Shilpa Chavan: Using her head

(The Hindu, July 18, 2010)

Life is all about serendipity for some people. For Shilpa Chavan, discovery is almost a way of life. She walks the line – occasionally a wall – between art and fashion with a knowledge that what she does, creatively speaking, cannot be classified as either. Her choice of career was not a logically considered decision, but she knew that she would do something creative, for pleasure rather than merely for money. Now in her mid-30s, Chavan was “brought up in a normal middle class Maharashtrian family” where her mother “would make something even from old, dried-up flowers”. Every school assignment “became an art and craft project, so helped us remember what we did better,” Chavan says. Her father was the disciplinarian, natural for him as a member of the police force.

Growing up, she designed her own clothes “when there was not that much exposure to what we could do apart from the basic course of fashion. I wanted to do architecture, but my father said it wasn’t something a girl should do, and commercial art wasn’t popular then.” So she indulged in a little scam, one that lasted about two months. Chavan started studying fashion at one college and a more conventional programme at another; “then my parents found out, so I had to finish my graduation and then apply again for a fashion course after three very long years”, she recalls. But she knew that she “wanted to create more than just clothes.’

Chavan managed to make a mark doing just that – for her graduate presentation, she produced headpieces that earned her the enthusiastic approval of her professor, and the award for Most Innovative Collection. From there, carried along by the whimsies of destiny, she went on to assisting Hemant Trevedi, designer, mentor and perhaps one of the best known all-rounders in the Indian fashion world. In fact, he gave her the name she is known by: Litle Shilpa – “Soon everybody was using it so I chose it for my label.”

She created headpieces for the leather show in Chennai and, with that, “I realized what I wanted to do: headpieces.” Trevedi suggested she study millinery – “That was when I understood that such a concept existed!” - in London. But money was a problem, until “suddenly Channel V stuff happened and a new position called ‘a stylist’ came about”, as Chavan puts it. With television, glamour magazine shoots and other freelance assignments, she was able to take on a 15-day summer school course in London. It was not enough. “I am very anal about what I learn,” Chavan explains. “I believe that to break the rules, you need to have very strong rules.” After another stint freelancing in Mumbai, this time for a year, she earned herself the Charles Wallace scholarship and went back to London for a six-month programme.

At around that time, the fashion wave swept India. Fashion Week grew from a Delhi-based event to Mumbai, and Chavan spread her wings a little wider. But “I still felt I needed more.” Serendipity took over. Just two days before the end of a London holiday she called star milliner Philip Treacy’s office to apply for an internship. She met the designer and his team on a Friday, a day before she was to leave for India, and was asked to start work on Monday. “I worked with Treacy, doing stuff hands-on, learning about the international market, doing more sales and retail pieces.” That experience gave her the push she needed to graduate from stylist to headpiece and accessory designer. “I found I had enough for a whole collection. I used these as samples, went back to London, got lots of feedback, and signed up with Blow PR, who suggested more press work.” It had all started happening for the middle-class girl from Mumbai.

From fashion to art was a baby step. “I started doing installation work some time ago. My husband is a graphic designer; his company was part of an India festival. The curator of the show saw my work there and gave me a space to do whatever I wanted - an installation.” Then, another happy ‘accident’: Sheikh Majed Al-Sabah, owner of Villa Moda in Kuwait, had bought some of Chavan’s work for his store; but “when he saw what I sent him, he wanted it for his art gallery!”

Her Work Is Never Done, the show curated by Krishnamachari Bose earlier this year at his Mumbai gallery, BMB, happened like that too. The name itself struck a resonant chord in Chavan’s creative synapses and she put together a mannequin that embodied for her, she says, and for those who saw it, exactly that – the endless routine that a woman lives, every day, without relief. The figure is composed of all those bits and pieces that make up the life of the average urban woman today – from dustpans to rubber-slipper straps, mosquito netting, plastic baby dolls, tea strainers and more. The head of the mannequin has gear wheels turning. Chavan said then, “She multitasks, making babies, working in the house; her brain is always functioning. And with all this, she holds a mirror - she is always thinking of being beautiful” – art with a story told in a quirky, funny yet meaningful way.

According to Chavan, “When I do fashion shows, it is art. When I do art, it is more like fashion. I am in an in-between phase. I like combining old and new and creating something completely new. And I love colour!” Even as she works in the modern urban environment of Mumbai, London and parts beyond, “I am very drawn to my local roots and inspired by local art and craft, culture and colour.” Though her own designs may not always be lucrative or even saleable, “My styling money supports what I want to do. And now my family agrees that it is a good thing; they are really proud of me. My husband is my critic, he completely understands my work,” she knows. “People still feel that I need to tone it down to get orders. But I am not going to change; I do not believe in it.”

As destiny takes her along the journey she is on, the turns have worked for Chavan. As she marvels, “I haven’t planned I wanted to do anything, it just happened!”

People watching

(More from Delhi, a long time ago...)

There is a lot in life that is a dead bore - some parties, some places, some books, some movies, et al, et al, et al. What never fails to interest me is people, even if they themselves are the kinds of bores that crash into the consciousness and make their extremely boring presences felt, grammar and good manners notwithstanding. And, over the past months that I have been away from my home, Mumbai, in the capital milieu that is Delhi, I have come across a number of extremely watchable characters. Not all have been aesthetic experiences, not even of the jolie laide variety, but all have been essentially memorable. The irony, for me, is that I find that I am being watched as much as I watch, probably being dissected as ruthlessly as I dissect and perhaps even being written about as nastily as I am writing now.

But, first, a clue about how it works. I walk into a party, which is inevitably crowded with anyone who is anyone, wants to be, is thought of as being or looks like they should be. There are lots of people standing around, talking animatedly, smiling, nodding, holding glasses containing liquids of assorted origins, reaching out for the ubiquitous munchie offered by morosely wandering waiters, seeming to be absorbed in each other and the event itself. And then you look carefully, walk close by a group, watch the most chatty of people with more than cursory attention, and you find a strange phenomenon happening: No one is really involved with any of the people they are with! There is a self-conscious preening, a furtive looking over the shoulder, an eagle eye or three out for a increasedly satisfying audience, a search for an ear more attentive, more influential, more amenable, more 'in', more useful, perhaps? At an event of sorts - a concert, an exhibition, a book launch, whatever - the behaviour is the same, though constrained in volume and movement by the need to be seated…or at least to be photographed somewhat flatteringly for the gossip press!

