goodness.

 My first response to reading this blog again was, seriously, a post on parenting - that was what I last posted about? I can't help but write this with a grin twinkling across my face because you see, I am a parent now but back when I wrote this there were exactly two things in life I was certain about: no parenthood, no marriage. Hah! Reason number 1 to keep a personal blog going is to for the chance to laugh at your past selves.

I cannot help but feel grateful to be where I am today. I seem to have emerged from one crisis to the next stronger and eventually, better for it. Silver linings नहीं हैं, बनता बदलता नक़्शा है। I remember, sometime in 2011 or 12 meeting a psychiatrist and asking her, thanks for the diagnosis - truly - but why do I have depression? And she said, I could give you a wide range of reasons but is it really necessary to know why? It's hard to find a good psychiatrist because it's such a tough job, isn't it? There are good ones; once in a while you come across a wise one. 

I'm grateful because I feel invincible. Nobody gets to a place like this in their lives without the grit that friends are. And so, to the bricks that built me up: What a blessing to me you have been. 

Chandana

Tiggy

Deepti Moorthy

Stuti (do you remember that awful year of high school?)

Roshni (then and now)

Steve (possibly imaginary first crush but SO real and comforting)

Kavya Firefly

Sarath G

^, your friend I met at that party at your place in Sanjaynagar who was simply breathtaking 

Sharan

Jo - a toast, to our fabulous YouTube channel

Tina and Sonu

Samra

Ryan, Nithya (we are so witty in our chats and emails da!)

Shrey

Anjali (and our iconic Delhi trip)

Pari

Garima Diva

Pai

Pallo

Asif

Shilpa K

Chiku

Anurag (bhai - I'm working on our annotated copy of Anthropocene, Reviewed)

Pri

Shibani 

Sheena

Siddharth (for laughing when you did - it changed my life)

Simran

Justin (solidmax)

Atul (arre vah!)

Sushil (जीने का सबब पुख्ता कर रही हूँ)

a friend and a therapist

Friends you can count on are rare. Friends who help you through depression are an even rarer subset. But should your friend also be your therapist?

I speak for myself when I say no, she should not. In the throes of depression I cannot see things which are fairly obvious. She makes the decision to be the calmer of the two and attempts to show these things to me. But this decision comes at a cost--she has to overcome her own fear and shock and try, at all costs, not to display it to me. She has to discard everything she's doing and concentrate entirely on me. No matter how she's been feeling, she must rally enormous emotional forces from within herself and use them to systematically counter every argument my corrupted mind throws at myself, at her.

But every time this happens, she is put in a terrible position of grappling between love and helplessness. Unlike my therapist, she has had no training in clinical psychology; any strategies she comes up with are ones she creates on her own, based on her intimate knowledge of me, the connections she makes from the history we share and her learnings from previous conversations. She never stops learning, she never stops trying for me.

But she's my friend. She's not a therapist. She comes from a position of love, and it is this same position which overwhelms her each time these conversations happen, because it is beyond the scope of our love to provide me with ways to cope with depression. Her love convinces me that I need these strategies, but it cannot always provide them to me. There is nothing right or wrong about this, and neither is this a limitation: this is a fact.

If you have someone like this on your life, don't take them for granted. Talk to them whenever you need to, but if you want help, go to a therapist or a doctor. Just like self-medication, forcing them to be your therapist is harmful and unfair on both of you. Remember that every breakdown you suffer from, they suffer with you, and somewhere it is worse for them, since they do not have medication or therapy to fall back on. You should.

thoughts on childhood in India

An interesting question came up today in our Child Learning and Development class - is childhood a social construct?

I'd like to read your thoughts.

can we be counter-imaginative?

It was half past eight in the evening. I was cycling back from university to my hostel. (The road approaching my hostel is hardly a road; it has bumps the size of small hillocks. I usually stand up and ride this rough stretch.) I was emerging from an unlit, dark 400 metre stretch of this road when a group of four men suddenly jumped in front of my cycle, shouted "Ha!" and ran away, laughing. 

I stopped in my tracks and tried to understand what had just happened. Was this an issue of safety, human dignity, violence against women? Why did they do this? And suddenly, a thought entered my head: what made them behave specifically the way they did? This wasn't a spontaneous outburst; it was a planned, unwelcome flash mob. Even if it took them a couple of minutes, they had obviously devised their scheme carefully. It had been executed with perfection. In addition to this, it takes a fair amount of controlled recklessness to jump in front of a moving vehicle in the dark. It was imaginative.

