. And admired.

Like any growing economy trucks are also Pakistan’s lifeline. They transport food, fuel, cattle and other essential commodities to and from different corners of the country. They are sometimes associated with illicit trade and weapons smuggling too. But it’s not just the inside that’s important in the life of a truck. Its outside too becomes a significant carrier… of ideas. Of messages that are subliminal as well as loud, messages that run on wheels from their point of origin to some other remote address somewhere. They are like art galleries carrying with them the works of many artists, telling many tales, many narratives: from the owner’s provenance to his sporting heroes to what he feels about his country’s missile programme, just about anything finds expression here.

On the long and strapping Motorway connecting Lahore and Peshawar they also provide visual relief in an otherwise minimalist horizon of asphalt, earth and sky. Watching them whiz past you, you’re zapped back to the days of the Silk Route, when caravans made up most of the traffic in these parts. Camels and some elephants in carved wood caparisons sometimes covered with sheets of beaten gold and silver, studded with beads and mirror-work and overhangs of patterned jute and cotton weaves. Others loaded with silks, jewels and spices trudged these paths leaving behind them a buzz of aromas and a Babel of sounds. The trucks of today don’t make that sort of a lingering spectacle, because they have speed on their side. But what they lose out to speed they make up with size, as they cover the length and breadth of the country dissolving differences, tying it up together as only ideas can. This image of a truck in fact connects directly to the ‘bioscope man’ who was a regular at village fairs. How with his double-drum (dumroo) he announced the highlights of the magic contained inside his painted box. The truck in Pakistan becomes an inverted analogue of the bioscope: coloured and 'imagified' (unlike the bioscope) on the outside as they travel and connect people through the use of visuals.

Where similarities abound between most things in India and Pakistan, there is strangely no equivalent of the Pakistani truck in India. Trucks in India are treated merely as carriers of goods at best and at worst, traffic-devouring monsters. Visually too they aren’t the best-looking sights you’d see driving on Indian highways. Most truck decoration in India consists of a few brush-strokes of mandatory information: National Permit/State Permit, OK Tata, Horn Please and stuff like that. Sometimes it also includes caveats against the evil eye, the most common of which is, ‘Buri nazar wale, tera mu kala!’ (Shame on you, evil eyed one!). Besides this, there is some glittery jhalar, some cloth hair (paranda) and some birds in flight indicating the nature of the truck’s long journey. Apart from this there is little that speaks of feelings of ownership and pride that trucks in Pakistan evoke.

Pakistani trucks are like brides, dressed from head to toe in the finest of silks and choicest handmade kundan. They also remain, in a sense, frozen in time… in a state of prenuptial decoration. A state that never lets the grime of the kitchen or the dust of the fields settle on itself. Never goes through the rigours of child-birth. These truck-brides never turn into housewives, mothers, widows and ageing matriarchs. This curious state of perpetual bridehood is what makes them so unique.

It speaks of a deeper infatuation with the prenuptial bride, a nubile virgin who though ready for the rites of marriage is still waiting for true love to rescue her. In her dressy allure she is very much the cynosure of all eyes yet she has her eyes set on the distant horizon, waiting for her true love to emerge from it. Love and longing have for too long enraptured the subcontinental imagination. Every age, every era has had its own doomed love story. From the complicated romance of Radha and Krishna to the Heer-Ranjha tragedy and the Devdas debacle, there has been no shortage of tales of longing and separation. The truck painters have sort of internalised this cruel fate. And so they heap upon the truck their talent, their sweat and long hours, creating a spiritual facsimile of the Taj Mahal or the ultimate expression of love.

Much of the imagery that decorates the outer body comes from a sense of virginal romance. A sense fed on the legends of Heer-Ranjha and Laila-Majnun. The imagery becomes both a celebration of and a cautionary tale against such a doomed romance. In fact the lines between the two functions are often so blurred that it becomes imperative for the painter to show this through an obsessive detailing that covers every possible space of the truck’s body with symbols of union such as flowers, eyes, birds of paradise and fruit.

Not surprisingly, truck art becomes an advertisement for a semiotic paradox, rooted as it is in a deeper well of subcontinental prejudice where the wife evokes feelings of ownership and familiarity in contrast to the mystery and allure of a bride. It’s not rare for drivers to show-off their truck-brides, especially to camera-carrying foreigners. Doors are swung open, hatches unbolted and poses struck to show interested onlookers the love and pride a driver feels for his bride. ‘Please see inside… this is Pakistan tradition,’ invitations such are these are commonplace as even the busiest driver or his cleaner will put aside other business to devote himself completely to the more important task of getting clicked with his bride.

But I think the connection runs deeper. The bride in her mystery also begins to take on the nature and persona of a mother. One of his mother’s greatest allure in the mind of the Greek hero Oedipus was his sense of ownership of her. In his mind his mother belonged to no one but himself and this right his father could only challenge with the threat of mortal combat. Where in most cultures it’s considered natural for a man to refer to his favourite ride by a feminine name or pronoun, such identification in the context of the truck-bride takes on a world of textures and meanings. Especially, when ‘she’ begins to resemble a Greek tragedienne. Or she becomes, in the imagination of the driver-son, a complex creature of myth. One that is always young and beautiful and in her allure and beauty belongs to no one. Not even the driver-son, who labours daily to keep her looking like a million bucks. He spends hours of his time and loads of his earnings making sure that his truck-bride looks her pre-nuptial best. And yet in his deepest heart he isn’t sure whether he’s won her affections and for how long.

So what are his rewards for this kind of unceasing adulation and heroine-worship? In exchange of this he gets to possess her, remain eternally in utero, womb-bound, because it’s the only place where he feels safest even when crossing the most dangerous stretches of his journey. He recognises that the womb is his ultimate sanctum where no one can reach him, no one can intrude. From this place he can, give or take a few minor hitches, feel truly like god, unseen yet in total control.

The truck-bride’s ‘cockpit’ is not only the hub for various machine functions it also becomes the truck’s creative pabulum, from which emerges much colour and art. And the son-driver inside this cockpit-womb becomes the eternal foetus giving rise to a slew of outward (hormonal) changes to the person of the mother-truck. By possessing the womb the driver gets to direct a lot of the truck-bride’s affairs. Things like her outward adornment, the parts of her body that need alteration, rework and refitting. All this he directs and manages from the cocoon of the cockpit.

The womb is also a veritable shrine, a sacralised space containing all that is not of this world. It’s the seat of the powers that need to be propitiated for the relationship to grow and flourish without any hiccups. Like an invisible umbilicus, framed pictures of the Ka’aba, verses from the Quran and different names of Allah take up the space above the windscreen. It is almost as if this metaphorical bride-son relationship is claiming divine sanction.

One reason for the successful perpetuation of this paradox, where purity and incest go hand in hand, is the space that sainted motherhood occupies in the subcontinental imagination. The mother figure is the ultimate centre of everything. Everything emerges from her and finally goes back into her. Every female form, therefore, has within it a mother. This all-encompassing feminine in fact disinfects the paradox of all incestual overtones. Instead it creates, in the minds of its bearers, a mysterious transcendence that is god.

Trucks in India too have this form of sacral space devoted to the gods. But one significant difference is the absence of art on the truck’s outer body. Some feel the difference has roots in the Islamic prohibition of making images (of man). So where the Indian trucker finds no need to give colour and form to his relationship with his ride, his Pakistani counterpart finds it impossible not to. Because for him the truck becomes a vehicle of transgression, the bearer of the impossible, the carrier of art and ideas… boldly going where no man could ever go… all by himself.