As much fun as seeing this happen is to watch people as individuals. At a recent do, I stood by, gazing fascinatedly at a scarlet-clad woman talking loudly, forty to the proverbial dozen, laughing raucously, gulping vampire-like from a glass of red wine. She had a face like a lizard, laterally flattened, with a wide mouth stretching across the expanse from one ear to the other, protuberant, slanted eyes flashing around seeking prey. My eyes widened as I saw her eat - her tongue came out, curled around the passing morsel, pulling it rapidly through parted, darkly red lips into her mouth. I must have looked somewhat odd, because I suddenly caught the attention of a festively turbaned gentleman standing just beyond - he smiled at me benignly, like a tolerant psychiatrist taking notes on a certifiable patient.

A few weeks ago, I was at a performance of classical Indian dance, by a close friend of mine. Which meant that I was not just a member of the audience, but a useful part of the home team, checking for sound balance and viewer reactions, apart from helping with vaguely meandering guests and the recalcitrant unseated. I watched one man - obviously a tourist, judging by the clothing, pedestrian sandals, camera and huge backpack he toted - hop seats through the auditorium, looking for the best vantage view. He tripped over distinguished feet, stepped on the toes of the Honourable Chief Guest, outpaced the pursuing ushers and eventually found a roost in the chair next to mine. "Great stuff!" he said loudly, enthusiastically, cheerfully, every time the dancer made an entrance, a pause or an exit. He clapped with verve, usually at all the most inappropriate moments, until I finally glowered at him and said "Stop!", firmly and decisively. After that, he leaned over every now and then and whispered, at full volume, "Now?" and took his cues from my nods or glares. I watched him as I would a child, with a certain maternal acceptance, a softness induced by his obvious ignorance. And he watched me for help, with a trust I found most touching of all.

This weekend, I do another round of the social interaction thing, all my masks firmly in place and my powers of observation at par. It should give me some more insight into the complex animal that is human. And maybe I will learn, along the way, to know myself.

A shoe in

(The Sunday Times of India, July 4, 2010)
There is a deep, almost visceral connection between women and shoes. Every day, every outfit, almost every step brings a different need in footwear. And the age-old MCP jokes about the number of pairs of shoes, sandals, heels et al that any woman has in her closet are justified; they hold some credence for most of the sex. Style, after all, is the bon mot, and must make a statement. But when it comes to those three months of the year when the taps above (and no, not in the upstairs neighbours’ bathrooms) run ceaselessly on and no one can tell when the sun will take over from rain, style has had perforce to take a backseat and allow comfort and practicality free rein. It used to be a sad story, this one, where practicality meant plastic/PVC and comfort came courtesy many Band Aids, but today everything seems to have caught up with itself and life is a great deal more chic for feet during the monsoon.

The old warhorse of footwear, Bata, has finally managed to veer off the antediluvian Sandak path, with a happy set of Sunshine and Lite slippers, or what used to be called ‘rubber chappals’, in bright colours like red, lime green and fluorescent pink, priced from Rs59 to Rs299. Better still is the Bata and I collection, with pretty designs on very light and flexible synthetic material. From totally foldable ballerinas to T-straps to semi-gladiators to wedges, the range is priced between Rs199 and Rs999 and does the walking-on/through-water trick quite satisfactorily.

There is competition, of course, in the multifarious offerings in shoe stores across the city. Kareena Kapoor’s Gucci chappals may not be easily sourced in Mumbai, but Candies, Jellies, even the occasional Sigerson Morrison fashionista flats and kitten heels can be found if you look hard enough. But fast getting ubiquitous in its original and knock-off versions are the Crocs, those clog-like soft-rubber clogs that look like something conjured up by a clod-hopping Dutch farmer on a bad acid trip and with names like ‘Cloud’ (Rs750), ‘Endeavor’(Rs1,695), ‘Cayman’ (Rs1,495) and, enticingly, ‘Relief’ (Rs1,795). Crocs do have less awkward-looking models, like Mary Janes (Rs 1,495) and slippers (Rs 1,495), and a charming sky-blue ballerina slipper called ‘Prima’ (Rs1,295). The street interpretations of these same designs are available at about one-third the price, depending on the buyers’ bargaining skills.

Of course, there are the standards like floaters and ‘rainy shoes’ in clear plastic, but what is cheering is that the average footwear fanatic can now find decent, locally made, branded stuff to slosh through puddles in, to run for trains in and to squelch across maidans in. A good bet is to stay home and watch other people getting their feet wet – or not, depending on what shoes they wear – but not many can manage that!

A fishy story

(The Hindu Literary Review, July 4, 2010)

FOLLOWING FISH, by Samanth Subramanian

According to its writer, this book is travel writing “in its absolute essence: plain, old-fashioned journalism, disabuser of notions, destroyer of preconceptions, discoverer of the relative, shifting nature of truth”. For a reader, it is a journey through a world where gills and fins are more in focus than cities and streets, with a generous and welcome helping of people and personalities, with some politics – local, social and more global – added to spice up the finished dish.

For a foodie, it all starts off most promisingly, with that bony delicacy so prized by the true-blue Bengali; in fact the ability to eat hilsa, manna on a Kolkata plate, without death or at least injury by one of those hidden sharp ends, could perhaps be the shibboleth–test for the Bengali gene. The writer looks for the fish during the winter, when the Kolkata weather is near-perfect, but soon learns that it is not just a fish, but a “lesson in moral science: Good things come to those who wait”. In search of this piscine paragon, he wanders into the Howrah fish market, unfortunately in open-toed sandals and waits…and waits. Finally, by the end of the chapter, he not only manages to find the fish, watch it being prepped for cooking and eats it, but also manages, albeit slowly, carefully, occasionally painfully, to separate bone from meat in his mouth without choking on either.

Having passed the perilous test presented by consumption of ilish maach, our hero then wanders along to Hyderabad and beyond. First he investigates the famous fish cure for asthma in the city of the Charminar – he meets the people involved, discusses the science of the ‘medicine’, looks into the politics of the situation and the economics of keeping the much-mooted practice flourishing for so many years and then is left wondering whether it is all really true, or just a matter of faith. A little history lesson follows, this time in Tamil Nadu, at the Church of the Holy Cross in Manapadu. Religion met the sea and managed to make friends with it, many centuries ago, and the two established a unique community with its esoteric class system. In the process of discovering how it works, the author discovers a fish podi found in infinite variations all over the state – added to rice and a little ghee or oil, it is fabulously delicious, the perfect meal…almost…until the next new food in the next leg of the journey.

A treatise on toddy, sometimes from a perspective not entirely sober, takes the writer through Kerala, looking for the drink in its stages of alcoholic potency, accompanied by the seafood that partners it. Looking for a legendary fish curry in Mangalore and eating with the Kolis of erstwhile Bombay spice up the transit. A serious and socially conscious note is struck in Goa, where the author listens to tall tales of sparring with sailfish and takes a look at the destruction of the beaches caused by the same tourist trade that made the small state so prized as a travel destination. The journey comes to an end in a shipyard in Gujarat, where a fishing boat is being crafted in a manner that is age-old and timeless, even though its makers have learned to use the technology available today to do so.