Which brings me back to the idea of using imagination to devise strategies which can counter, or attempt to counter sexual violence. This is, of course, applicable only in situations where the survivors of sexual violence wish to put themselves out there, once again, without any guarantees of safety or success. Apart from the survivor's personal choices, it also depends on the kind of sexual violence we are trying to devise strategies for. It may seem exceedingly difficult, for instance, to come up with a strategy to counter rape as it is happening. But can we come up with a way to respond to being ogled?

There is some work being done around this idea by Blank Noise. 

The question of context is never far behind when thinking of issues of sexual violence or really, any social issue. There are no universal values, and there can definitely be no "10 Ways To..." counter being forcibly objectified. That said, we definitely can benefit from imagining, visualising, discussing and hopefully experimenting with strategies to counter this kind of daily violence against women, within our specific contexts.  

Madras, meri jaan

It was perhaps a sign of things to come when the first thing I saw the moment I stepped into Chennai Central a year ago was a biriyani kadai. It was around 4 pm and a couple of people stood around, consuming generous plates of chicken biriyani. I thought to myself, chicken biriyani? Interesting. It wouldn’t have been ‘interesting’ in Bombay. It wouldn’t have been interesting anywhere else except in Madras, back then, considering I had assumed that the entire city was vegetarian.

I wish I could meet that girl and enjoy the surprised look on her face as she saw the streets lined with as many biriyani kadais as there were amman koils (perhaps more). Perhaps they became highlighted in my mind because I couldn’t immediately shake off my surprise.

We’ve all met people who say to women-who-take-offence, so what if we use ‘rape’ casually in our conversations? It doesn’t make us rapists, it makes you over-sensitive. The curious thing about language is how it infects you and sits in parts of your brain which get lit when you encounter change. I never realised that parts of my brain had been infected by ideas of Madras being a vegetarian city, until I passed by a couple hundred poultry shops, non-vegetarian restaurants and kadais as I left the station.

Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a change as obvious or tangible as moving cities. Perhaps there’s wisdom in the idea that it’s good to move around people different from you. What happened to me when I moved might happen over a conversation with someone tomorrow.

An overwhelming majority of my colleagues love non-vegetarian food. They cook, consume and celebrate it like I never have back in Bombay. I felt the irony: it was as if Madras was gently pulling my leg. Madras, like most Indian cities is a city of pluralities. There are only-on-Thursdays, everyday-except-Thursdays, egg-is-fine, fish-smells, chicken’s-best, swear-by-seafood, will-eat-anything-that-moves pluralities among non-vegetarians as well. Food is as protean and alive in its contradictions and patterns as its consumers are.

It isn’t as if these puzzles don’t exist among vegetarians. But it was important for me to understand that no city can ever be flattened into a single food type. Only living beings have blood types; places don’t. I would never do what I did to Bombay since it has an enduring reputation of being a melting-pot, cosmopolitan, global village, fluttering immigrant magnet, whatnot. But I did it to Madras because I figured it’s down south where everyone eats idli-dosa, is super-brainy and speaks Tamizh. How does one apologise to a city?

As April descended into Madras last year, the city’s famed summer season became a constant refrain. It gets hotter in a room if you keep saying it’s getting hotter. I couldn’t really feel the difference. People from Madras and Bombay alike would ask me, how are you managing? It must be so much better in Bombay, no? I’m managing fine, thank you, I said. If Madras gets hot by nature of its geographical location, Bombay doesn’t fare any better thanks to its relentless pollution and smog.

In a passive-aggressive conversation with my mother, I realised that the climate, like the food, is another infection we unknowingly let fester in our minds. The tongue is a vicious organ. The heat of Madras is as much about climate as it is about supporting a dark-skinned, loud-mouthed, Dravidian, anti-Hindi, conservative, ‘Madrasi’ narrative of the south.

Sometime in July, a friend from Bombay asked me if I missed the city. I had visited home for a few short days in June and began to outline to him specific places, moments in the day, restaurants, lanes, places and people that I could see vividly in my mind. Yes, I missed Bombay, I said. The friend nodded his head with great self-assurance. Once you’ve lived in Bombay, you’ll miss it anywhere, he said. Madras is no match for the energy, vibrancy and of course, the heady nightlife that the city has to offer. Do they have nightclubs in Madras?

This conversation repeated itself over many people across time. Unsurprisingly, none of these views came from Madrasis themselves. Which made me realise something else: Madras is possibly the most unpretentious Indian metro of all. It simply doesn’t believe in calling attention to its city-ness.

Perhaps the place where this hits you the hardest is its airport. Madras Airport is one of the most unassuming airports I’ve ever been to. A local train stops at walking distance from the airport: you can literally walk into it from the station’s subway.