© Dhiraj Singh 2009
* Published in Art&Deal magazine (Creators of New Media; vol. 6 no. 3 issue no. 29)

Urban Shaman II

2009-08-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

Urban Shaman 1 & 2 seek to reconstruct the city as a psychological map. Or a man-made jungle of uncertainties, obsessions, mysteries, illnesses, taboos, contradictions, madnesses, possessions and some moments of lucid thinking when everything begins to make sense. The artist uses X-ray plates as a narrative device; a choice that seeks to trace the roots of the urban jungle. Much like an X-ray as it is used in its original context! The Urban Shaman is like an ‘X-ray of Intent’—a totem or an idol—that takes on an expiatory role both because of its other-worldly appearance as well as its familiarity of functions. Urban Shaman aims to be a study of an organism with prosthetics, dependencies and habits. As also of an organism in denial… of the effect his things and acquisitions have on his life and being. And whose ritualised love, fear, loathing and reverence often see him groping for answers in his ‘psychological jungle’.
DHIRAJ SINGH

At the India Art Summit 2009

Urban Shaman 1 & Space Urbanarium

2009-08-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

My works: 'Urban Shaman 1' and 'Space Urbanarium' that are part of the Connaught Place: The Whynotplace show at Religare Arts.i Gallery

You Are Invited

2009-08-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

Courtesy: Religare Arts.i Gallery

Fierce Creature 9

2009-08-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

132 cm X 173 cm
acrylic on canvas

Fierce Creature 8

2009-07-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

103 cm X 76 cm
acrylic on canvas

Fierce Creature 7

2009-07-17T12:14:00.000-07:00

86 cm X 170 cm
acrylic on canvas

Fierce Creature 6

2009-07-14T00:26:00.000-07:00

91 cm X 104 cm
acrylic on canvas

Fierce Creature 5

2009-07-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

115 cm X 82 cm
acrylic on canvas

Fierce Creature 4

2009-07-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

86 cm X 170 cm
acrylic on canvas

'Sufism on Canvas'

2009-07-03T13:59:00.000-07:00

This show opened on July 1st and will go on till July 10 at Art Junction, The Lalit (hotel), New Delhi.
Manisha Koirala of Dil Se fame was there too...

Fierce Creature 3

2009-06-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

81 cm X 112 cm
acrylic on canvas

Night Vision

2009-06-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

The sky is black,
the stars shine silver,
the birds are sleeping in their nests.
The moon casts shadows,
wild beasts go hunting;
but people lie asleep and unaware
of the peace, the stillness,
and the beauty of the night!

I wrote this poem called 'NIGHT' for my school mag when I was in 'Class III-B'... about 7 years old... :)

Fierce Creature 2

2009-06-11T00:41:00.000-07:00

The inspiration for this work lies in the rather rare 'dragon' imagery in Sufism. The dragon like the lion beccomes a fierce creature that points towards a wilful and radical change in perception and self-awareness. This fact is beautifully illustrated by practising Dervish and writer Payam Nabarz in a passage in his book, The Mysteries of Mithras. Says Nabarz: "In Sufism the dragon relates two astronomical nodes, two diametrically opposed points of intersection between the moon and the sun. Its head is the ascending node, its tail the descending node. An eclipse can only occur when both sun and moon stand at the nodes. To the (Sufi) mystic, the dragon symbolises the place of encounter between the moon and the sun within. The dragon can either devour the moon, seen symbolically as the mystic's spiritual heart, or it can serve as the place or container of conception. By entering the dragon when the sun is in the nodes, the moon or the heart conceives. Thus, in full consciousness of the perils, one must enter the dragon to await the eclipse in its cosmic womb.”

Fierce Creature 1

2009-06-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

This one is inspired by the famous Sufi fable where a lion walking through the desert found a little lion cub playing with some sheep. It happened that the little lion had been reared with the sheep, and so it had never had a chance or an occasion to realize what it was. The lion was greatly surprised to see a lion cub running away and being just as afraid of a lion as sheep are. The lion jumped in among the flock of sheep and said, 'Halt, halt!' But the sheep ran away and the little lion ran, too. The lion only pursued the lion cub, not the sheep; and when it caught up with it, the lion said, 'I wish to speak to you.' The cub said, 'I tremble, I am afraid, I cannot stand before you.' The lion said, 'Why are you running about with the sheep? You, yourself, are a little lion!' 'No,' said the little one. 'I am a sheep. Let me go, let me go with the sheep.' 'Come along,' said the lion,' come with me and I will show you what you are before I let you go.' Trembling, yet helpless, the cub followed the lion to a pool of water. Pointing at their reflections in the pool, the lion said, 'Look at me and look at yourself. Do we not resemble each other closely? You are not like the sheep, you are like me!'

Art Without Borders: Pakistan

2009-05-26T04:27:00.000-07:00

Our interview at Dawn News in Pakistan...

Lost

2009-05-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

65 cm X 65 cm
acrylic, aluminium foil and enamel paint on paper

It was a good day to get lost, thought Hero, so he tugged at his leash and the leash tugged at the hand holding it. The hand dropped the leash. Hero was now free to roam the world, chasing those bright smells of freedom.

The Hidden Gallery

2009-04-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

Four of my works (So Long America, Saturn Moons & Rings, Cozmos 1 and Sol Invictus) from last year (2008) are up at The Hidden Gallery (A6 Asola Homes, Behind Shanni Dham Temple, Fatehpur Beri, Delhi) till May first week.
Do try and make some time!

Inside a Grass Blade

2009-04-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

65 cm X 65 cm
dry pastel and acrylic on canvas

Vacuum-womb/Space-child

2009-04-18T05:31:00.000-07:00

acrylic and enamel on paper
65 cm X 65 cm
an idea is obviously not matter... because it has no substance
yet it continues to occupy space and grow and expand.
an idea is like the vacuum of outer space that though brimming with activity is usually defined by negation... as an 'absence of matter'.

The Problem With Pakistan

2009-04-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

‘Islamabad is an hour’s drive from Pakistan.’

This local koan begins to make sense as you prepare to enter the ICT or the Islamabad Capital Territory. It is a bit like entering the First World from a Third World country by road. The check-posts, the armed guards, the four-lane highway that fits into the triangular city like a shaft in an arrowhead, everything fills you with a sense of anticipation, the kind poor immigrants might feel for a land of opportunity.

From the check-post you can see the humungous petal-like arches of the National Monument. Shining like a giant flower or a three-headed obelisk announcing your arrival. Telling you that you’ve arrived somewhere foreign… somewhere not quite Pakistan. The ICT is nothing like any other city in the country. In fact many of its proud residents compare it to ‘DC’ minus the Potomac. About an hour’s drive away, on the other end of the arrow is Rawalpindi or Pindi as it is commonly known. Pindi is what Islamabad isn’t. The real McCoy.

The capital of Pakistan is a built-from-scratch metropolis. It’s also a state of mind especially among the rich and the powerful. Almost like as a nagging feeling that they have on their hands a state that is at best a mosaic of differences and at worst, not a state at all. And the fear is not unfounded. It’s like a test-tube of oil and water where one settles on top of the other no matter how much they are shaken or stirred. Islamabad is the oil on top the water.

Power cuts in the country range anywhere between 8 hours to half a day. Near Gujranwala we’re faced with a chakka-jam or road demonstration, people burning their electricity bills. Bills that sought to overcharge them for power not delivered. Essential commodity prices are so high that even flour for the daily bread is sold in the black market. Many farmers even in the ultra-fertile Punjab province have not seen a good crop in years. The journey from Wagah to Lahore on the Samjhauta Express shows the striking contrast between the condition of farmers in the two Punjabs. Where the Indian Punjab has swank car showrooms spread across it like confetti, the other side has its enclaves of squalor.

One thing that Islamabad doesn’t lack is space. It has a green cover far exceeding its built-up area. It has landscaped gardens, awesomely laid out residential blocks, fancy markaz’s or shopping plazas, lavish bungalows many of whose owners live outside the ICT or even outside Pakistan. These are just-in-case residences and they have an ambassadorial function being as they are inside the nucleus of the nation. You need a presence in the Capital, especially if you have business interests to take care of.

“That is the government employees’ colony,” a friend points out a set of run-down high rises. These are probably the worst kept of Islamabad’s buildings. They look comfortable if not architecturally superior, like the rest of the city. The city even has digital speed monitors. So if your speedometer is non-functional you can look up to see if you’re over-speeding and subsequently get a ticket from a cop who catches up with you like lightening.

There are road signs in Urdu and English. There is also freedom to spray them with paint. One says: ‘Bye Bye Israel’, another with a pair of breasts, a less cryptic, ‘Fuck you’. For those who can read Urdu the writing on the wall is more disturbing because there are places where you can find invitations to the Taliban to take over the Federal Capital.