This is a book that wanders across this vast and wonderful country, exploring its tastebuds and traditions, taking frequent diversions and tangents into socio-politics and psychology, in language that is free-flowing yet a web tangled with journalese, experience, skill and a soupcon of what could be called pedantic verbosity. In that, with that, it is fun to read, in parts, and tells you a lot about the land that is eternally fascinating and a delicious place to explore.

Under the skin

(Hindu Sunday Magazine, July 4, 2010)

It is indeed a woman’s world now. A sculpture by Delhi-based artist Bharti Kher, The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, fetched a record $1.5 million (Rs 6.9 crore) at the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction last week. It is an almost-life-sized figure of a prone female elephant, its contours covered with bindis. Created in 2006, critics have called it ‘iconic’, ‘awe-inspiring’ and ‘deeply moving’.

Born and educated in the UK, Kher favours the use of the bindi, more often seen decorating the female forehead than on inanimate works of art. “I use them as markers that are both conceptual and banal. Bindis have a transformative quality both aesthetically and conceptually, and can lend themselves to many forms.” These small stick-ons, glued on to the fibreglass behemoth, “have become a part of my language; a lot of my work refers to my own way of working through symbols. By engaging with a material continually, it starts to take on its own life and the life that the artist assigns it.” Women use bindis as decoration and to cover, protect and enhance that invisible, omnipotent ‘third eye’, Kher says, and “the conceptual underpinning of the work is as much about the act as it is about the narrative. Women put on this third eye, which suggests that today I can see more than I saw yesterday, or that I can see you, or myself, better. Sometimes they function like scars or markings.” And there is a more complex implication: “You can also see them as a skin, a covering for a body that marks time; skin as a sign of who you are, where you’re from.” The shapes themselves, round or snaky, are far less complex – “Keep it simple and the art speaks.”

James Sevier, Director and Specialist, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department, is all praise: “Every fold and recess of the sunken form is meticulously contoured by the intricate patterns of bindis that organically swarm across the beast in a second skin. It is India’s identity in all its glorious complexities that is the hero of this masterpiece.” He feels that Kher’s “unique sculptural practice employs familiar motifs and presents them in unexpected combinations and contexts that engage the viewer physically and viscerally on various social, political and cultural issues. Her work is renowned for its distinctly allegorical approach as well as its capacity to draw upon and enhance the inherent symbolism of everyday objects she employs. And whilst the vocabulary of her chosen motifs is typically Indian, her work also has far broader relevance to a global audience.”

The work itself was chosen as Kher’s most important work to date, Sevier says. “It is an unequivocal icon of contemporary Indian sculpture, awe-inspiring in its scale, detail and beauty. It brilliantly combines two traditional symbols of Indian culture – the bindi and the elephant – but leaves us asking whether this is a vision of India on the rise or India exhausted by its own rapid modernisation.” The sculpture itself is as ambiguous, leaving the viewer wondering whether the elephant is sleeping, dying, trying to get up or peacefully comfortable. “It is an intensely emotive sculpture and a vision that engenders extreme pathos from the viewer,” Sevier feels and critics agree.

Kher clarifies that the beast is “not lying down, she is dying. An elephant would never lie down like this. She is at a cusp between life and death - a private space where no one else can go except you and you'll do it only once.” And the cliché about elephants holds true. “The work talks about the memory through the skin of an elephant who never forgets, so it carries the stories of life-like texts that run over the body,” the artist explains. “It's one of the most resolved pieces that I have made.”

The enormous work, almost five metres long, is “truly monumental; its physical presence is like that of a fully grown elephant,” Sevier says. A viewer needs to be able to walk around it, almost feel the animal and its emotion. “One would hope it went to a museum collection or a foundation where it can continue to excite and engage as broad an audience as possible.”

Kher makes it clear that “Auctions don't have much to do with the artist’s direct practice, because the works have left us long ago. But I’m happy if the work goes somewhere where people can access it and its significance is clear.” After all, she adds, “It wasn't made to be a gold bar in a vault!”

And how is a value put on that kind of experience? “One needs to take into account the object’s iconic status, its rarity and its broader art historical significance, as well as prices being fetched for other iconic and important works of monumental contemporary sculpture by artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, etc,” Sevier explains. The big league, indeed!

Take a chair…

(Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine yesterday)

Once upon a time a chair was something to sit on, a bed was meant for sleeping in and a table was best used during mealtime or as a work-surface. Today, furniture is often more a design statement than a merely functional element in home décor. This is a fairly typical feature in high-budget urban homes, or those that are well protected from the environment and, most importantly, have a team of people to care for the interiors. Catering to this need is a panoply of home stores and design studios in Mumbai and elsewhere. One such is the Pallate Design Studio in Mahalakshmi, South Mumbai, which recently featured its first showing of designer work by its creator and Head Designer, Shahid Datawala, and the young and enthusiastic Priyanka Gala.

Trained in Product Design at the Raffles Design International College, Mumbai, award-winner Gala started as a fashion and jewellery designer, but soon made the short transit to furniture. In her first collection, she shows off facets of her own personality, with a touch of feminine charm and practical functionality. Datawala, a man of many talents – among them photography and garment and jewellery design, classical music and “many other things” – uses dramatic blocks of colour and graphic shapes that, he says, are “inspired by anything I could see around me in my everyday life”.

Gala knows what any girl wants and gives it to her with characteristic élan. Walking into two of the ‘rooms’ designed by her is like coming home. One, done up entirely in black and white and an occasional pale taupe-grey, used various permutations of design and texture that is, strangely, not overwhelming in its starkness. The bed-head, with its mailbox-like shelving in a high-gloss finish is perfect for all the nuances in a feminine life, from chapstick and hand-cream to alarm clocks, books, telephone, medicines, mirror, tissues…”It’s my favourite colour combination,” Gala says, showing off the cushions, the spreads, the seats, even the screen. The same finish is used on many other pieces, from a dresser to a work-desk, closet doors and shelving units. Another space, also intimately sized, is more informal, obviously young and girly – with greens and pinks dominating, everything from the bangles on the dressing table to the wallpaper colour-coordinated for best effect. A larger space is a model living-dining area, with gilded ‘commas’ a recurring motif on chair-backs, drawer handles and couches. This is far more formal and masculine –“the colours used here are less feminine,” Gala acknowledges.