Just late this February, I accidentally wandered into the International Terminal and it was calm, quiet and almost empty. There was a man sitting in one of those small shuttle cars and he asked me if I was lost. I told him where I wanted to go, and he happily offered me a ride. I couldn’t believe my ears. He ferried me—the only passenger—all the way to the Domestic Terminal and even stopped in the middle to offer his friend a lift. It was quirky, it was heart-warming and it was possibly when I realised for the second time that I had fallen in love with Madras.

Sometime in August, I was talking with a friend about something I don’t remember now. We were standing on her terrace which overlooked the junction between KMC and Eega theatre. While she spoke to another friend, I happened to look down at the traffic inching its way home.

Constant references to the horrible traffic in Bombay are not just a matter of fact; they are subtle boasts to Bombay’s city-ness. A city is not really a city unless it has frustrating, incurable traffic jams, yawning sky-scrapers, a ballooning population and a taxing daily life, among other things. Madras has bad traffic in patches, not too many tall buildings, a population which balloons in pockets and situations and a fairly laidback daily life. I wonder what makes Madras a city. I’d ask her but she doesn’t seem to care enough to answer.

What Madras does seem to be proud of are her beaches. And they really are worth the vanity. There are so many beaches, I could pick them to suit—or mould—my moods. Go to Bessie when I’m feeling light-headed, or talkative and friendly, or contemplative. Go to Palavakkam to be seduced. Go to Thiruvanmiyur beach when I feel I need to be alone, to be soothed and reassured. I’m not sure yet what Marina and Neelangkarai will offer me.

Sometime either in December last year or January I was going back home from Koyambedu bus depot. I was in an auto, and it stopped at a signal. It was around half past seven in the evening, and I was foolishly trying to read a book by the streetlight. As I bent the book this way and that, multi-coloured lights began gently streaking my hands. It felt like someone was playing with me: touching and letting me be as the streaks blew across my hand.

The book lay forgotten as I twisted my hands in the lights, feeling the colours wash over my skin. As the auto-anna restarted the engine, I peeked out to find the source of my delight. It was a string of neon-red, blue and green fairy-lights adorning the sign board of a fertility clinic. The clinic was shut but someone had left the lights on. Somehow they had bent and stretched their way inside the auto I was in and lit me up. That was the first time I realised I was in love with Madras.

arriving

4:23 pm: That feeling of wonder when you know that you have been in two different places in the same day. In the morning you were in one city: an entirely different experience which made a different person out of you. And then you crossed over to another city, setting on its horizon. Changing cities like a chameleon. It takes time to arrive to another place, even if you've been there before. 

old dreams

I recently read a letter which had a vision of my future. The writer imagined that four years later, in 2013, I'd be teaching a group of 18 year olds about languages across the world. I'd also be alone in a different city somewhere, spending my free time walking around, soaking my senses in myriad sights, sounds, smells.

When I read that letter, it struck me how old some of my closest dreams are. It doesn't make my desire to become a teacher more valid than someone who has decided to teach today. It doesn't rule out new dreams, younger dreams. I'm simply humbled by their power. Things change every day; there are no footprints in a desert. Once in a while, a wind blows again and again, steady among the shifting sand dunes.

This wind is now making me change my direction once again. If you know anyone who has done or is doing a B. Ed in India, do let me know. I want to become a teacher.

Rim Jhim Gire Saavan - Manzil

happiness is a warm gun (the beatles seem to have a song for almost everything, sometimes)

source

thoughts on waiting

My mother hasn’t travelled much around the city. She’s lived with people who have, she’s often waited for them to come back home. She was born and raised in Dehradun, which used to be a sleepy little town in the north, known for its schools and ‘British’ weather.

When she came to Bombay, it was her first time in a big city after a brief stay in Lucknow with her husband’s parents. She has never been the kind of person who gets excited or disheartened quickly, but she remembers her initial shock at the scale of the city. “Everything was so big.” 

In some ways I can relate to this. Having grown up in IIT, where everything is either quiet or a 10 minute walk, going to Sophia was like stepping out of a town into the rushes of a city, with all its constant hammer and din, and big, wide roads which actually looked scrawny and challenged, and people milling in and out of impossibly tight places. (I realized later that not all of Bombay is like this. But bear with my stereotype for now.)

She didn’t encounter Bombay first-hand much. She went out perhaps once in a month or two, always accompanied, and listened to the city that my aunt (then a class 12 student) experienced with her friends. Sometimes she couldn’t shake off her fears when my aunt would go off for a late night film with her friends, and come back home alone at 10 pm. Her husband would tell her it was normal, and although she felt patronised, she didn’t swallow her ‘small town’ fears until her kid sister came back safely every night.