It is as if the members of the republic don’t any more have confidence in their government. As if there’s been a serious conspiracy to unmake Pakistan. They may routinely blame India’s RAW or the CIA but there’s enough evidence that the Pakistani elite have not held back their own contributions in screwing up their country. I think L.K. Advani must have felt it too when he spoke about Jinnah’s vision for a different sort of Pakistan than what stands today in its names. Wasn’t the country meant to be a refuge for the pure? A new and pure Holy Land extracted from the contaminated ore of Hindustan. A new Holy Land whose brave new Capital would have the singular distinction of being called Islamabad or the City of Islam.

A lot of Islam’s high ideals are based on issues of social justice and equity that outlaw anything that compromises a Muslim’s claim to a good life. That’s why canonical Islam had outlawed usury, gambling and wasteful expenditure on wine, women and song. This codification has been very essential to the Islamic worldview… ensuring that the larger congregation or ummah is safeguarded against injustice both within and without. But the problem with Pakistan doesn’t lie there. It lies rather in the way the Islamic worldview has been translated here. For a country that was formed on the assumption that the ummah couldn’t find safety and security among non-Muslims, the problem now has become a race to find ‘non-Muslims’ within the ummah, or in the Orwellian sense a race to find those ‘less equal’.

In conversations over chai cups one often comes across references to the ‘air-conditioned Begums of Islamabad’. It is not supposed to be a flattering description but alludes to all that is privileged, all that is insular. Outside, a harsh race is on. To prove whose blood boils more at the atrocities committed on the ummah by the non-Muslims, in India, in Afghanistan or in Iraq. For those who don’t have access to YouTube it’s easy to get a CD on this sort of propaganda. It’s funny how the new connectivity is being used to fight old wars.

Though generally speaking Islam’s empowerment of the individual makes every Muslim duty-bound to fulfill the five cardinal pillars of Islam, it also implies that every Muslim stand up, physically if need be, against injustice. This in itself is not a bad thing… until it begins to overwhelm the individual. Giving him the right to play judge, jury and hangman whenever he perceives a threat. And perceptions by themselves, as our long and tired history of prejudices has proved, are often not the best judge of things.

The road to the Islamabad Marriott has been cordoned off after a truck loaded with explosives killed at least 54 people and injured another 260 on September 20 last year. The truck had over 600 kg of RDX. I am there exactly a month later and of course I don’t get to see the Marriott. A former federal minister who was visiting his daughter in Islamabad remembers hearing the windows of his daughter’s house opposite the hotel explode with the impact. “I could have died if I was outside… hit by shrapnel or something,” he says.

Geographically Islamabad lies inside a horse-shoe of hills. From here Murree and Nathiagali, the country’s best known hill stations, are only a few hours drive. A lot of Pakistan’s rich have their summer houses in these hill resorts. A ship-shaped restaurant at the top of the nearby Margalla Hill provides the best view of Islamabad. From the main deck of the restaurant the ICT twinkles below like a facsimile of the night sky. It could be Rome with Faisal Mosque as its Piazza Venezia. The best thing about the journey from Islamabad to the top of Margalla Hill is the road. It looks as if it was just laid yesterday. Margalla Hill also has a national park, which perhaps has as many animals as it has Pakistan Rangers on guard duty.

“The problem with Pakistan”, as everyone from a chaiwalla to a high-serving bureaucrat will tell you “is not that we are not smart enough, or rich enough… the problem (in a low voice) is the Army”. The problem with Pakistan is at the moment a silent one. There is growing anger against a section of Pakistan that is considered inauthentic by the majority. This is the foreign-returned, English-speaking Pakistan, a minority that has in a way made a Faustian bargain with the West.

Mohammed Zeeshan grew up in rural Sindh. Growing up he was fascinated by the colour and speed of moving pictures. Born poor but full of prodigious talent Zeeshan had little choice but to become a sign painter while still in school. He was later recruited by an ustad who painted movie posters. The apprenticeship involved censoring foreign skin-flick posters with black paint. This is where Zeeshan learnt the art of subterfuge or hiding that which is unpalatable. Today his graphic nude miniatures sell abroad for lakhs of rupees. His art for the local market is more ‘covered’. But the early days taught him what no art school could. “It was an intense time of study for me… I was not yet old enough to be watching these films that played in the morning shows… I didn’t even understand the pornography in it… for me it was just an image on to which I was expected to carefully add layers of my own interpretation,” says he. Much of those early days imagery survive in Zeeshan’s art today.

But Zeeshan’s an exception. Most others like him buy into the extremist propaganda. It is easy to demonise the rich and blame them for every thing that’s not right with Pakistan. Not every kid gets to make art, use his imagination and make money. For most growing up outside the big cities art and music and poetry take on the shape of a beast. A beast that is fascinating as it is terrible. That’s also why the country is a hotbed for many underground groups and subcultures.

Karachi’s Rainbow Centre or the not-so-underground bazaar where pirated CDs of foreign films are sold is often the bull’s eye of fundamentalist fury. Shop-owners here receive regular threats from extremist groups. Ultimatums, that they burn their Bollywood and porn CDs in public. The shop-owners for their part routinely call in the media and make bonfires of CDs. CDs that aren’t necessarily the ‘evil ones’. That way everyone goes home happy.

On the other side there is anger too. Anger of the rich whose art and culture stands imperiled by the designs of ‘the mullah element’. At one fashionable soiree in Lahore, someone even provides a solution to the ‘fundoo’ problem. “Nuke the fuckers,” he says between sips of boot-legged Bordeaux. Another friend while driving me around the old city almost runs over a bearded man, “I hate these bloody mullahs,” he says.

But the problem in Pakistan isn’t just its fundoos. But a missing middleclass, a clover-leaf bridge that brings the poor on to the same highway as the rich. The tragedy however is that now it’s just too late to start building that bridge.

© Dhiraj Singh 2009

Brainbow

2009-04-04T00:33:00.000-07:00

acrylic on paper
65 cm X 65 cm
The colours of the brain!

Velcro: Hooks & Loops

2009-04-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

100 cm X 90 cm
acrylic on canvas

Saffron Smoke

2009-04-02T03:29:00.000-07:00

acrylic on paper
65 cm X 65 cm

Smoke

2009-03-25T02:19:00.000-07:00

acrylic on paper
65 cm X 65 cm

Kolkata-2009

2009-03-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

“It was shortly after that (26/11-Mumbai) on December 19, a motley group of artists met at Aakriti Art Gallery in Kolkata to discuss a new movement, a movement which would bring the artist community together and voice its protest against mindless terrorism. And thus was born the Art Against Terrorism concept which has now crystallized into a huge exhibition of paintings, sculpture and woodwork across eight top galleries of the city which will be held simultaneously beginning March 23 with the first show kicking off (at Aakriti) and ending April 9.”
--India Today

If you happen to be in Kolkata you can go and see this show...
it has my work.

Love is an Inflatable Duck

2009-03-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

acrylic, soft pastel, band-aid, film roll, printed paper, glue, marker pen on paper
65 cm X 65 cm

Mercury

2009-03-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

acrylic, paper, glue, marker pen on paper
65 cm X 65 cm

Holi! Holi! Holi! Holi! Holi!

2009-03-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

(Pic by Sahar Z)

Or in the words of Allen Ginsberg...
"The world is holi! The soul is holi! The skin is holi!"

Lux Mundi

2009-03-07T01:11:00.000-08:00

66 cm X 96 cm
acrylic on canvas
Lux Mundi is literally, the Light of the World, and is one of the many honorifics of Christ. In this work 'light' becomes a metaphor for all that is well-meaning, good and beautiful in the world today. But where on the one hand this virtue stands out amid all that is bad, mean and ugly, it also has to pay the price of being so... by having to bleed like the original Lux Mundi.

Resurrection

2009-03-05T01:02:00.000-08:00

96 cm X 56 cm
acrylic on canvas
Taking the story on from the Easter legend of Christ's resurrection, this one tries to explore the phenomenonology behind it... What it means to restart an engine that has evidently packed up... what it means to conjure life back into a body that has begun its return to the elements. This one's a sort of spectroscopy of resurrection. That's why there is an excess of 'happy' colours and 'solar' colours as much of our life on Earth revolves around the sun (pun unavoidable!) starting with our quotidian functions that get started at day break to the grand greening of the planet through photosynthesis.