Datawala’s work is somehow darker, deeper, perhaps a reflection of his many experiences as a photographer. The pieces he has created for this show of his collections for the Pallate Design Studio need a much larger scale and space to be shown off. A brilliant red table base from his Atom collection has ‘branches’ that come off a central stem, “like an atomic structure, or DNA”, says Datawala. His Poached Egg table is an ominously clean white arc set with a yellow centre, with more pieces that match the same eggy theme – chairs, a sofa, a centre table. The Orange Peel sofa melds textures and curves to create segments of vivid orange, while the 69 set has the obvious lines of the numbers with a wicked sexual innuendo attached. And the clean white and chrome of the Arc ensemble balance nicely on bases that are neatly curved. These are all very high-maintenance pieces, Datawala agrees, and need big homes with substantial staff to make sure there are no scratches on the high-gloss laminate over wood and ply, he knows, trying to eliminate one such scar from the edge of his Poached Egg dining table.

In the crowd of familiar styles of furniture - be it Chippendale, Mackintosh, Dhrangadhra or a more mundane Durian – the work of some inventive and innovative designers tends to stand out. You just need to know where to find the excitement!

Musical cares

(continued...)

I have been finding over the last couple of months that a number of people who say they like music, don’t. Not really, truly, at least. They enjoy one or maybe two styles, tolerate the rest as background noise and abjure the – in their opinions, whatever those may be – more esoteric. They will listen to the unfamiliar and the familiarly disliked for a brief while to please their loved ones or to be social or, sometimes, to show their accommodating large-heartedness, or even their willingness to be ‘in’, but not with any discernible attention and interest. There is an element of crocodile in their smiles, a soupcon of Punchinello in their nods, a sense of panic in their need to know the average playing length of the CD or tape or live rendition.

From this rather nastily snobbish point of view, Mumbai is more genuine than almost any other Indian city I know – personally or by hearsay. This, even though the man who manages my favourite music store in my home town (the aforementioned Mumbai) tells me that Chennai has a more adventurous audience and so a larger selection of genres like alternative, fusion, jazz, be-bop and rai. It may be because the South – as a people more than a geography – is more Brahmin, tolerant, accepting, even genuinely curious and therefore involved. Another explanation could be that with so much less of the bureaucracy and self-consciousness that plagues Delhi, minds outside the capital are more open to outside influences, more inviting to the myriad sounds of music, new and old.

My exposure to melody and phonic input has been both deliberate and subliminal over the many years of my life in various parts of the globe. From shaadi sangeets to traditional kutcheries, operas and rock concerts to chamber orchestras, commuter-train singers, tourist-bus antakshari teams, beggar minstrels and party crooners to meal-time entertainers, tapes, CDs and now the magic of MP3, I have survived the whole gamut and enjoyed most of it, even singing along occasionally in my best shower-stopping voice.

I remember one wonderful concert I went to when I was in college in New York. It was wonderful not just because of my escort – the best looking man on campus and just a dear friend, unfortunately – but because of the strange genre it was. Atonal, the show proclaimed. Instead of an orchestra or musicians or instruments or anything remotely familiarly musically related, there were two huge speakers on the stage, with spotlights focussed on them, the scene worthy of a full-blown opera setting. The synthetic sounds came squeaking, scraping, sonorous, sensual, sensitive, stirring over the superbly balanced acoustic system. I sat there, sometimes moved, other times uncomprehending, but always rapt, wholly absorbed in the strangeness of the experience.

A few years ago, I was taken to listen to chamber music at the India International Centre, Delhi. I had just arrived in the city after a hideously long and tiring journey by rail from Mumbai, and the train lag was hitting me very badly. The music – being mild and easy to absorb Mozart, Hadyn and Handel – was unchallenging to a sleep-deprived brain, and the movements of the internationally well-known string quartet slow, swinging and soporific. I started by enjoying the familiar sounds, then slowly drifted into a state of gently swaying inertia and, finally, to the unmitigated collective horror of my parents and hosts, sank inevitably back against the headrest of my seat and succumbed – mercifully silently - to the incessant demands of Morpheus. No amount of surreptitious shaking and prodding pulled me that evening from behind the walls of dreamland and I missed a musical treat…or so I was told for many years thereafter.

And now I am driven to the borderlines of insanity by that scourge on the phonic soundscape – the remix. It plays without any reason, sense or comprehensible logic in shopping malls, elevators, hotel foyers, weddings, parties, discotheques…even my car on occasion. It takes the familiar – usually Hindi film music of myriad time zones and genres - and makes it uncomfortably unfamiliar, a catchy beat and souped up instrumental improvisations combined with rap and rapid rhythmic variations to create a series of noises that do appeal in the short-term, but repel if heard more than once, unless well-flavoured – and often muffled – by the welcome musicality of traffic in a metropolis through an open window.

Music as she is heard - but is that the way it was meant to be?

Quality control

(More from Delhi...)

I was taught when I was very young that there were two Qs I had to mind, and mind more than any Ps I ever met in my life. They were weirdly spelled, but since I soon found that much of English and any other language I knew was, too, I got used to it. The words – dinned into my hard little head by parents, teachers and assorted other shapers of my then-tender psyche – also had meanings deeper than I first understood; these meanings, and the understanding thereof, have been clarified, magnified and ramified manifold over the years I have been conscious of them.

And the aforementioned words: quality and its kissing second-cousin, quantity. The way it was explained to me was that quality was the 'what kind' part, whereas quantity meant the 'how much' of whatever the object of discussion was. And the two concepts clashed happily and unhappily over the years, as I gradually discovered when to prefer what and why. Slowly, sometimes painfully, I learned that however impressive the short term benefits or gains of quantity, the long-term effects and satisfactions of quality always won out.

It started when I was very young. My parents would help me explore the contents of my piggy bank and try and show me which round metallic object was what. And then they would offer me one of these, or even a flimsy piece of paper, in exchange for a whole lot of those bits. Anyone with any sort of logic would object – how could one ‘thing’ substitute for so many? It didn’t take long, however, for me to understand that the one thing by itself could get me a lot more chocolate than the many things had the power to. It was the first in a series of object lessons that taught me about the circumstance that makes my own life possible: money.

Then came the story of clothes. I was a downy working girl at the time, fresh out of college and back in the country, gainfully – or so my employers optimistically believed – employed. I made friends, some for lunch, others for shopping, a few for that strange, hormonally-linked phenomenon known as female bonding. The shopping ones again showed me the distinction between my two favourite Qs. We would all head for that Mumbaite’s mecca, Mangaldas Market, the place where fabric fiends find Nemesis grinning fondly at them over bales of cloth. They would scramble for the “Lettest, sister! Good price!” stuff, while I stood fastidiously, snootily, isolatedly by and gazed longingly at the soft, rich gleam of silks and the rough nubbiness of hand-woven textiles. We spent about the same amount of money, but I got just one smallish package while they strode triumphantly out with bundles to gloat over. I still have the outfit made with that purchase; my friends have had many new wardrobes since.