Her arguments with her daughter over coming back late at home were usually about not being informed. That didn’t mean I could come home whenever I wanted: the rule was very clear—be back before it gets dark. In comparison to some of my friends, I felt like she was from the Dark Ages. But I flouted the rule quite a lot, and when I did, it was the fact that I didn’t inform her in advance - and not really my unpuncutuality - that took her anger over the edge. 

In retrospect, I knew that informing her in advance meant saving her the humiliation of waiting in vain for someone who was already lunching outside, while lunch at home was wearily put away in the fridge. Informing her in advance would have meant that discussions on the extension of my deadline would progress somewhere, instead of resulting in passive-aggressive displays and loud, hurtful words scarring confidences of the past.

What does it mean to be the person who is left behind? What does it mean to wait for someone’s arrival? Does their arrival make your life complete? Not really. But to not be aware of the delicately excruciating wait for someone, the denial of fears for as long as possible, to not consider this when you have stepped out of the house and you know it’s getting late, that is to tread on someone’s heart. Some of us wait for our daughters, sons, to come back home. Some of us wait for our old, successful selves to return and turn around our mundane lives. Some of us wait for a lover to leave, gradually yet inevitably. Some of us wait for a sign, an indication that things have changed. 

Ads for missing people always catch my attention. The awkward bits and pieces of Marathi that I know arrange themselves swiftly when I read a missing person’s ad. Often they are small black and white posters plastered on stations, clambering for attention in an inattentive, transitory space. Behind every description of someone’s face, eyes, clothes and build is the desperation to distinguish this individual from the maddening crowd. I stand precariously close to the edge of making poetry out of someone’s anguish, but these posters make for some of the most moving literature I have encountered.

Perhaps that is why the truth behind the posters about Gauri Bhonsle’s disappearance hurt me a little. The advertisers of the show could have hardly suspected that they would be discomfiting someone but when I learnt that Gauri Bhonsle was a fictional character of a TV series, I imagined the thousands of families who have had their loved ones disappear feeling short-changed in some way. I felt short-changed, and I have never suffered the agony of a missing friend or relative. 

Every missing person poster I read reminds me that waiting is hardly passive. You might not sit around hearing the seconds needle tick by. After all, life catches up with you with its ringing mobile phone and cycles of laundry. But you still wait. You still wonder what is happening with someone who ran away, someone who was taken for interrogation by the police, someone who went for a birthday party and hasn’t come back since. Perhaps life is a good distraction against that kind of worry and pain and sometimes, plain curiosity.

I wonder who thought of the term, missing person ad. Does the missing person become a commodity when removed from the masses, and attached very specific attributes? Does the cash reward make it different from an announcement?

A character on a TV show I was working on was in her final month of pregnancy. When her mother asked her if she felt scared, she said, “I just want to get it over with.” It was an insight into her pregnancy for me. It’s a long wait, nine months, and although it is hardly a passive one, do mothers ever get impatient? Do they feel tired of waiting for something which is making them lose control of their bodies every day; do they feel the wait keenly?

My mother said something similar to my TV character. “You know it’s going to take nine months, so you are prepared to wait it out. But it starts getting to you during the last few days. The baby has grown, there’s water in your stomach so you always feel like peeing; it’s difficult to walk, sit down, lie down or stand. You feel old and heavy and watery. You just want it to get out.” I don’t think I’ve ever been referred to as an ‘it’ before and laughed so much. 

She remembers those days as difficult and labourious, (pun intended, if you like) but also as a wait which didn’t have a very significant end to it. She waited for her child to be born, then for her milestones, then for her to go to school, and then she waited for her to come back from school. 

As I write this I’m beginning to understand that the pressure that society places on a woman being a ‘good’ mother is tremendous also because of this waiting, this gradual swell of time which only stretches into events with higher stakes—sexual maturity, sense of responsibility and awareness, graduation, marriage—our parents wait for all of these things as time passes by, and it is not a comfortable anticipation.

The lack of news is an acutely uncomfortable wait. Being on death row must be a very peculiar kind of waiting. I’m not in favour of capital punishment, but if it has to be done, it seems extremely odd to make someone wait for their own execution. If you have decided they deserve to die, then what are you waiting for?

Control ALT Delete

Money worth spending? Sunday, let's hope so! God bless you, Radiohead.

Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should've Come Over

Will I ever see your sweet return?

In the Mood

Rhythm&Meaning from Ocean_Minded on 8tracks Radio.