Wing Bling

2009-03-01T21:09:00.000-08:00

This gorgeous creature I found hanging on to my window mesh in Shivpuri one morning. At first I thought it was a kite (it was that big), then thought maybe someone's pulling a fast one on me... with a rubber toy. So I reached out to yank it off the window and it beat its wings a wee bit. And I realised, I was being paid a visit by some kind of a giant. Immediately I brought out my mobile and captured it in it. Later on when I showed the picture to some nature watchers, I was told that this creature's called an Atlas Moth and it is the largest of its species.

Like Insects

2009-02-09T01:23:00.000-08:00

60 cm X 42 xm
Paper, glue on paper

Nefertiti: The Female Christ

2009-02-06T01:40:00.000-08:00

Acrylic on A4 paper
The most thrilling thing about Christhood is also the most misunderstood. We often fail to understand that it is a principle... a messianic idea that has since time immemorial had many claimants; more men than women. Messianism also has implicit within it the idea of changing the status quo... finding a new way... a new religion... and in that Nefertiti (more than her husband Akhenaten) made quite a mark, not just in ancient Egypt but in the entire history of the world. Their religion of a unified single God (Aten or the light of the Sun) is either as old as Judaic monotheism or is clearly its predecessor. This was a remarkable idea because everywhere in their contemporary world there were still pantheons of gods that ruled different aspects of life and death. Not suprisingly both Nefertiti and Akhenaten suffered the fate of heretics, not in their lifetimes though because they were monarchs but posthumously. This is often the fate and price of Christhood.
This one’s my tribute to Willem de Kooning, a stalwart of Abstract Expressionism, a movement that I dig… almost as much I do Nefertiti.

Sisyphus

2009-01-31T07:21:00.000-08:00

Dry pastel on A4 size paper
The artist, to me, is like Sisyphus, cursed to take a boulder uphill. For every few steps that he moves up the natural inertia of things pull him back downhill whenever he stops to fill up his lungs. It is the artist’s curse to keep on making things. New things, relevant things, things that contain his unique fingerprint… his unique imagination. It is the act of creation that is his redemption, where he tries to give birth to all that is ready and waiting inside his head… waiting to be delivered from a realm of imagination to solid manifestation. This is the artist’s cross, to keep on delivering bits of his imagination over and over again… till there comes a point when nothing more remains to be said because everything has become manifest.

Free Speech

2009-01-28T02:01:00.000-08:00

This photo-collage started out as a picture of a sieve lying on a pile of bed weave. I added to it layers from different photographs and photoshopped it some, rotated it a bit... the result is called 'Free Speech'... something I've been thinking about a lot lately...

Message Bird

2009-01-23T03:06:00.000-08:00

The other day I had a dream… I was spending time with my folks, we were at an unfamiliar but friendly upstairs place, chatting, eating and generally catching up when I suddenly feel this weight on my shoulder. I know it’s a bird because I can also feel the wind from its flapping wings. I bend my shoulder to have a better look at the bird. It’s a pigeon. A white pigeon and it is holding on to my back. I get this sense that this is some kind of message-bird so I bend and turn around in a way that its perch between my shoulder blades is given a shake. The bird loses its grip on my back and lands on my forearm. Now I can see it fully. It is a white pigeon but with the head of a man. Funny thing is that am more surprised at having caught a pigeon than the kind of pigeon I've caught. The head is skinny and roundish, stubbled and with a receding hairline. It is a face I've never seen before. This man-bird has on his face the look kids sometimes have before wailing out aloud. I try to comfort this creature but he doesn't seem to be in a hurry to start wailing. I get a sense that he has chosen me for some kind of a silent benediction… And then I wake up… feeling a bit strange, a bit sad… wondering what message this bird has brought me. Wondering if the bird itself was the message?

Elephant Breaks Table

2009-01-20T11:33:00.000-08:00

This is where my neighbours store their junk: a deep fire-place sort of recess in the wall upstairs. Spilling out of this space is a coffee-table with a broken leg. On the table's top is a hunting scene... in the style of Rajasthani miniatures, complete with royalty and attendants. But before the hunt could be completed the table gave way under the weight and wisdom of the elephant.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Elephants and tables make strange bedfellows!!

Wall-makes-a-face

2009-01-16T15:36:00.000-08:00

My photographs, am gradually realising, resemble my works on canvas. This one was taken alongwith this... I like the way a smear of paint (made by someone else) has for me become a pareidolic tongue.

Cozmos 6

2009-01-11T09:10:00.000-08:00

90 cm X 90 cm
Acrylics and enamel paint on canvas

Psolitaire

2009-01-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

Collage, from details of 'Psolitaire' (a sculpture I made from a CD, some glass pieces, wire and industrial glue). This is an improvisation of Psychedelic Angel.
Below is another version...

Chulbul reading Karim

2009-01-07T23:35:00.000-08:00

Time magazine calls Karim Rashid, the 'poet of plastic', others have credited to him the invention of the 'blobject'. Rashid is the new kid on the block for industrial design, and has over 2000 designs to his credit. These range from interiors, fashion, furniture, lighting, art and music to installations. His work is in permanent collections in 14 museums across the world, including MoMA in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and various other international galleries.
(Source: Wikipedia)

A Page from History

2008-12-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

The Little Magazine, Volume IV, Issue 4, 2003

This is the first page of my first published story, STARDUST. It has been a long time since I wrote another... Funny how today, the last day of 2008, I suddenly felt nostalgic about my life as a fiction writer.

Here's the full text of Startdust, uncut and unedited!!

IT WAS ALMOST as if the refrigerator was part of Vidisha’s sack race. It shook. It rumbled and cleared its chilled windpipes. Made threats, as if it was going to explode. But Vidisha was too far gone to notice. She was thresholding in raw unworded screams, like someone gagged on unbearable pain. Her coming drowned the refrigerator’s chilly wind-piped noise for half an inexact minute. But the refrigerator went on alone, unbothered. She noticed its thrashing crescendo when her breathing had begun to lose its steam engine rush.

“Is it coming too?” she said laughing, so hard that she felt herself choke and her stomach tighten like a fist. Saurabh bobbed his head in the direction of the refrigerator to check for outward signs of pleasure—or pain—causing it to stop, suddenly as if his eyes were a remote control. It stood in the corner interrupted and chastised, panting its last moments of ecstasy and exhaustion into some soundproofed hole in the wall.

Like Vidisha its private joy had been enjoyed slyly, through a peephole.

She entered sleep like a half-taught swimmer, tentatively wading into the depths and crosscurrents of new waters. She waded some and looked back to regard the newness of Saurabh’s hairy body, the clean-shaven knob of his neck and the purplish marks that covered it like a smile. She thought the smile had been her doing. It made her happy. She felt like an artist who had just signed a masterpiece. She wanted to hold him but felt hesitant. She didn’t know him any better than when she first laid eyes on him.

In a way he had been the strangest of her strangers. His passion had had the hint of ritual. She felt worshipped and restored. His body seemed cold beneath his sweaty glove skin. Like her favourite fried ice cream, he’d felt warm and soft on the outside but chilling and solid within. She liked to feel the two dessert sensations melt and tease the inside of her mouth. But with Saurabh there had been no melting and teasing.

Yet Vidisha was thrilled to have met him. Got him. And have him added to her long list. He had made her feel things she had only read about in women’s magazines. She slept dreaming of bruising him again. And of women’s magazine sex and a new life like she had on her last night at home.

They had met in the morning at Sapna Lodge. The few times Vidisha didn’t have a place she came to Sapna. Sapna was a dream she visited whenever she felt lonely. She felt safe at Sapna, because the staff there didn’t raise eyebrows when she checked in with different men.

In a way Sapna was like Vidisha’s architectural double. She liked the way Sapna was built. Three storeys tall, neon-announced, brick naked and peruked with loud magenta bougainvillea, Sapna was like an Amazon amid Sundar Nagar’s corset pygmies with French windows and grilled gardens. Like Vidisha Sapna was her own woman. She had guests but that was the limit of her attachment.

Vidisha was visiting India after three ‘long’ years. Long was her way of laundering the oily innocence of a girlhood she had loathed. She had hated the rules of belonging. Hated being forced to be good because she wasn’t born wheat fair and rosy tempered in a family that was pink and polite.

