parenting

I wonder if people consider the philosophical and moral implications of bringing up a child.

One of the most common arguments I've heard for having children is the continuation of the family line. If a family wants to extend their lineage, why not write a well-researched account of its oral history instead? I would imagine it would problematise and enrich notions of who is a Muslim, etc., who is an Indian, etc. which we need desperately. It would take away academic (and by extension class, caste, geography and gender) monopoly over who writes these histories, and what kind of histories are heard.

But I digress. Not everybody cares about knowledge monopolisation and that's okay.

Another argument is having someone to take care of you when you grow old. This is a justified anxiety since not many of us care to die alone and it's comforting to have someone with whom you have an intimately shared history with. I imagine the economics of raising a child take care, partly, of this requirement. I think we may have enough to provide for ourselves when we grow old, were we to not spend on raising children. Of course, emotionally we may choose the intimacy of having our own children to share our old age with, rather than friends or other relationships. But that is not reason enough to have children, since it doesn't account for the personal liberty of the child.

I also want to protest against the hypocrisy of this justification: a parent-child relationship is considered emotional, and is operationalised emotionally, but the justification (particularly this one) to have a child seems rather transactional. In this sense, rural families who decide to have children so that they can pitch in economically seems to me a more candid approach to having children, although it is equally unjustified for the same reason: children are not a means to an end, just as much as parents aren't.

A third argument is that children are a source of company in an otherwise lonely world, or relationship. Let's not consider the latter situation, since children are not a means to make a parent feel better about themselves or their relationship with their partner. To the justification that children are a source of emotional joy and security, it's harder to apply the utilitarian critique because theoretically, parents also lend emotional support and comfort to their children. But does this always happen?

The question now is: once I decide to become a parent, do I also think about how to become a good parent? (By 'good' I mean, a parent who is emotionally caring and looks at a child not just as a source of emotional solace but also as an individual with rights.)

To understand just how difficult parenting is, let's compare it with teaching. As a teacher it is possible to have access to resources, planned training; to have the luxury of experimentation and personal space while working with children. Teachers get paid, too. As a parent, on the other hand I have almost nothing except anecdotal advice from almost everybody, de-contextualised resources, discontinuous support and a stupendous invasion of my private and/or professional life. What kind of support, really, do parents have on how to raise a child? Why does our society not acknowledge this lack?

There are some people in this world who have really made a muck of being parents. Their children are trying their best to be well-adjusted despite their upbringing. Their parents, in turn are trying to cope with dark moments of feeling defeated and self-betrayed. Both children and their parents have to eventually find support systems elsewhere. This process is immensely difficult because of unnatural and unjustified expectations that society places on parenting and children's relationship with their parents.These expectations also make acknowledging this social failure almost impossible: bad parents are rare and their children have bad luck.

In fact, I think it's really hard to be a parent because although they are encouraged to be one, they are hardly given any pragmatic support once this irreversible deed has been accomplished. Parents are left stranded and unprepared to handle the enormity of laying foundational groundwork in a child's life, entirely on their own. Is it enough that women can fertilise eggs and lactate, that men can generate sperm, that they have a stable socio-economic arrangement, that they get along with each other? Where is the child in all of this biological and economic preparation?

Perhaps people who decide to be single parents have had the opportunity to think a little harder on the philosophical implications of bringing up a child, since it isn't a natural extension of their current state in life. It is not enough to think about the potential changes in one's personal life (given that that is also a crucial component of the decision-making process) simply because being a parent is not entirely about you.

We need to free parenting from its essentialist trappings. Being a parent is not natural, simply because procreation is. We need to think of it as a choice, as a role that people need support and preparation for.

freedom and democracy

Excerpt from The Diary of a School Teacher, by Hemraj Bhatt (trans. Sharada Jain)

While watching T.V., I came across a news item about a Madhya Pradesh teacher who had advertised in the newspapers for a female friend to massage him and fulfil his sexual needs. The police, on reading the advert, conducted a sting operation on the teacher and took him to the police station. Here, they asked him vulgar questions again and again – just to enjoy themselves at the expense of his discomfort. The teacher, on his part, was visibly ashamed and kept apologising, saying that he would never do something like this again.