Writing without a point, because it's hard to find one

It seems like it's time. Then again, making your goodbyes public means you must take them seriously. You can't write a suicide note and survive to tell the tale without feeling at least the tiniest bit embarrassed with yourself.

How interesting unfamiliarity is. I came back here and something in my eyes went 'really?'; this blog theme is possibly one of my favourites. It began to seem a shame to leave, without having written anything worth the possibilities this colour-combination and font texture invite in a person. Perhaps I will override my farewell and come gatecrashing back. I think this is entirely likely; having invested two paragraphs already to one thought, there is a definitive possibility that I will change my mind swiftly. (Never must one think one does not know oneself. There only remains the prickly question of honesty.)

For someone with an abysmal memory, to have and keep a journal is a way of keeping off the sand dunes of time for as long as possible. When you are putting things down, a part of the reason why you labour so much after adjectives and descriptions is desperation. This desperation is borne of all the moments of disappointments you and others have felt, of having let something go. Is forgetting something a choice? Perhaps repression is. But why would you forget this, and not that? Is there a mechanism at play, of which somehow, slyly, you are aware? Does your ego not suffer when you forget important things, or do you admire how it somehow endears you to your loved ones? Oh, you're a crafty thing, you are. There is nobody more cunning than the one who manufactures innocence.

Where have I digressed to? This is the problem with writing at night while listening to music which sounds so familiar that you feel like you're strumming every wailing chord yourself. A girl I know once told me how she had stopped talking on the phone at nights, because she'd wake up next morning and be a tad mortified at the languorous rubbish she'd been spinning last night. I've felt that sometimes. So much sharing makes you lose yourself a little. Then you run around on a wobbling heart, trying to gather your dark secrets again, trying to feel that old sense of slight contentment, that there are things you want to share sometimes, but something has made you suspend that feeling, till another secret, another little bit of you comes along. Or you blog about it all at night. Oh, what an irony pickle!

So let's not blame myself. Perhaps it's this house. We're shifting soon and going to a house on the seventh floor, on a building made by vanishing a jungle. It's a conflict, truly it is. I knew this jungle, what it looked like, what it felt like. It was our myth come true, it was our gory battlefield, it was our daylight horror tale. To this day, getting lost in a forest in the middle of the day is my favourite nightmare. It is a breathless, hand-on-my-heart frightening a prospect for me. And now when I walk towards school, my mind nodding in agreement to the sprawling landscape of nostalgia, my heart crushes at the sight of this building. My forest has disappeared, and in its place is a thing as alien as a dinosaur. Perhaps it is one.

I need to stop growing so old, if truth be told, because things change, and our conversations with the past need to undwell on how similar or dissimilar the present appears to be. For this very reason I keep counselling myself to not give up on Bombay. Have I given up on Bombay? All I can see is an invasive, unmindful, graceless kind of change-brain, knocking things up and plonking down strange creatures in their place, creatures which seem proud of themselves, but are, in fact, painfully awkward in their ambitiousness and fresh paint. They look down at the few old trees which have been left alone, and something seems very odd.

There are creatures, however, who do seem to have a kind of bloom in them. A run-down little two-room opposite IDC has been recreated as a creche for children of construction workers. It has friendly, although incomplete, cartoons all over its outer walls, and despite the nauseating off-white paint scheme, it seems quite inviting and at peace with where it stands. If double-decker buses and the pavement book-sellers leave, if L'Amour book-shop at Hiranandani is replaced with an Arabic bistro, if Taste of Kerala goes away, if Anmol near J B Nagar loses its grand entrance to a steel gate... Seawoods station has already been turned into a monster, and some of us have been reading with trepidation at what is about to happen at Panvel because of the new airport. It's difficult not to despair, I can almost hear myself singing mournfully, 'Back in the days when taxis were black-and-yellow...'. And on the other hand, I tell myself that attachments stunt your capacity to remember things with love.

Our loves seem recycled, sometimes new, but our fears, they seem to be the same old ones.     

"Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.."

One standard reaction I would get from people when I told them about the Jnanapravaha course was, "I don't get Modern Art. It's just deliberately obscure", or "Modern Art is so elitist!", or "You have to be obscenely wealthy and educated abroad to be able to enjoy that kind of art", or my favourite: "One line, dot, or square across a large white canvas and that's that. A four year old could do that."

Aside: Now that I think of it, most people said "four year old..". Not five, not six, not two - people didn't even cash in on adolescent angst and presume most 16 year olds could make Modern Art. What is it with universally precocious four year olds?