She’d gone to New York to study international merchandising at a heavy-duty fashion school because her family could afford it. But the fashion school was just an aside. An excuse. Her real study began after school hours. Among the other things Vidisha had lost in New York was the way her mouth moved to use words. She now said “Mur-see” and “Whatever” when she was frustrated or disinclined to argue. She also slurred her ‘r’s, yawned her ‘a’s and limned ‘i’s into words like ‘can’t’ and ‘man’.

She met Saurabh at Sapna’s wood and stone reception. He was hiding behind a shock of yellow roses with lips the colour of healing wounds. Three brass-rimmed Roman dials kept an eye on him. And on the time in London, New York and Moscow. Delhi's time was trapped in the bright red dots of a digital timepiece below the healing wound roses.

Vidisha had wondered why the receptionist had seemed so officious and distant. In her long absence from her country she had become unused to the ways of men like Saurabh. Their reserve, their gruff friendliness and their roundabout ways of showing interest. But Vidisha hadn’t totally forgotten her Delhi days.

Though Delhi wasn’t exactly New York there was lots to study by way of variety and numbers. The study was for a dictionary of male sexual behaviour. Vidisha thought of herself as a near authority on the subject. Not that she was ever inaccurate in putting her studies into boxes she had made of imaginary cardboard.

But her dictionary had a serious flaw because it had just one reference. Herself. Saurabh had interested her because he'd seemed unboxable, not so much in the way he looked but the way he held himself. There was something odd and serious about him. It was as if his hands were tied to extremes of caution and urgency on two different posts behind his back.

He had avoided looking at her when he’d asked for her passport. His smile had been weary as if he was Atlas holding the world on his back. The fat steel dial on his left hand told of another time. "How long will you be at Sapna?" was the only full sentence he’d spoken to her.

The rest of their meeting had been like a dream. She had produced her Master Card on which she smiled, thumbnailed and abbreviated, signed the Lodge register and accepted the gilted plastic keytag from Saurabh gingerly brushing against the generous fuzz of his ringless hands. On her way to her room she had dazzled him with her smile as she bid him "Adios amigo" wondering if he'd get the amorous lilt in her Spanish goodbye. Wondering also if she'd been understated enough to catch his attention.

Vidisha was from Panipat. She hated it when her fashionable classmates in Delhi said, 'But you don't look like you're from whassitcalled'. In her heart she had never felt like a towny. Even when she first came to Delhi as a student at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, she hadn't felt small because of her towniness. It was in Delhi that she first felt the urge to begin work on her dictionary. She was soaked in freedom like Delhi's low-visibility winter mornings. She could do as she pleased, with whosoever she pleased and no one would bother.

Now she was back in Delhi for a week to relive her first brush with freedom. And Sapna was her natural choice. This was her last week of doing as she pleased before she took a taxi home. Home was a family that took marriage seriously. Like serious business. Her parents, her brothers, their wives had all married for money. And now it was her turn. They awaited her homecoming with a list of good matches one of whom would ignite their family business some more.

Vidisha’s friends in New York had wondered how she could settle for an arrangement so readymade, so soulless. But she had smiled her dazzling smile at their disapproving innocence and said nothing to dam the floods of mush and sympathy.

Her week in Delhi was in a way a finale to her freedom as a dictionary compiler. Because in the list at home was squeezed a sentence to good family life, for life and business. Her six years and a week had been her barter for this life sentence. Not that she was heavy with regret. She had lived her freedom well, almost to a fault. Besides, she had no intention of giving up her dictionary work. But she knew marriage was sure to cramp her style.

Getting Saurabh's attention hadn't been difficult. There was knock at her door the moment she woke up to switch off the AC's heavy breathing. Saurabh stood waving a piece of paper masted with thin curvy letters. It was a 'Guest-Relations Form'. He said he'd forgotten to give it to her at the time of check in. He looked pale and apologetic. Vidisha smiled at him and invited him for some shots of American bourbon that she'd purchased duty-free to celebrate her final week in Delhi.

"I have no one to share it with," she said as she stood away from the door to let him in. If he was surprised he didn't show it as Vidisha welcomed him with her dazzling smile. She had been jetlagged but the five hours of air-conditioned sleep had washed away the half-moon stains below her eyes. She was still wearing the prickly white bathrobe that she had got into after her long and detailed shower. She smelled of green apples, peaches and the faint spirit of nail colour. Her hair seemed longer and shinier than the plait she had brought it in.

"Ice?" she asked Saurabh as he sat struggling with his maroon pinstriped tie and collar. "Lots, no water, thanks." He spoke like a whisky man, she liked that.

Vidisha didn't like small talk but with Saurabh she felt compelled to use it. "’You surprised I called you in?" she asked looking at him meaningfully as if what was to follow would hold their conversation like a coloured weft.

"No," he said and creased his eyebrows. "But I was surprised you offered me bourbon, I really love whisky," he said to soothe the sting of his unexpected vanity.

"I am glad I have some surprises," Vidisha said feeling a strange pull towards the thin, pale and hairy stranger in a grey suit sitting facing her. It was surprising because he had hardly said anything to make her feel that way. It was as if he was telling her things with his glistening boiled egg eyes. His pupils were golden brown and impervious like thumb pins on a blank notice. Assurance oozed from his brow like shiny sweat. The inscrutable eyes of a user, said a whispery voice inside Vidisha's experienced head.

But she disregarded the impulse to box him. She just kept staring at him, at his big boiled egg eyes, at the unassuming neatness of his grey suit and the unreflecting black of his leathered feet. She felt as if his body circulated some liquid charm instead of blood. She felt the space around him teeming with Jupiter rings. His body emanated light and star dust and his eyes were like a remote control. She felt small and lost before him. Like a lowly speck circling Jupiter.

For the first time in her life Vidisha felt unsure of herself as a dictionary compiler. For the first time in her life she felt the tiny hair on her skin goose up in anticipation of sex.

"I am sorry," he said intruding her sizing up of him.

"Why sorry?" she asked surprised.

"Because… because… I’m really not what you expected..." he seemed tied again to caution and urgency. "I'm Saurabh by the way."

This made her laugh and cause the spell to break and thin out like the shiny atoms of a shaken dust rag. Unlike her dazzling smile her laughter was natural and didn't precede an intent or a scheme. But she rarely laughed with strangers. Especially strangers she meant to strip and study and classify without guilt or remorse.

Rarely did she cross the fine line between observer and observed. And laughed while crossing it.

She was tempted to lie but couldn't. She felt the rings regroup; the light and star dust around him return, and his eyes turn back into a remote control. She felt her bathrobe turn threadbare and glance off her body like slippery spaghetti.

"You are different, Saurabh," she said, "in a very nice way". She felt the ‘very’ necessary to rationalize her rare chemistry, and rarer gravitational pull. But there was also some truth in it. He was nice in ways she could not expand and put into a box of imaginary cardboard. His niceness was like the finely woven grey of his suit. The white and the black, inseparable and indistinct.

"But let me tell you, I don't usually do this... especially with strangers," she lied suddenly looking very firm and honest.

"You are probably right," he said without sarcasm or humour, looking deep into the frosted hollow of his ice and bourbon as if his golden eyes could see her lie refract in the golden of his glass.

"What do you mean, probably?" His casual smugness had irritated her; she wanted to know his mind.

"Er... I mean the part about strangers," he said as he tenniseyed her: head to toe, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. He seemed to be frisking her with his golden boiled egg eyes.

He was different and nice, she thought, as the first mouthful of icy bourbon warmed and tingled and flushed the sides of Vidisha’s face like the sudden glare of a dentist's dome light. She felt herself relax. This wasn’t just another dictionary entry. Another specimen she'd brought to her sexual behaviour lab.

"Tell me what you thought of me when we first met?" She always liked to know what her specimens thought of her. But with Saurabh this question had come out by rote, without warning. She didn't want to know whether he thought of her as lonely or confused or downright whorish. With him she didn't want to get answers in wordy elaborations. The sensations he was causing were enough.

Saurabh smiled and slid deeper into the foam-backed bracket of the sofa chair that had been his perch since he came in.