The TV channels played this clip on loop. Several questions came to my mind. What do these channels want to convey by showing such news? What is worth showing and what is not? What was so great about conducting a sting operation on a poor teacher?

In a country and in a society where nothing is immoral if done on the sly, who gave the police and the TV channels the right to define morality?

This teacher could have fulfilled his desires without the advertisement. Then the police and journalists would not have known about him. But he expressed his feelings. What does freedom mean in a democracy?

Hemraj Bhatt (1968-2008) was a assistant primary schoolteacher in a government primary school in Uttarkashi. He was the only official teacher in a school for 51 children, ranging from classes 1 to 5. He began keeping a diary which was translated and published after his death. His reflections provide insight not just on his daily struggles to provide meaningful education to his children but also on the entire education system itself. Read the full diary here.

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.

'Zindagi Gulzar Hai'

There comes a time when you realize that you have surrendered a part of your heart to a book, film, television series or a professor because they leave you moved. The writer, the artist becomes a presence in your mind separate from your experience of their work.

With each redefining moment of watching Kashav's story I feel a complicated mixture of love and alarm at its intensity. I sometimes cannot believe this story has actually been written.

Sultana apa, you have my heart. Don't let me down; I won't be able to bear it.

[No spoilers, please.]

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.  

Initial thoughts on possessing a shaved head

1 The slightest breeze feels like waves of wind flowing over my head.

2 I still have to shampoo! Because dandruff doesn't go away with hair.

3 The kajal in my eyes and earrings seem to stand out more - maybe there is a facial proportion answer to this.

4 People, known or unknown, are franker with their reactions - they laugh or widen their eyes in a way that I cannot miss.

5 I have to rearrange the way I dance to hindi songs because I can't use my hair anymore.

6 It really does feel light up there.

7 Looking at my reflection in the mirror is an exercise in self-discomfort. It's sometimes hard to get used to the way my face has changed.

8 I don't feel nice when my roommate says, "you look like a boy!" And I wonder why.

9 There is a slight but significant shift in the way most men see me. It's as if I have become an object of curiosity instead an object of sexual overpowering, if only momentarily.

10 Women come and tell me how they have been wanting to do the same thing for a long time now. I know how that feels, because it took me three years.

11 I sometimes forget I don't have hair anymore, when I absently run my hand over my head.

12 It surprisingly doesn't annoy me when people stroke my head, but I can imagine it must be for others.

13 I suspect people ask women a lot more questions than they do men, when women choose to shave off their hair.

14 People ask a lot of questions.

dirty talk

Like sex, hygiene is something that people don’t talk about often enough. Everybody has their own personal definition of hygiene. Maybe we don’t need to talk about everything, you say. But when you share a bathroom, you do, I say.

We have our personal definitions of hygiene that we strangely believe everyone is aware of, and shares with us. We silently but irrevocably judge people based on how they leave the toilet, the sink, the floor, the taps, the drain. It is a testament to their character, their parents, their community and/or religion, the place they come from.

Notions of invisible ‘purity’ which form the basis of Hinduism and Sikhism may be hard to believe since they are, ultimately, abstract concepts upon which some people are alienated, murdered, sexually violated, exploited by other people in positions of power. But it’s interesting to note that while something might be visibly unclean to me, it might not be to someone else.

I live in a 2BHK flat with four other women. One of my friends in the other bedroom constantly complained how her roommate, K left the drain clogged with her hair every morning. To me, this is unforgivably inconsiderate.

After three days, I jumped in the middle of what was, technically, their dispute, because each bedroom has its own bathroom. I confronted her as soon as she came out of her bath. I spoke to her unkindly, asking her what she thought of herself to leave the bathroom in such a terrible condition for her roommate. I said a lot more, too, assuming that she was doing this out of laziness or disgust. (Eww, who picks up hair from a drain?)

She was stunned. She simply assumed that the cleaning staff was doing the needful. I sharply corrected her, no, it’s your roommate who’s cleaning up after you.

That night, I happened to eat alone in the mess; my roommates had finished before me and had gone upstairs. I realised that my friend had never mentioned having spoken to K about her discomfort. She, as I, had simply assumed that K was at fault because she didn’t share this common code of hygiene with the rest of us. Neither of us had stopped to think that we had never verbalised this code to anyone.