Seagulls and Sails, by Jehangir Sabavala

The problem with a painting is that it is it's own context. You as a viewer must take the initiative to engage with it, struggle with its apparent obscurity, resist the ease of ignorance and indifference, learn the language, battle your inarticulacy, and most difficultly, consume your ego. The painting may or may not relate to your life or your experiences. It may not agree with your opinions on who should be a celebrated artist, who should not. It may even deeply offend you. But there is no denying the fact that it exists, and its self-sufficiency makes you feel lost and unsettled.

The gallery experience of art is something that troubles me a lot, specially because there is a politics underneath the floors and behind the walls, which is not clear but cannot possibly be unfelt while you are in the space.

My TIFR experience comes to mind. One of the projects I was involved in (it had a hand in changing my life - now that didn't sound too dramatic, did it?) was organising an exhibition of TIFR's incredibly exhaustive and exciting art collection. There were over 250 art works that our curator, Mortimer Chatterjee had to select and exhibit at the NGMA. Everything about this project was an electric experience - learning how restoration artists are actually the acrobats of the art world, how the right frame can do a three-sixty to the way you experience a painting. 

Our interactions with Mr. S, the gallery manager of NGMA were very problematic. It was difficult to communicate with him because there was an incredibly busy subtext underneath whatever he appeared to be saying. Greasy, translucent words would stream silently from his grey-black hair and thinly film our eyes. 

Instead of working with our curator on creating the story which would tie the selected works together, or compiling the essays and pictures of the exhibition catalogue (yes, people do read and publish art crit too! god bless y'all), or  taking care that the works were packed, transported, unpacked and hung/arranged properly with gentle, loving care, we were now required to fret about who had to be invited to the opening show, who would sit where, who would be invited for the dinner later and who wouldn't, who would get the flowers, who would give the flowers, who would cut the ribbon, how long would the Minister's tour of the show be (we couldn't possibly do the detailed two hour talk-walk with her, could we?). We even had to make sure certain people didn't bump into each other, because they had separately instructed us on who they got along with, and who they didn't.

It was degrading, reductive and humiliating. NGMA flexed its muscles because it knew we had nowhere else to exhibit TIFR's collection. The only other gallery large enough to house such a huge collection was Jehangir, which was booked for the next two years. 

I began wondering about the gallerial experience of art. Many professors and students were left stunned by the exhibition. These were paintings and sculptures they had walked among, waited for the lift by, discussed theories, politics and movies next to. Partly due to bad lighting, poor maintenance, a pitiable budget allocation and partly due to the kind of insulation which institutes of higher learning often develop about anything beyond their immediate academic concerns, these beautiful, provocative and  insightful pieces of art had become nothing more than show pieces or shadowy, dusty oblongs on corridor walls.

What a difference big, clean walls, considerate, gentle lighting and context can make! Many people came up to us and said that the exhibition had breathed new life into the paintings. It was tempting to believe that, but the truth was that it was a simple case of taking for granted things that are the closest to you, and also how much you cared about something. As long as Dr Bhabha was alive, he fought to keep aside 1% of TIFR's total budget for collecting and maintaining its art collection. He often paid for paintings or sculptures he wanted for TIFR out of his pocket (but then again, he was quite privileged financially), and his successor, Dr MGK Menon collected many *eyebrow-raising works for that time. 

Successive directors didn't quite know what to do. Dr Menon had left TIFR in 1975, and it was only two years ago that the previous director decided that the paintings and sculptures needed restoring. To date there's a tiny strong room opposite the Accounts section, which has paintings stacked together in their packings, not being displayed because, well, actually I don't really know. Nobody seemed to have an answer, but I suspect there wasn't a straightforward way to say, we don't care.

The exhibition changed the way many people at TIFR saw the art collection, even after the paintings and sculptures made their way back home from the gallery. There was no denying that the gallery, in its capacity of being a generous space to exhibit those works, had had a role in this change of heart and mind.

But there was a malevolent superficiality to the whole experience which I could not shake off. What the painting was saying to you, what you could see or hear from it mattered lesser than what they cost. The Husains were eagerly sought out, the Baburao Sadwelkars were ignored. Here I speak of the gallery manager and some of their staff. The power politics played by the art world and those who peopled it - in this particular situation - was disturbing. And this then reflected on to the people who came and saw the exhibition.

Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, the definite, independent, each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if... if..., it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and the guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the viewer. Increasingly, galleries have a habit of saying when they acquired a painting and how much it cost...

Millions! The viewer does not see the colours on the canvas, she sees the colour of money.

Is the painting famous? Yes! Think of all the people who have carefully spared one minute of their lives to stand in front of it.

Is the painting Authority? Does the guide-book tell us that it is a part of The Canon? If Yes, then half of the viewers will admire it on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle.