"That maybe… maybe… you could help me," he seemed sure, without sounding so.

"Are you on something?" she asked feeling a sour taste rise up the base of her tongue. Saurabh just gave her wan look, smiled his Atlas smile and shook his head as if her innocent question had unlocked something profund for him.

"I'm sorry... I.. I.. didn't mean to sound rude." She cursed herself for asking him her pet question, smiled her dazzling smile and asked him for a refill.

Somewhere around the second bourbon their lazy conversation taxied like a braking airbus. All the warm feelings queued up inside her braking taxi were banging to be let out. She needed the urgent stepladders of touch and Saurabh's buzzing body to land, touchdown and celebrate.

She placed herself on the arm of his sofa chair and began playing with the cool black nylon of his longish hair. He moaned and cupped the soft handles of her bathrobed shoulders and drew her face close to his. In his black dilated pupils Vidisha could see herself split and made tiny like images on reversed binoculars. The kiss that followed evapourated the six years of sweat and study that had gone into the making of Vidisha’s dictionary.

In her deep narcotic sleep she hadn't heard the refrigerator's second coming or her soft dreamless moaning. When she woke up the late-setting August sun had gone leaving behind a weak twilight. The falling darkness was pink and luminous both outside and inside her refrigerated room.

She wondered what was causing the chill and looked towards Saurabh, waiting for him to say something. But he just lay there half dressed and propped against the headboard, regarding Vidisha’s whitesheeted nakedness with the glistening whites of his golden eyes.

"Shouldn't we order something to eat?" she asked to ease the discomfort of his gaze.

He shook his head and groped below the bed for his white shirt, grey suit and maroon pinstriped tie. "I have to go," he said rising from the bed as if their sack race had been just a diversion.

There were things that she wanted to say to him but could not. She felt her mouth zipped like a space suit. She wanted him to stay, and let her look into his golden eyes and see whether her two selves had changed. But he was almost ready, almost hidden beneath his luminous grey neatness.

Her eyes were beginning to brim and overflow but she didn't want to sob and let him know what his leaving was doing to her.

She wanted to fight, weep and do all the things she'd hated some of her specimens for. But her body was beyond obeying. "Is that it?" she asked when she heard the click of his steel watch buckle. He turned around and looked in her direction forming difficult words of goodbye. But somehow the words never left him.

His footfall was soft and feline and the only sound he left behind was the greaseless whistle of the door's aching hinges.

Vidisha's mind was racing. It went back to her first dictionary experience. The first time she had lured a man: a boy, a smitten classmate, into her lab. The sex had been awkward and painful. The parting more so but only for the smitten boy, who had expected a romance to follow their first encounter. She had shut him out from her life after the first time. He had begged her, cried on the phone, called her names and then spread stories about her among the other students. But Vidisha had moved on to other specimens. There was a visiting lecturer, then a fashion designer, then a model, then a stranger she met a party, then another stranger and another and another.

There was something nice about strangers, they didn't follow her like abandoned puppies. Didn't bark and whimper outside her door demanding love and sex. They took the experience in their stride and moved on. Like her. Some strangers had called and wanted to keep in touch but her enthusiasm had been sub zero.

Her US stint had been like Delhi replayed at high speed. The freedom was delirious and the variety mind-boggling. She had done most nationalities, most races, and most body types. But they had all been studies, nothing more. In her heart she desired nothing more than the experience, the sensation, the insights, the tales, the twists but only once.

When her friends talked love she'd turn coy and reticent and said it was a personal matter. But it was a personal matter that she'd turned into folk art, no more personal than graffiti. Her only fear was AIDS. The abbreviation chased her like MacDonalds' M. She always douched herself after sex and carried protection in a blue leather shoulderbag. Condoms of different sizes, flavours and outer feel. She lugged it around like a Santa Claus of safe sex.

Only once had she met a specimen genuinely allergic to rubber. She had called off the sack race that night. It was a disappointment but there were things she never compromised. With Saurabh the blue Santa bag wasn't even considered.

But never had a dictionary entry been so utterly abrupt. Saurabh had been different like no one else she'd studied. She felt the tables turned. She felt thumbed, read and exposed. She didn't feel like the mistress of her hunt. She wanted to tear out those glistening whites from his golden eye holes. Keep them in a petridish and watch them rot and change colour. She had never felt such a gush of bile for any of her specimens. Yet she wasn't sure of her reaction if she met him again. She couldn't say what she'd do if she saw herself split and made tiny in those eyes again.

She decided to check out of Sapna. Cut short her pre nup finale. Saurabh had changed her mind and body in ways she'd never imagined. She had friends with whom she could stay. But she didn't want to meet anyone. Explain to anyone anything. At the reception there was another grey suit whose smiling face called her Miss Vidisha. He was so forgettable that he was almost invisible. But she didn't forget to smile her dazzling smile at him and lie about her leaving Sapna early.

"There's been an emergency at home," she told the grey suit as she dropped the gilted keytag on the counter. "Can you please arrange for a taxi? I’ve gotta go to Panipat right way. I don't mind paying more," she told the receptionist who smiled obsequiously and said, "Yes Miss Vidisha".

She wanted to ask him about Saurabh but didn't know where to begin. What is his full name? Is he married? Who does he think he is? Questions frothed and raged inside her head like the high tide sea.

A fat Ambassador came. Vidisha’s two suitcases were loaded into its back pocket like thick wads of currency. She sat hugging herself in the wounded yellow emptiness of the stone and wood reception, staring blankly at the three faces of time.

"Miss Vidisha your taxi is ready," said the receptionist. "Hunh?" she looked at him as if his voice had thwacked her back into the palm of a giant hand like a yoyo. "Yes, thank you," she inhaled deeply to push out the words she’d been dying to get out of her. "Saurabh..." she said, her voice thin and brittle, "When do you think he’ll be back?"

The receptionist's eyebrows jumped to his sweaty hairline, as if she'd casually enquired about his sex life. "Who?" he asked surprised. "Sau-rabh," she repeated deaf loud and syllable clear.

"You mean Saurabh Doshi?"

"The guy who was here before you."

"Ma'am it's not possible that Saurabh Doshi..."

"Just tell me who was the guy who checked me in. The guy with those big eyes." She was beginning to feel an angry vein burst inside her head. She hated Saurabh Doshi or whatever he was called for putting her through this maze of explanations. For making her leave Sapna early and hate herself so intensely. For filling her up hope and awe and what her friends called love and then vanishing like death.

"You are right, Miss Vidisha. The guy with big eyes is Saurabh Doshi, but it's not possible..."

"Am I making this up then? Or is this some sick game the two of you play? Furgetit..." It seemed hopeless. She was beginning to have grave doubts about her judgement, her integrity as a dictionary compiler. Why was it that she'd fallen the one time she'd strayed from her calling.

"Ma'am I could say the same about you," said the receptionist mildly angered.

"What the fuck do you mean?" She had never used that word on someone she didn't know.

"I am sorry. Please. I am sorry," Vidisha said as she struggled to find a tissue in the depths of her blue Santa bag. It was as if all her gaseous anger had suddenly liquefied and found an outlet in her eyes.

"No, no, it's okay," he said as he went behind the stone and wood counter and disappeared beneath the shock of wounded yellow. The exact place where she'd first met Saurabh.

"I am sorry, I didn't mean to shout at you," Vidisha said drying her eyes. "Please don't mention all this to him."

The receptionist came back with a parched and loose leaf of newspaper and laid it on the table before Vidisha.

From its folded page stared Saurabh Doshi, clean-shaven and pale faced, in a blue background passport mug. He was smiling like he had been when she'd asked him if he was in a habit. But his eyes didn't have their boiled egg shine. Beneath him was a column of fine print news whose lines kept flying off the page. It's headline first blurred and then leapt out at Vidisha like leeches that had smelled blood. With some difficulty she ordered their scrabble square shiftiness. They said 'Jilted lover hangs himself' for a split second and then lifted off the page again like ravens on an honour killing. They encircled Vidisha for a few seconds then entered her at her spine’s end and travelled all the way up to her head in a pulse of train-pulling electricity.

