28.6.13

Art

Halfway through his month-long stay in Bombay, Anubhav Rao, a fresh tweenager intern and I were in the auto late one weeknight heading to Bandra's cheap watering hole, Janta. Among the few things we spoke of on the quick drive, work - his & mine - came up. Anu completes his internship at Crude Area next week. At the time of our conversation, he had been asked to write short descriptions for a few art pieces, since Crude Area sources, curates and sells affordable digital prints by artists from around the world.

Anubhav was confronted with a dead end on the assignment. As articulate and competent he is with words, arty jargon was a first. I began rattling off some areas of focus – colour, treatment, elements, mood – and then a mildly amusing 'texture' he chorused with me.

We meandered to other related and tangential topics through the course of the evening. He is observant, even if not a talker. But the comical one-word chorus set me thinking.

I've known about, and the people behind, CA for barely a few months now. Their hard-to-miss ethos, however, even in a front page ET story from last weekend, is to make art 'accessible'. As author of the Prix Moliere winning play Art suggests, "There's no point… if it isn't accessible, because no one will see it. The greatest… were also accessible."

Art is a limited space & time play about three friends and their perceptions of a really expensive 5' X 4' white painting with some barely perceivable white diagonal lines on it. In the course of the play, their discussion heats to a violent brawl and the three end up questioning the very fabric of their friendship.

Art. A space that is hazy as hell and crazy as can be; chaotic as peak-hour traffic in this city and peaceful as the desert landscapes of the Iceland Pico Iyer describes in his travelogue, Falling Off The Earth. And amid all of those anomalies and harmonies lie the sometimes elitist, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes baroque and sometimes relatable pieces of art. As an increasingly unsurpassable factor in cultures across the globe – especially with pop versions and styles gaining strength of numbers and prominence – art of any kind has become impossible to ignore. But how do you enjoy it? Surely a 14" laptop screen isn't the best way to take it in – however convenient. Most of us can't spare the hours to gape at an original at an art gallery or museum either. In the constant vying for mental space that music, fiction and visuals squabble with on TV, on the internet and of course in our world around, isolation of any one form of aesthetic rendition is not only a ludicrous thought but also a rather narrow approach.

Like meditation, any, however menial, study of aesthetics requires at least one catalyst. It could be a drone or a refrain, a painting to complement what you might be reading.

A few days back, someone shared a recent piece by Stephen Fry on Facebook. The immediate impulse was to click on the link and quickly skim through its contents. Fry quotes one of literature's most famous speeches from Shakespeare's Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
But it wasn't half as much fun as I thought it would be. The mind demanded a far heightened experience of the passage from Hamlet's Act 3 Scene 1 that Fry quotes in his piece. There was also an immediate urge to open YouTube and play the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, because he finishes with a line from the song.

So I went back to the soliloquy from one of Shakespeare's most renowned and depressing tragedies of blind distrust in love. But half way through this altered reading, I caught myself, this is no good. The vocals in the song hampered the absorption of the monologue. How about an instrumental orchestra version then? The last one is not hard to find since several 50-piecers of repute have attempted it to great degrees of success.
Since I tend to read with pauses of moments to look up, a new craving launched. My eyes wanted a view of this painting from my living room (thank you CA!).

Killer Tune by Enkel Dika
I finally played it all out in my head, like the final take of a film reel. So perfect, so harmonious, so ironically peaceful, for Fry's piece was about loneliness.

Now I had an element each to enamour my senses – my vision, hearing, speech, intellect, touch (for it sure gave me goosebumps). If only I had my sister's often-opened copy of the volume to read it from, as the aroma of yellowing paper would make my olfactory go into a tizzy.

Then again, if wishes had wings, I would have few new experiences in art to look forward to. For now, I revel in the sheer possibility of recreating this delight.