Then, one day, I moved to Delhi, far away from my own territory and cohorts. I saw a whole new version of the quality-quantity divide in the lifestyles and habits of the locals. There was the nouveau riche blowsiness of the average Punjabi peacock – in clothes, in food, in decibel level, in décor, in weddings – in complete contrast to the quiet, Brahmin elegance of an occasional Mylapore moorhen I was used to. I was rather startled, sometimes even shocked, in my finicky, elitist Mumbai-bred manner, at the excess they could achieve. But how they went about it was endearing – they were enthusiastically absorbed, childlike in their pursuits, convinced in every way that what they were doing was THE thing, hep, happening, sophisticated, classy and, most of all, what everyone else (even the moorhens) would enjoy as much and as passionately.

They ate with verve, huge meaty helpings surfeited with spices and floating with fats. They drank - indiscriminately, unimaginatively, immaturely – inexplicably preferring the high of lots of cheap whisky (the general choice) to the savour of measured Single Malts. They sang bonhomously loud and heartily, their voices raised sometimes tunefully in chorus to refrains from old film music or new bhangra concoctions. They dressed in all the glitter of the Times Square tree or the night-time displays from Mumbai’s Zaveri Bazaar, with sequins and zari, velvets and satins, pseudo labels and seventies-style safari suits. They made a lot of noise, attracted a lot of attention and had a lot of naive, unconcerned fun.

And they made me long – though very briefly - for a simpler attitude, one that would temporarily discard that old dinned-in notion of quality versus quantity and find the naive joy of a peacock dancing in the warm, friendly rain.

Munchies and more

(More from the Delhi files...)

'Tis the party season in Delhi. Beautifully warm, sunny days yield to chilly evenings, and outdoor dos are the norm, for the most part. Sigris and heaters light up the nights as hosts conduct their shivering guests on to the terrace, where they all huddle together with hands outstretched over the glowing coals. An occasional burst of teasing breezes induce delicate shudders as chilly fingers of air creep up trouser legs, sari petticoats and sleeves with a touch of arbitrary, casual sadism. And the soul gets gently chilled in tandem with the body, as the necessity for food for thought fades even as the need to feed the stomach burgeons.

The stomach is indeed fed, with bits and bites. In Mumbai, party crunchies would depend on the sort of occasion it is. Very often, I have feasted variedly on potato chips, banana chips, tapioca chips, carrot chips, karela chips, yam chips, prawn chips, corn chips, tortilla chips and a chip on a shoulder or two. Chivda of various flavours jostles with papads and pretzels, while prettily configured veggies clamour for attention from dips laden with dahi, paneer, fresh herbs and hoarded spices. Trays wander past, laden with canapés (pronounced in myriad ways)-everything from neat rounds of bread to saltines topped with cheeses, goopily-mayonnaised salads and curried vegetables. An occasional roll in appropriately cocktail bite-size may make its presence known, in the company of small chunks of fruit.

And the guests partake, some making dinner out of minor offerings. Punctuating gulps of assorted beverages and bursts of conversation is the crunch, chew and munch of passing edibles served up, masticated and swallowed. Polite requests for recipes intersperse doses of gossip about friends and enemies alike, with sidelong comments on fashion, foibles and frivolities that are the norm in parties. Everyone knows someone and pick-up lines are as frequent as ecstatic greetings of buddies not seen for at least two hours, air kisses exchanged, the air redolent of the onion on the chole, the garlic in the dip and the mustard with the proscuitto.

In Delhi, however, there is a distinct culinary difference. I have never met so many self-conscious eaters of a fare that tends to be standard across the capital's evenings out. As I have stood on cold terraces or windswept lawns, my hands creeping steadily closer to the warmth of sparking embers, I have dodged melancholy men in grubby uniforms insistently offering me a series of morsels of strange colour and odour. This is where I met the kebab, now ubiquitous in my social experience. It came sliced into mouth-filling pieces, small coin-shaped rounds or wrapped in cold, hard rotis, with a red sauce - was it ketchup, barbeque, salsa or something else that I didn't want to identify? - to slop it with. It lay inertly in paraffin-warmed metal containers, held on a tray in the company of crepey paper napkins with which to wipe off the oil and masala. It varied in colour from deep burnt-amber to pale grey-green, and incorporated dizzying quantities of spices, some incendiary, some dulling, some just plain inappropriate. And its composite contents spread across the animal kingdom, from fish to fowl to other fauna of unquestioned provenance.

As a change came the vegetarian avatars of this cocktail food - paneer squares, capsicum strips, potato croquettes and, in one horrific accident, broccoli in a batter coating. It all floated past on the same sort of containers as the carnivorous equivalents, to a considerably less enthusiastic acceptance. Accompanists included fragile toothpicks, implements to pierce and lift the edible morsels to the mouth; the problem was then what to do with the little skewers thereafter - I did notice modes of disposal such as furtively sticking them under chair cushions, dropping them discreetly into potted plants and, in one particular instance (which caused me to go into firmly quelled paroxysms of delighted giggles), the jacket pocket of a passing gentleman (for the record and the edification of suspicious friends, that was not my doing).

And then, one bright winter late-night, I met the spring roll, cocktail style. It was at a party to celebrate the launch of a glossy book. The tome was vivid, the rolls pale brown; the volume unfurled its bright pages at the flick of a thumb, the food curled cringing on a warmer tray; the book needed a whole lap to hold it in, the munchie mandated two fingers, delicately positioned. Both were devoured, eagerly, avidly, greedily. Food for the soul and more for the tummy, all right!

Wedding boos

(I found a collection of columns I wrote a very long time ago when I lived in Delhi, in what now seems like almost another life. But they seemed fun, with the much-vaunted Mumbai-Delhi rivalry in existence even now, so I thought why not....!)

It has been a hectic week. The kind when you grab a little sleep whenever possible, be it during the night - where sleep traditionally belongs - or at moments in the daytime, in the car (though better not while you yourself are driving), at your keyboard at work, in the loo...wherever you have a moment of personal peace to let those active synapses shut off for a brief while. One rather unexpected place I have found nap-in-worthy is a traffic jam. And those I have had close encounters with over the past few days.

'Tis evidently wedding season in the glorious city of Delhi, and an integral part of the nuptial celebrations is a traffic jam. Guests and relatives alike, all dressed to kill - or die, considering the arbitrary manner of their wanderings in busy vehicular lanes of passage - teem outside garishly be-lit and bedecked venues, mill myriadly along the pavements and clog streets in a casually proprietorial way that lovers have with their accustomed beloveds. This tends, for reasons unfathomed by the cloggers, to make traffic slow and then gradually grind to a noisy, indignant, impatient halt outside pandals, temples and reception grounds. Dialogue does little to sort out the problem, coloured as it inevitably is with a certain non-bonhomous mindset.