She wanted to keep her eyes open and read on but her lids came down like freefalling shop shutters. The wood and stone reception melted into the shock of wounded yellow like a snipped movie scene. All she could hear was the metallic click of a watch buckle and the greaseless whistle of aching door hinges. And in the far corner of her crumbling reality the receptionist's nervous voice asking her if she was okay.

ENDS

Grump

2008-12-30T00:39:00.000-08:00

Two digital frames juxtaposed vertically to look like a face :)

Cartwheeling: from Darkness to Twilight

2008-12-29T02:27:00.000-08:00

120 cm X 75 cm
acrylics on canvas

Stale Dish

2008-12-27T07:11:00.000-08:00

Old dish antennas like old anything are given to rusting, falling apart and crumbling. Age also gives them character. A certain aura of experience, a shoulder for smaller creatures to come and rest on and reflect. They also become a harness for the daily wash and other random wired things.

These pictures are the work of the same afternoon that made the Wall-bleed-scrabble post possible.

Wall-bleed-scrabble

2008-12-26T03:51:00.000-08:00

This picture happened just by chance, on an impulse infected by the shutterbug bug(?), as I was scrounging around for 'subjects'... on my apartment block terrace. I had been reading about Nick Veasey, an amazing artist who uses the X-ray phenomenon to tell his stories.
I found this composition on the horizon of a cement wall and the floor. The wall was randomly splattered with blue and the two scrabble squares were (conveniently) lying just next to it.

Jinnah of the Bible

2008-12-22T01:55:00.000-08:00

The story goes back to the Christmas of 1876 when in the home of Mithibai and Jinnahbhai Poonja was born a boy whom they named Mohammad Ali. It is pertinent to point out here that this boy was NOT floated off on a reed basket to escape an order to kill all boys... of a certain age, from a certain community. It is also pertinent to add here that this boy did NOT grow up in a foster home. But the boy had an upbringing of privilege. He grew up and learnt to speak the language of the court, the Empire’s language of logic, empiricism and substantiated debate. He was a thumping success at this. Later, he took to fighting the Empire with its own logic, its own sense of fair-play and constitutional methods.

Then one day he had an epiphany that ‘his’ people were not the people of the larger population of the land. He realised that his people instead were a smaller group, a people that at some point in the history of the land had taken up a faith of another kind. His own family had had a similar history.

After the epiphany Jinnah, as the man was increasingly referred to, decided to take his people away from being underlings of the larger population of the land to a Promised Land of milk and honey. A land so pure, so full of righteousness that the old land of inequality and injustice would become a distant dream!

Here unlike the Biblical story of Moses, Jinnah did reach Canaan... he got to see the newly-formed land of purity and righteousness. But then like Moses, he soon followed his forefathers into the great beyond leaving his people to their own devices, which ironically were in short supply. The people soon learnt that the milk and honey of rhetoric could never match up to the institutions and systems needed to administer justice and maintain peace.

With this realisation began Jinnah’s Canaan’s descent into chaos. A chaos more destructive than the one they’d been promised they were leaving behind. They realised the fact that their purity and exclusivity in fact stood on very shaky ground. Not based on the lofty ideals that they seemed to be in the beginning. Rather, they realised, that they was based on an error of perception. On defensive reasoning. On brittle egos. They realised that their Canaan was not a land of milk and honey but a sprawling necropolis, a remnant of another civilisation that was now simply called Mohenjodaro or the Mound of the Dead.

So for want of better ideas, Jinnah’s people hid behind the graves. They made the graves their home, dug more graves, renovated old ones, redecorated them. They transferred all their energy and passion to grave-building, making graves that were bigger, roomier and grander. They dedicated their scientific know-how to the pursuit of making graves. They didn’t care about food or drink, they didn’t care about their poor but built graves with a vengeance.

At some point they realised that they had more graves than people to fill them so they started training their young men to find newer, faster ways of filling up their works of passionate enterprise. They developed, not entirely on the own, a weapons system of staggering proportions, fitted with the capacity to annihilate millions at the press of a button.

So why did Jinnah’s people take on such a self-destructive trajectory?

For this we have to go back to the story in the Bible. The story of an incessant wait…

According to the Bible Moses went up to Mount Sinai to receive a Code of Living for his people and this took what looked like ages. In this time his people got restive and demanded to go back to a somewhat familiar system of being. So they collected all the gold each one had, melted it and built themselves an effigy of a calf and started worshipping it. This was the exact opposite of the form of worship Moses had in mind but that’s another story.

Jinnah, unlike Moses, never came back to his people with a Code of Living. And so they collected all their gold and built themselves an effigy of a government. An easy calf-like system that could be tweaked and bullied into looking the other way while the real work went on undisturbed. The real work was the work of making war, something Jinnah’s people were familiar with having fought their way out of the larger population of the land. The fighting took many forms, since there was no larger population to fight they began to fight each other. It was a fight for dominance. The Punjabi began to fight the Sindhi; the Sindhi, the Balochi and the Balochi, the Pathan and the Pathan, the Punjabi. And soon the Land of the Pure had not just one golden calf, but a whole dark pantheon of violence, of hatred, of funding underground wars. It had written its own Code of Killing and Dying. It had turned itself into a state, in direct opposition to the one dreamed by Jinnah. And what was worse he was not coming back. Besides there was no shortage of graves.

Today, Pakistan continues to carry on its strange and vengeful legacy, its biggest and vilest jihad against its founder. It carries on finding newer ways to negate and erase everything that he sought, everything that he argued for, going back into everything that he wanted to deliver his people from. In fact Jinnah’s Pakistan, like the Biblical story, has rubbished the very idea of a nation of based on the tenets of a faith. Was Jinnah wrong? Or what we're seeing today is a posthumous punishment... a garland of shoes that his people have taken upon themselves to put around his grave?

Ascent into Delhinquency

2008-12-17T01:49:00.000-08:00

(Pix by Sahar Z)

This past week has been a great time for Delhi… two shows about the city that boldly navigate the public-private art debate.

It's thanks to them that Delhi's suddenly found time to get in touch with its eternal throb. It is a city that not only defines India (established as it was by the King of Gods, no less) but also pulsates with the confluence of many countering energies… a daily race between those who are visiting it and those that call it home or office, all of whom remain but a blip on its eternal radar.

This is the City of Djinns and cosmic DJs who with a mere sleight of hands mix, scratch and direct the fortunes of a billion people. This is the Delhi of sophisticated protests: a sit-out at Jantar-Mantar followed by cappuccino at Barista. Also the Delhi of imperial impulses: spread across two states and still grabbing land. Delhi gives you a voice and ample opportunities to use it. It also gives you immediate recognition anywhere else in the country... Who but a Dilliwala can meet you for the first time and ask 'Do you know who I am?', or remember other people's mothers and sisters at the drop of a hat? Or say 'Don't mind, yaar' every time he jumps the queue to get ahead. And who but a Dilliwala would give you wrong directions to avoid appearing impolite.

Yes, this is Delhi, who at 48 degrees C is a cauldron of contrasts. It is also a city that challenges many ideas about the very Nature of the City.

The images above are part of the city's first public art festival; those below, from a gallery show about the nature of urbanisation.

Banjar hai sab

2008-12-15T05:29:00.000-08:00

CHAUKHANDI TOMBS, Karachi (pic by Sahar Z)

Banjar Hai Sab Banjar Hai
Hum Dhoondne Jab Firdaus Chale
Teri Khoj Talaash Mein Dekh Piya
Hum Kitne Kaale Kos Chale...

This song sums up the morass I find myself in these days... it has been a strange and tumultuous fortnight. We'd returned from Pakistan, a month back, full of 'amazing stories' and then on November 26 something happened that turned what we'd thought were small crevices into giant canyons.

Suddenly all that love and bonhomie that we felt there began to seem small in the face of the hatred that 10 young men carried in their backpacks. A hatred that they unleashed on unarmed people without a thought to the network of roots that joins every man to five hundred others, each of whom is joined to five hundred others. And each of those five hundred, to yet another five hundred. These roots are invisible to touch but we see them in the eyes of those we love. And once those eyes are forced shut that love turns to hatred. A hatred that is carried on in multiples of 500 through the invisible roots of our eyes.