I hadn’t pulled up K for leaving the bathroom dirty. I had attacked her for not reading our minds.

Why can we not talk to each other about hygiene? Just because four women happen to follow a particular aspect of this all-important code doesn’t mean it becomes obvious. The bathroom is one of the most crucial spaces in a house—unlike the kitchen, it’s a space that everyone uses frequently. It’s a private space that we are forced to share. We confront our uglinesses, we let go (forgive the terrible pun), we strip ourselves bare in that room. It is impossible that each of us does this identically. Even when I was living alone, it was the bathroom that made me feel most vulnerable when a guest happened to use it.

I think it’s time my roommates and I overcame our shame and disgust and spoke to each other frankly about hygiene. In matters of dirtiness, the bathroom is no match for the mind.

Ab ki baar...

And a close favourite:

Seeing there is no place left for reason or humanity.

Source

question

When it comes to trusting people, is it incorruptibility to not learn from betrayals, or is simply foolishness?

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.

screaming

A precious advantage to having your own place is the freedom to scream. One afternoon when the lights were burning the back of my eyes once again, I went to office, stood under the shower and screamed. I screamed with my mouth wide open, then shutting again, in fear. After all, the windows of the bathroom were made of glass with wide mouths of their own. I pressed my spongey lips on the bathroom wall and screamed into it. I beat my forehead and crushed my heart inside my throat. I wanted to reach inside myself and grasp that; heavily webbed sticky dense untouchable yet so heavy, so heavy. Had I no friends in this city I would have screamed freely in my own house and cleaned up later quietly.

Susan Gowling, Those Precious Hours

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?

klpd

One thing I frequently experience is a frustration with words, terms and phrases when discussing sex with friends. I often feel lost. I can see she and I both feel it, but we just can't seem to put it to words.

Of course, it goes without saying that if I read a lot more than I am right now, I'd definitely have more words to my disposal. But what I've increasingly come to realise is that a lot of experiences are already predefined; their sentences, adjectives, words claimed by androcentric passengers in the travel of language.

Say, for instance, having sex with someone. Why is it not sex when I have had the time of my life, but it hasn't been penetrative? Does it really matter? Must he nail me? How on earth will my girlfriends and I make do with that pale milk phrase, 'making out'?

I have always intensely disliked that phrase. It captures nothing; it could mean children play-acting, a young girl striking out on her own in a new city, pressing out spaghetti strings from the machine. Why could 'making out' not be any of these instead?

And then, bases. How powerfully they staircase a dip into the ocean. Why must his shirt be unbuttoned, her bra unhooked? What of all those beautiful places in between; the smouldering, the pauses, the suddenness, the crackling cigarette or was it the friction of your corduroys?

I wish I knew hindi better, I'm certain that we have much more fulfilling ways to talk about our experiences, sensations, feelings without having to rely on cheap American imports. 

Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should've Come Over

Will I ever see your sweet return?

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.     

Hymen 101, by Laci Green

I had no fucking idea! It's incredibly shocking to me, that despite having read, spoken, argued, participated in and discussed sex and sexuality, I had such a fundamental misunderstanding about my own body. What makes it worse is that I've also perpetuated this myth by talking about it, authoritatively, to my friends.

*sinking face*

She is one of my idols, as of this moment.

source

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

Via Mohit.

"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.

सवाल

तुझसे नाराज़ नहीं, ज़िन्दगी 

हैरान हूँ मैं

तेरे मासूम सवालों से 

परेशान हूँ मैं 

 ~ गुलज़ार, तुझसे नाराज़ नहीं  (मासूम)

Feminism 101

I just found a very funny and smart web comic via Fuck Yeah! Feminism - a website I've been wanting to explore for a very long time now but haven't for a variety of reasons. Thanks to this lovely web comic called Fudge That Sugar, my down-arrow button is getting a bit sore, but I'm chuckling away in glee! The irony is that the creator of this awesome web comic, AK Tettenborn has just closed it, three months ago. This makes two amazing publications which are closing down in front of me - but that's another story.

For now,