The underlying problem seems to be that of the occasion itself, more than the people populating it. A couple of days ago, en route to a dinner party in a neighbouring state, I became entangled in just that sort of situation - a wedding-induced traffic jam. Bejewelled, bedecked and be-sworn-at invitees straggled across what was supposed to be the main state thoroughfare, meandering around stalled cars, sauntering past growling container trucks, stopping to chat in front of testy taxis and irate auto-rickshaws. Have wedding, have reception, goes the mandated sequence; and have reception have guests, is the logical consequence. And, obviously, have guests for reception, have traffic snarls.

So, having chosen the culprit as the cause - the marriage celebration itself - the ifs, buts and byways needs perforce to be examined. One major factor in the mess that causes a rise in vehicular and/or driver choler is the degree of downmarketness involved, the vulgarity, the non-u-ness, the overall glitz and glitter of the celebration and its ramifications. Be it elephants or horses, rose-spotted Contessas or spangled stretch limos, mill-owners or mill-workers, the idea is almost always to make a noise, the louder the better, keeping up with the Joneses be damned and out-done beyond the neighbouring housing society. And, the greater the blockade on the roads around the axial point of the whole, the better! Class, after all, involves subtlety, silence, and a let's-not-attract-attention-or-annoy-the-tax-department elegance. And good traffic management, too.

I encountered a wedding reception of the first kind recently. Guests were greeted at the gate of the hostess' house by two rather disgruntled pachyderms, both shuffling restively from foot to foot, unhappy with not just their trappings of flowers but with the ethnic dancers whirling and bellowing untunefully to greet invitees. Bright lights lit up the chaos, and cross klaxons and chagrined chauffeurs added to the vernacular cacophony. Inside the house - with an interior décor as jarring as the general decibel level - hordes of unwashed banjaras sat in groups, some displaying their presumably musical talents, others their costumes, still others their bad teeth.

Traffic within was as bad as that without. People gathered in groups, each getting in the way of the adjacent one, every little clique expressing vacuity at high volume. Jewels glittered like the high beams of visitor's vehicles, teeth gleamed with equal intensity. Turbans towered, reminiscent of the red lights spinning atop the governmental cars that stopped at the gate to disgorge their passengers. Fashion bewildered, from mal-fitting zari-strewn red gowns swathed in tinselly gauze to dull gold lame saris worn with the panache of badly draped curtains, from allegedly gypsy-style skirts to form-fitting black satin somethings that defied description. Waiters wove unsteadily and sleepily through the crowd, their offerings cold, pallid and pooling on trays held beseechingly out to anyone who would accept. And, at every turn, sycophants cooed and sighed sweet nothings, presenting their fondly imagined best profiles towards the flashbulbs of the gossip press.

Somewhere in the mess, the blushing bride and - one could assume - her bashful bridegroom lurked, like earthworms that creep unscathed through the neon blurs of speeding cars on a winter night. All the while, outside, the traffic blared and bulldozed hopefully, in futile anticipation of a time where it would pass in peace.

Book reviews

(TOI-Crest, this morning)

TALKING ABOUT JANE AUSTEN IN BAGHDAD by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit
Some years ago my friend Asra Nomani and I did an email exchange across the border. She was on sabbatical from The World Street Journal and exploring family ties in Pakistan then and I was with the Times of India’s Internet division in Delhi. We wrote about life, how people were responding to the then-resurgent Afghan conflict, the aftermath of the Kargil War, the Hindu-Muslim divide and everything else, from parties to food to social mores. This correspondence was published by a newspaper in the United States and earned us lipstick money. It also gave us and our readers a chance to learn more about being women in rapidly changing situations in two very different cultures, with all their political, social and moral variations.

Something of this kind, only a lot more so, happened more recently between Bee Rowlatt in London and May Witwit in Baghdad, as documented in the frequently moving and occasionally tedious Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad. Bee, mother of three young girls and wife of a busy and peripatetic television journalist, worked at the BBC World Service Radio. She called May at random, as journalists often need to do for that all-important ‘quote’, and found an intelligent, articulate, highly qualified woman who quickly became more than a contact. The teacher of English literature at Baghdad University was soon a friend and, over the course of emails, text messages and a rare phone call or two, was close enough to be a sister.

May wrote to Bee about the anguish of being a modern woman in Baghdad. She and her much younger husband, Ali, came from opposite sides of a religious chasm – she was a Shia and he, a Sunni – that divided their families, society and the country. Her emails show not only the horror of Baghdad during and after the arrest and execution of Saddam Hussein, but the daily see-saw of violence and uneasy peace that she lived with. Touched by this, and genuinely horrified, Bee starts trying to find ways to get May and Ali out of their devastated land to a much safer life in England. Meanwhile, she sends money, gifts, reassurance and love through her sources to Baghdad, getting small packages and reams of electronic text in return. The mails are often interrupted by power failures and deprivation in Iraq and holidays and mundane chores in England, but they are expressive, often anguished and always full of emotion. The collaborative effort to help May and Ali escape frequently trips over bureaucracy and finances and does the one-step-forward-two-steps-back routine more often than not, but, after many hitches and halts, it all works out.

This is a must-read for anyone who cannot understand what ordinary people go through during a war. There is time to get haircuts and dream of new shoes, but it is never as simple as walking down to the nearest shopping centre and choosing a style. In a state of conflict, there are bullets to dodge, hatred to face and death to deal with at every turn, as May describes to Bee. It would have been interesting to read the emails unedited, with all the errors made typing in text through tears and anger, but the occasional spelling mistake and multiple exclamation marks do some of that job. The photograph at the end, reached after compulsive reading of page after page, of the two women locked in a hug, had me pushing back tears and that strange lump in the throat…


THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 40s by Rupa Gulab
The novel begins with an insider joke – about a woman walking out of her newspaper job for a restaurant review that told it like it was rather than like the puff piece the management would have liked. Then the plot wanders about through a series of too many almost-predictable events all at once – domestic violence, Page 3 wannabes, infidelity with steamy sms exchanges, a maid doing well for herself with her memsahib’s help, suspicion, anger, tears, potentially fatal illness and more. Perhaps the best part of the admittedly well written and occasionally truly funny story is the dead mother-in-law who still lives with Mantra and her husband Vir. Readable, yes, but just once.