In this past fortnight I have listened to many theories, counter-theories, solutions and super-solutions about what SHOULD, COULD and MUST be done. I have also been part of many conversations in front of the TV and on the Net and in these moments I have felt the draining futility of all this solution-finding, this building of air castles, this bullshitting ourselves and others in the hope that somewhere in the heart of these discussions lurks an answer, however nebulous. The thought is comforting if comfort is what you're seeking.

Perhaps we talk to let off steam. Or feel protected by the force of our convictions. Or maybe we just talk because it's easy.

The one and only thing that I have realised in this past fortnight is that we've been wrong; way off the mark in combing a wasteland of words in search of Paradise or its active principle, if there's such a thing. We've walked a hundred 'black miles' in search of a Subcontinental Utopia, a place where former brothers could be re-united. But we're nowhere close to resolution.

I have come to the realisation that answers to the problems of our beloved Subcontinent lie not in talk and discussions... a pursuit that invariably gets entangled at the edge of some old scar. Or falls right in the middle of a still-festering wound.

But I do have great respect for the roots that grow from our eyes. I respect them because these roots don't know any boundaries... they just grow... and fall in love... with other roots. And in their growth and multiplication lies my biggest hope. I shall therefore not talk, not discuss the pros and cons of this war or that peace... these boycotts or those CBMs... your terrorists and our victims. I shall not talk this language because it is the language of subterfuge and reaction.

Instead with open eyes I shall remain silent so that my roots don't stop growing.

The Tightrope Dancer

2008-11-28T05:21:00.000-08:00

My piece in TEHELKA magazine...

SCENES FROM Lollywood’s earliest raunch-fests play to a sex phone call in Urdu… Mustachioed heroes and plump heroines are preparing for what promises to be a very naughty time. This is an installation called Telephone Pyar by Adnan Malik showing at Islamabad’s prestigious National Gallery of Art, an institution run by the government in the high-security Presidential area.

At Lahore’s National College of Arts a unique miniature department gives new direction to the old subcontinental tradition. Many miniaturists from here have found recognition around the world. Among them is Mohammad Zeeshan, who has just returned from a residency programme in Weimar, Germany. Zeeshan’s new work takes a dig at the English alphabet using very graphic nudes.

Lahore’s famous Hira Mandi is also home to Cucoo’s Den, an art gallery and café run by Iqbal Husain. The son of a dancing girl, Husain is now a respected painter whose works are a keen document of the red light district. The rooftop café with its marble crucifix and grave slab centrepiece is a must-see for any visitor to Lahore.

The art community in Pakistan may be small, but it is thriving and trying to find a face and voice in these troubled times. It has not been an easy task, given the tightrope that ‘artistic freedom’ often means in Pakistan. But the environment also gives a certain muscle to art and creative transgression. These are not exactly halcyon days for the arts, but it’s hugely better than the ‘dark age’ of the Zia years where anything with a whiff of rebellion could be declared ‘un-Islamic’. That was the time when wearing sarees and watching films were also outlawed.

Read full article...

Galaxy Square

2008-11-24T20:26:00.000-08:00

77 cm X 56 cm
mixed media (charcoal, acrylic, enamel paint and reflective tape) on paper

This started out as a collage using the chamakpatti (reflective tape) I got from Pakistan and some (new kinda) paint... but gradually the paint encroached on every possible bit of space. The paint is the colour often associated with the sky i.e. unlimited space... so in a sense it was space that took up space... and created form within it, form in the form of galaxies, suns and nebulae... form that could also be contained within an atom... form that could expand to distances of millions of light years... form: square, reflective, blue, white, gold and iridescent.

Pakistan's Sistine

2008-11-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

This is Pakistan’s Sistine Chapel, more commonly known as Karachi's Frere Hall. It’s an old colonial church that now has the misfortune of standing within sighing distance of the American consulate. This makes stopping your vehicle in its vicinity and trying to capture the building in your camera a security risk. Thankfully, this idiotic injunction is routinely flouted (evidenced by the photographs).

Frere Hall also houses the largest work of Pakistan’s best-known artist Sadequain a.k.a. Sadequain Naqqash, so named for the filigree-like intricacy that he developed as his style. Frere Hall's ceiling was given to Sadequain to use as a canvas... but an untimely retreat from this world stopped the project midway. As I see it this was a blessing in disguise because visually the vacuum of the unfinished half of the work balances the sizzling otherworldiness of the finished half.

(Pix by Sahar Z)

In the month that Sahar and I spent in Pakistan we had the privilege of visiting galleries and private collections where 'a Sadequain' or 'Sadequains' were held up as trophy-rocks from an alien galaxy... you're proud to have them but don't quite know what to make of them. And that is precisely the beauty of Sadequain. He leaves you baffled and confused. It's almost as if his strokes have the power to enter your head and disturb you. At the National Art Gallery in Islamabad where 46 Sadequains were on display we distinctly remember coming out with a headache.

Such a subliminal power is often associated with the written word and not the (thousand) words of a picture but Sadequain (also a notable versifier and calligrapher) manages to blur the boundaries between the two.

This post is my humble tribute to the artist...

Triune Brain Drain

2008-10-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

56 cm X 77 cm
water colour on paper

The Unsayable

2008-10-04T10:16:00.001-07:00

77 cm X 56 cm
mixed media on paper

This is my first work that mixes mediums; one that I am most happy using (acrylics) and another (pastel) that gives me a feeling of playing with dust... coloured dust. It's unsettling, coz dust doesn't settle. It keeps moving, keeping the paper in a sort of flux. As if what you're trying to say is eminently unsayable. In the sense, it defies saying or putting into words. I don't have a name for this work so I am simply calling it 'The Unsayable'.

The Gridiot 2

2008-10-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

77 cm X 56 cm
pastel on paper
There is this grid that runs through the whole Universe, and through everything that's a part of it. It's a sort of scaffolding onto which hang layers and layers of matter, anti-matter, and energy and the electricity produced by their constant intercourse.

Rahu

2008-09-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

99 cm X 56 cm
acrylic on canvas

According to Carl Sagan 'pareidolia' was a survival technique that human beings used to detect anthropomorphic life-forms wherever and whenever they felt threatened or alone. He believed that they were in fact hard-wired to join random and unlikely dots to see faces, limbs etc. An exaggerated or distorted likeness of themselves! In times of trouble and despair these imagined beings became gods or protective deities. And in good times they became wrathful deities who needed regular appeasement.

Cozmos 5

2008-09-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

180 cm X 77 cm
acrylic on canvas

Cozmos 4

2008-09-22T22:49:00.000-07:00

(detail of) 180 cm X 95 cm
acrylic on canvas
The cosmos of cause and effect continues to expand and unfold...

Cozmos 3

2008-09-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

91 cm X 73.5 cm
acrylic on canvas

Cozmos 2 (Songlines)

2008-09-18T03:20:00.000-07:00

91.5 cm X 91.5 cm
acrylic on canvas
In his book, The Songlines, novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin describes the songlines as, "...the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'."

Cozmos 1

2008-09-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

(detail of) 180 cm X 80 cm
acrylic on canvas

Eviscerate

2008-09-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

86 cm X 106 cm
acrylic on canvas

Here the viscera is neatly re-arranged to create something memorable and yet not disturb peristalsis and other body functions.

The Great White

2008-09-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

86 cm X 76 cm
acrylic on canvas
On the outer edge of our Universe is a Great White that prowls its dark waters looking for the stray planet or planetoid that's spinning out of its orbit around the Sun. Like the Great Bear the Great White is also a constellation, a formation of stars that the people of the planet from where it is visible have so named even though their planet has no sharks, no seas, no water. They have named it from memory, a flash that they have of their Earth days when they hunted sharks from a small Alaskan archipelago that was wiped off the face of the Earth in a tsunami.
This is the story of souls that spend lifetimes on each planet, dying on one and being born again on another, progressing out, away from the Sun until they slip into the dark waters and are born in another universe, another planet, as another order of beings.

Mutant Fish

2008-09-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

acrylic/charcoal on A4 paper
There, swimming in the Atlantic is a giant finless fish that eats other smaller fish. It's a one of a kind mutant fish that has no mate, no friends, no family.
What is the name of this fish?

Here's a clue

Anastasis

2008-09-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

114 cm X 70 cm
acrylic on canvas

"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."
--Daniel 12:2-3