Who painted it? What do we know about his/her sexual practices and have we seen anything about them on the television? If not, the museums will likely have a video full of schoolboy facts and tabloid gossip.

Where is the tea-room/toilet/gift shop?

Where is the painting in any of this?

Experiencing paintings as moving pictures, out of context, disconnected, jostled, over-literary, with their endless accompanying explanations, over-crowded, one against the other, room on room, does not make it easy to fall in love. Love takes time. 

... the only way into the strange life of pictures is to expose yourself to as much contemporary art as you can until you find something, anything, that you will go back and back to see again...

- Art Objects, by Jeanette Winterson

I did much of what Winterson describes as "over-literary, with their endless accompanying explanations" throughout the two months our exhibition was on. Initially it was exciting to know and explain to strangers the what, how and why of a painting. And then it began to pale, because the explanations became larger than the paintings, and slowly made them entirely redundant in my mind. When I had repeated the story behind Husain winning the mural competition twenty times, I stopped looking at the mural. It was a pity, because before assuming the role of a 'tour guide', I would spend time alone, just with the paintings and sculptures, and try to listen to them instead.

Saying that Modern Art is obscure, elitist, or that enjoying it requires you to be wealthy and educated abroad, or that it can be done by a four year old, is like hiding under a tree because everyone in the forest says the sky is about to fall. Let a painting speak to you, sing to you. Touch a sculpture and experience it. Take off your blinkers and know that if you reach out sincerely, you will be met half way.

"I know."

What were to happen if we did have the ability to know everything about something? What if the possibility of knowing everything existed?

Say for instance, I know I need to get to Kanjur station quickly because a usual, I'm running late. It's 6:30 pm, and

the traffic is a mad, ravaging beast of screeching horns and savage wheels, a growling, yelling, vicious, anxious metallic beast, with its guts spilling out in all directions on the road, and

I know I'm going to get frustrated by the fact that the BMC/BEST has shifted the bus stop farther away from Main Gate, and built a road divider in between the lane going towards Kanjur/Eastern Express Highway, in an effort to create a separate lane for buses, but because bikers and company buses choke this lane, BEST buses usually take the other lane meant for everybody else, while I do an angry, dangerous dance from one lane to the other, and

I know that as a result of the frustration and lack of time, I'm going to hitch a bike-ride to Kanjur. 

It is so defeating to know everything. Surprises are lost. The kick you get out of doing something differently is lost. The exquisite angst of an existential crisis is lost, the overwhelming brightness and warmth of an epiphany is lost. The wonder at your abilities to do something you never imagined you could, is lost.

While reading the paper yesterday, I chanced upon an article by Jaron Lanier. He wrote a paper called One-Half of a Manifesto (2000), on opposing "cybernetic totalism". I quote Wiki -

At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory (esp. iedology) is not that it is false, "but when it claims to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality." The impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm, and causes the self-fulfilling destiny, which spoils people.

Isn't it amazing that we don't know everything, yet here we are, living life, making mistakes, celebrating, waking up everyday?

Emptiness as a Beginning

When I began the course on Art, Theory and Criticism at Jnanapravaha, I thought I knew what I was getting into. Chiefly, I thought that I was about to learn what fascinated me so much about contemporary art. Jeanette Winterson expresses this first beginning into the unknown beautifully in Art Objects, and I would like to quote her.

“Long looking at foreign paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, and then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence."

Her essay struck me deeply, because I had found in her words a kindred spirit; someone who desired and despaired of art in equal measure. Oh, what a gladdening feeling to know that someone felt the same! This session went beautifully, and I returned home with hope and excitement.

Over the days, things changed. I would lose track in the middle of lectures. I would suddenly find myself playing peek-a-boo with straying thoughts, shooing them away shamefully. I often chastised myself, “what on earth are you doing, thinking about possible wisecracks and comebacks you could have deployed in past conversations? Listen to what he’s saying!” I would feel miserable and hopelessly lost as I found myself veering towards blankness and incomprehension, three-fourths of most sessions. One day, a guest lecturer asked me about Modernism in literature and I couldn’t say a word. My favourite college professor’s disappointed eyes washed over in front of me, and I died a little. That the guest lecturer and I were students of that same professor, albeit separated by uncountable generations, didn’t help. I had let a legacy down.

I would walk out of the classroom with my mind heaving with incomplete, tentative understandings of terms, concepts, histories, backgrounds, critical analyses and interpretations encountered in each session, and I would discard them as soon as I left the building. I began feeling depressed at my inertia, and despaired over my feeble, wisplike passions. Why wasn’t I fascinated anymore? Why did I not feel wondrously awed? Why did I not feel grateful and eager about being a part of the course, having the privilege of hearing such intrepid, erudite people share their thoughts and work with me? Why did I not want to explore, create, ask or act on anything?