A question of life

(Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine)

'When Will You Be Happy’ is not a real-life question, but a kind of existential musing hidden deep within “a simple line that you can even scribble on a piece of paper”. It is the name that Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat has given his latest work, a 100-foot (30-metre) long installation that is on its way to Pilane, Sweden, for the annual sculpture show, Skulptur i Pilane. As the artist himself says, the line “does make you think”. And the location of the site, an ancient burial ground, “makes it a little more urgent. Happiness is often here now and we end up postponing that moment.” And the urgency becomes almost mnemonic when “you inscribe it in a burial site - it reminds you that you cannot postpone life”.

The Pilane show, curated by Peter Lennby and opening on June 12, also includes Belgian Wim Delvoye, Icelandic artist Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, British artists Laura Ford and Tony Cragg, Nils Ramhøj from Gothenburg, Sweden, Ursula Von Ryding from the USA, and Swedish artists Leo Pettersson and Jonas Holmquist. The site itself is home to about 90 judgement circles, raised stones and other such relics, some still visible, that date back to the Iron Age. The landscape, with cultural artefacts that have been dated back to the Stone Age, has been extensively restored and, with its gently hills and verdant pastureland, is the perfect setting for large sculptures that have an almost organic form, rooted in times long past and seeming to rise out of the earth into present reality. The works are completely in concordance with the Pilane terrain and ethos. As Kallat put it, the show is “all very dramatic and wonderful. Some really interesting pieces have been shown.”

His work has been lauded by critics and audiences alike ever since his debut show in Mumbai in1997, when Kallat was all of 23 years old. Over the years, his creativity has managed to provoke not just comment, but wonder, with its scale and vision. And the articulate, expressive, thoughtful, introspective, occasionally philosophical artist never fails to come up with something new, combining painting with sculpture with photography with technology and, in his last works, with food. A prestigious and successful show at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London earlier this year had a quirky twist as art was created with scans of edible objects, from rotis to samosas. And now he returns to a recurrent motif: bones. This time, in the perfect setting.

Kallat’s work is known for its humungous scale and vision. While Anger at the Speed of Fright was merely 50 feet ‘short’, 365 Lives stretched to 200 feet and had a life-sized car parked in the middle of an installation composed of 365 photographs. He has said that some of his works “rely on scale to generate meaning; it’s only when you walk past that it all slowly changes tenor”. Some pieces, like the gigantic Public Notice II, which has 4,500 bones made of resin shaped into alphabets spelling our Mahatma Gandhi’s speech just before the non-cooperation movement was launched, need time and space to be even partially appreciated. Others, like the Dawn Chorus paintings, require cerebral overtime, showing street urchins at traffic junctions selling books – their hair is made of traffic and pedestrians tangled in archetypical Mumbai style.

For Skulptur i Pilane, Lennby’s original choice of Kallat’s work was Eruda, the figure of a boy selling books. But “Somehow I was not convinced that it was right,” Kallat says. After all, “The place is quite loaded in meaning. I wanted to conceive something ground up, so to speak.” It took a while to think up what he considered to fit the site and its historical importance and significance. “I receded from the project for a few months without committing, until I came up with something that I felt was closely connecting to the site and to my work.” It had to fit not just the atmosphere, but the scale and terrain as well. Kallat explains, “I found that the landscape is very beautiful, but the subterranean reality is that of burial and the notion of death, somewhere hidden underneath.”

He started working with the thought of “beauty and happiness and all that in the way the landscape appeared”. And came up with “this simple line that gets embedded into the landscape: When Will You Be Happy. We will actually be digging, it will seem as if it is being excavated, part of it still in the earth.” And with the size of the installation, “When you are close to it you feel like it is fairly large scale bones, but from different vantage points could make it seem as if the words are emerging from within the grass and you can touch it, make art a tactile experience.” It was not easy; in fact, it was “somewhat challenging to deal with both experiences – great distance and closeness at the same time”.

Bones are a recurring theme in Kallat’s work. Public Notice II- the Gandhi speech, Aquasaurus - a seven-metre long water-tanker and Autosaurus Tripous – an autorickshaw, all made of resin bones, are just a few examples of his forensic passion. According to him, I am interested in what is not visible, what is there but you don’t see it. Bones don’t reveal themselves until way after a person’s death. They form the innermost element in the human body. In some ways it connects to concrete or haptic poetry, where essentially the way the alphabets are modelled adds a layer of meaning.” This is the story of Kallat’s need to know more. “I am interested in using text, where the alphabet itself is sculpture. The act of inscription itself has immense meaning.” For Pilane, “Given the spread-out prehistoric landscape of the site, I wanted to work with the primeval and corporal image of the bone. It is at once evocative of one’s physicality as a living being and a reminder of one’s mortality.”

Kallat has said, “As long as the work is self-rejuvenating, across time and people and retinas and cerebrums, it will be able to regenerate itself.” Sort of like the earth within which his bones will be held.

A man of Modesty

(Published in The Hindu Magazine, May 22)

She could be the poster girl for new-age feminism. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of her existence is the way she can do a powerful drop-kick wearing an exquisite designer gown and priceless pearls, fight and kill the bad guys, find and save the good guys and then have a little weep, just to show that she is, after all, only human. And perhaps it is Peter O’Donnell, her creator, who should take the credit for knowing what a woman is all about, embodied in the sleek, strong almost superwoman character he called Modesty Blaise.

Born in London on April 11, 1920, O’Donnell’s inspiration for his heroine came from a chance ‘meeting’ with a young girl he came across when he was in the army. It was during the war in 1942, when he was a sergeant in northern Iran; he and his men had just finished eating when they saw a child of about 12 years of age, dressed in rags, warily watching them. She seemed to be a refugee, perhaps from the Balkan region, and on her own, but somehow not a pathetic figure. The soldiers offered her food, which she ate, and then gave her all the supplies that they could spare. She packed up the tins that they had left for her, smiled her thanks and walked off into the desert, going southwards, O’Donnell recalled in interviews and in his introduction to the series, ‘She walked like a little princess.’ And when he was looking for a frame to fit Modesty Blaise into, ‘I knew that child was the story.’

The impression was indeed strong. O’Donnell’s heroine featured in the comic strips that he drew (with collaborators) for the The London Evening Standard for almost 40 years, ending in 2001 and syndicated internationally. In the books, of which there are at least 12, starting with Modesty Blaise and ending with Cobra Trap, he gradually reveals tiny bytes of information about his leading lady, building up a personality that was honed by hardship and a life of crime in northern Africa, the Middle East and parts beyond, a woman who ‘retired’ in her 20s and never settled into happy domesticity, as women of that time would have likely been expected to do. Instead, she used her well-earned money, her skills and her contacts to fight crime in ways more complex and unexpected than the conventional, often for the British government via a gentleman called Sir Gerald Tarrant.