12.6.13

First Rains: Third Time Lucky

On the first day-time early evening drizzle in Bombay, as I walked briskly in the solitude of the mob from Horniman Circle to Churchgate, I couldn't resist the spontaneous urge to take in the lightly brighter version of the city through the wide panes of a BEST AC bus. Albeit, the journey would eat a full hour and a half extra into my evening, but the wish was to embark upon a secret recap and relive nostalgia of a route I lumbered upon often during my very first stint in Maxcity was overwhelming. Like swimming or cycling or any other learned synchronised body movement, this memory demanded to surface that evening last week. And then this thought came surging: some things never change.

Perhaps never is too harsh a word. Perhaps these things take their syrupy sweet time, more like, to relent to the elements. And these things I speak of could be a shrub of pale pink Champak flowers outside a modern landmark in Worli, or the mellow erosion on the side wall of a bicentennial edifice in Mahim. Then again, it could just be the square-faced, bushy moustachioed sev-puriwala who hasn't budged an inch from his spot right outside your first home on Pedder Road along its undulations. The signboards of old housing colonies with moss growing over them, flourish on the first paint, immune to its chemicals, adequately dried by the briny mist wafting from the sea nearby – perhaps even consumed and digested – an ironic testimony of their depletion.They all stay put – in denial of the world around them that moves and moves on.
In this city of fleeting glory, 15-minute fame, fast-expiry attention spans, and a pace highly governed by money, even new-age smokescreens find a way to keep loyalists and convert more:some through the spiel of heritage, others resort to synthetic calisthenics.

The wrinkles may iron out; the blotches erase, but in the face of constant influx, what do the old do? Some battle it out,some cash in, some play passive spectators. The last allow the new to pass – like a Monday-to-Friday fad – knowing the clouds must clear for ominous blue skies to materialise.

On this journey, there will be dispute, indecisiveness, and doldrums. Pulling the shutters down and letting fungus ease the demolition or looking smart and allowing a swift execution is then a personal choice and a tactical one respectively. The former earns respect, wrath and mirth, the latter, reverence, mockery and disgust. A commotion of reactions for a plethora of emotions. And from the chaos arises a pattern clear as an engineer’s drawing. Detailing not just contours but also virtual tours; elucidating the details and the drastic anomalies.

The chaos becomes the pattern.The design begins to throw up a design, and follow a routine, a process, a cycle. And then his cycle becomes that thing. That thing that seldom changes? Or takes what seems like forever to undergo any noticeable transformation.

3.6.13

7 Battles of May

May is not a fun month in India. Or for that matter, any tropical country. The climate is by no means pleasant and tempers tend to fluctuate without little or no warning. Mine may not have been very different from others', however, they had original touches and interesting twists!


  1. Moving Base.
    Location: Tier 2 to Big City
    When: May 13, 2013
    Fight: Employment documents; cats; time; LBT strike
  2. Cats.
    Location: Western Suburb
    When: May 13 to May 25, 2013
    Fight: To let them go out or not.
  3. House-keeping.
    Location: Same as Above.
    When: May 15 to present, 2013
    Fight: Agent says speak to handy man; Handy man does not receive calls; Carpenter loses estimates; Building Secretary raises objection to changing piping for water force improvement (read: some in exchange for non-existent)
  4. Commute.
    Location: Western Suburb to South of the City
    When: Mornings & Evenings; First week since joining, 2013
    Fight: Bus or Auto? Bus or Train? AC bus or direct route? Fast Train or Slow?
  5. Work Place.
    Location: South of the City
    When: Recently, 2013
    Fight: OfficeBitch on laziness overdrive - I was to replace her old seating and storage space yet to be emptied of her remnants
  6. Weather.
    Location: Big city
    When: Yesterday
    Fight: Rains
  7. Time.
    Location: Big city
    When: Everyday
    Fight: Work? Socialising? Pets? Groceries? Shopping? Reading? Beauty regime? Dinner? BREAKFAST?! Sleep?
However, I see that as the days go by, the creases are ironing out, and a smile, some patience and irreverent following up does the trick. Then again, you can't control everything. For everything else, as the famous tagline goes, there's MasterCard!