As usually happens, discussing personal crises with others has its limitations. I feel reassured of the support of the people who care for me. I feel relieved to unburden myself for a while. But the search is my struggle alone, and the answers still remain as elusive as ever. These are not questions who become neighbours; it is alright not to know them intimately. Furthermore, some answers exist in the form of doubts. No, these are questions which plague and agonise and disrupt your life – till they are led to the truth.

Trains are vehicles of insight for me. This is true even when I am walking, though not in the fashion of a flaneur, but in that state of simultaneous thought and motion, when you find yourself extracting answers as automatically as you are walking. Being in motion has a curious way of letting you let go. Immediate objectives are taken care of – you are headed somewhere, you will arrive somewhere at some point in time. So now, you are free to exist peacefully in between. And today I realised why I was feeling depressed and reluctant to learn or explore anything.

It was because of my ego – a BA graduate in English literature from Sophia College. This arrogance consists of three tropes: 

the ‘BA graduate’ – one who can effortlessly absorb, read, write, understand, analyse, assimilate and express a text of whatever medium/genre

of ‘English literature’ – one who has studied closely and carefully various texts in English, spanning across period, style, intent and form and therefore should have no difficulty in continuing to do so

at ‘Sophia College’ – one who is a part of an institution of higher learning which is not only well-reputed, but has an illustrious history, which bequeaths you with an inheritance of unmatched intellectual abilities, that you have obviously lived up to at all times, and will naturally do so in the future

I couldn't accept the fact that I was finding it hard to understand lectures delivered in English. In something that was so closely related to literature. I refused to accept how much I had left behind, and how much I had to retrieve, and/or relearn. I was worried that thanks to my limited understanding of the sessions, I would submit lacklustre assignments. That my teacher would read my essay and be unfavourably surprised, “this is what she gives to me, the girl who did a BA in English from Sophia?” What I forgot was that I had not done anything towards keeping any of the skills that I developed during my three years of college, from rusting. And they had; they were now useless and required rigourous practise. And that the assignments were not judgments, not ends in themselves, but they were the first steps towards learning something new and unheard of.

Starting from scratch – this is the challenge that Jeanette spoke of all along, but which I now realised requires both humility and bravery. As I begin reading this once again, it starts making sense why our teacher began our course with this essay.

“Long looking at foreign paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, and then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No-one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.

We have to recognise that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.”

The Silent Descent of Time

Freedom is having your own little laptop. To stay up nights, against the light, and let the dreams talk to you on the screen here instead. Quiet songs that make the tick slowly tock away.


Spaces are created. With the liberty of time they flow out into the open when we conduct the sounds of our mind. The waters stir, the ground deepens, the sky widens.


The moment smiles over me and I take a picture. Dust covers the still surface of my sunken jasmine tea. It feels good to have time to yourself, time to reflect and see it descend upon you.

Photograph of a Smooth Talker

You make me wanderlust
I don't want to stay anymore, there are
Too many little islands I've made.

I send out little paperboats
Every time I feel unsettled, I set asail
A wobbling, fearful, mute thing.

They talk behind my back
Inch by quiet inch the delirious glitter of
My lies washes upon the shore.

"The only good fight there is."

Happiness

- Anirudh Singh Chohan

Few people who can accurately claim to know me can testify that I have tried my level best to reverse-engineer happiness. I’ve tried all the ways to conjure it out of nowhere, but haven’t quite made it happen. That said, I am not even close to give up trying.

This may be a stretch of my imagination or just a bad approximation of how it would feel to be truly happy, but I will try and articulate it in the best way I know. Times when hours seem to pass like seconds and one is in a pinpoint of focus. Times when the real and surreal coincide and you live in the moment. Those very times when, there is perfect silence inside and one is alone with the gods. And there is perfect laughter. It’s truly what I find to be the only thing worth working towards. The only good fight there is. I see people meander and fumble through life standing up for nothing, growing old, just getting by and it pains me to see that the world around me seems to be too caught up in the humdrum of ‘the typical’ to actually breathe for a minute.

That is the very challenge that life throws at you. The big question: How far will you go?

This could mean not sleeping for 4 days or freezing in the cold waiting for someone. This could mean losing your lover, relatives, friends or even your mind. It could mean not leaving your seat for hours forgetting day and night. And if history says something, it could mean mockery and derision. But the place where it drops you, all of this won’t matter.

So cheers to going the full way, or not going at all.

Source