In I Lucifer, she came across a delusional young man who could ‘predict’ death; in The Impossible Virgin, she believed for a while her partner Willie Garvin, who called her ‘Princess’, was dead, but managed to stay strong enough to win the nastily fierce battle against the villains of that particular piece. In Pieces of Modesty, the action is quicker, the stories shorter, O’Donnell proving that to tell a story of the kind that he specialized in, an entire novel was not necessary. And in Cobra Trap, Modesty Blaise is killed, but leaves behind a tiny hint of a possible rebirth in some form. Along the way, she meets people, often men she has love affairs with, some good and some…well…who don’t find her good side.

The comic strips showed her as a curvy woman flaunting a deep cleavage, clad in clinging clothes, high heels and lots of eye-black. The books give her a more sophisticated image, with a svelte body, long legged elegance and refined taste. The story that The Daily Express in England had commissioned and then rejected because it did not want a heroine who started her career as a significant member of the underworld as she ‘lacked propriety’ became so popular that though it went out of print, Penguin published a ‘retro’ edition a couple of years ago. Movies have also been made, none of note, but it is known that, like writer Kingsley Amis, director Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan who wants to use one of the stories for a film; in fact, he has a character in his Pulp Fiction reading a Modesty Blaise novel! And there was a less diabolic side to creativity as well – the man who wrote of the most horrendous ways to kill also wrote 19th century romance novels, using the pseudonym Madeleine Brent.

O’Donnell died on May 3, at the age of 90, leaving behind not just his wife of 70 years, two daughters, three grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, but a character who is, in her own way, ageless: Modesty Blaise.

Meet Carrie...

(Crest, TOI, May 22)

Almost like a Karan Johar film, or perhaps inspiring it, the high-fluff Sex and the City soon became SATC – not easier to say, but quicker to type in. And as the television show progressed into a movie and then another, a quick churn-out of books was inevitable. As were the questions that segued into a prequel: The Carrie Diaries, starring the character made iconic by a fashion forward Sarah Jessica Parker and her shoe closet.

Carrie Bradshaw, or Bradley, as her friends in high school called her, is from a small town called Castlebury. Life is all about attitude for the young woman, who craves, as do all teenagers – myself and my classmates included – to belong, but to still stand out by way of word, deed, personal style or, indeed, boyfriend. So for Carrie, making out with the boy that every other girl wants is paramount, though a future career as a writer comes a close second and losing her virginity follows fairly close behind.

And so her life proceeds. The handsome, desirable and hot Sebastian Kydd comes back into her life and – oh wow! – chooses her as his girl. For a while, anyway. For Sebastian, as it must be for any hormonally overcharged teen male, quantity and scoring with girls who matter rules over quality and any genuine emotional bond. But Carrie believes that she is the One and Only, and is shattered when she finds that her man finds horizontal bliss with her best friend.

Typically young adult American, with behaviour perhaps seen in a tiny select circle translatable into an Indian context, Carrie and her (former, by the end of the book) best friend Lali, Maggie, the bitchy Donna LaDonna, Mouse, Danny, Walt with his secret life, Peter, sisters Dorrit and Missy, George and a cast of other characters slowly build up to the next stage in Carrie’s life. She finally finds her way to Brown University, but first heads to New York City, still a virgin, for a course in creative writing. An occasional surprise pops out of the fluff and does work. And as the last page ends, Carrie starts making the friends so familiar to SATC watchers.

Does a book like this one deserve to be written? Perhaps, yes. After all, the readers, most fans of the show, craved more information, from how Carrie Bradshaw started her career as a writer to how the four women became so closely bonded, to…well…where those shoes came from. As a shoe aficionado, I can understand the last point, but for the rest - I just about managed to read the book.

As I was saying…

I started telling you about the Bollywood dance project I worked on last year. And the people I met while I was doing it. Some I did not meet, but enjoyed talking to. And a few were difficult enough for me to abandon the idea of speaking to them, after a whole lot of tries over the phone and else-how. In the process of collecting the information that I needed, I came across characters that I will include in a novel, if I ever wrote one, that is. They had their quirks, their madness, their passions and their manners, all in the places that they belonged, and had no compunctions about displaying any of it to me, a stranger who had wandered into their lives and was asking questions about everything.

Among the participants that I spoke to was one that was not easy to get through to, a young woman who had her walls and defenses firmly in place and seemed more wary of me than I was of her. But she soon became a favourite that I rooted for, a strong, sharp, determined woman with a surefire need and drive to become the best. I had seen her on television and was very impressed with her acting talent. Reviews I had read of her work in a big screen production made me increasingly curious about her, about why she, of all people, would choose to be part of a dance reality show, something that could count as being frivolous when compared to the kind of work she was so good at. She was Shilpa Shukla, the intense lead in a TV drama who was the Godmother, a female don who held her own in a male-biased world. She had that kind of face – the determination burned in those strong lines and firm chin. And then you looked at the eyes, dark, strangely soft and shy, almost asking for approval as they surveyed the world from behind a screen of reluctance to show more and, in that, showing a lot more than she would have believed. In a way, I am glad she was eliminated, though I wish she had not been, since she is worth so much more than just a waggle of the hips and the portrayal of a character developed within a three-minute span to loud music on a set. I have been looking for her since then, on television, in films, on the stage, anywhere that she could bring her talent to. I look forward to seeing her again and, of course, her work.

As I do many of the others. There was a group of young choreographers who spoke to me eagerly, wanting to talk about their work and their lives. There was Javed Sanadi, who was teamed with Monica Bedi (of her, more later), who keeps in touch occasionally long after the interviews are done. There was Nishant Bhat, Shilpa’s choreographer, who wept almost as much as she did when they had to do a dance-off and were finally out of the contest. There was Himanshu Gadani, paired with the tempestuous Gauhar Khan, who was brought in after a few episodes and brought out some of the best in his student. There was Deepak Singh, well aware of the problems and strengths that his partner Parul Chauhan, star of a popular Hindi soap opera, had to deal with, and managed to bring out the best in her and change her sari-clad and sindoor-smeared image. And there were many more.

Again, for another day, another blog.

As I was saying…

I started telling you about the Bollywood dance project I worked on last year. And the people I met while I was doing it. Some I did not meet, but enjoyed talking to. And a few were difficult enough for me to abandon the idea of speaking to them, after a whole lot of tries over the phone and else-how. In the process of collecting the information that I needed, I came across characters that I will include in a novel, if I ever wrote one, that is. They had their quirks, their madness, their passions and their manners, all in the places that they belonged, and had no compunctions about displaying any of it to me, a stranger who had wandered into their lives and was asking questions about everything.

Among the participants that I spoke to was one that was not easy to get through to, a young woman who had her walls and defenses firmly in place and seemed more wary of me than I was of her. But she soon became a favourite that I rooted for, a strong, sharp, determined woman with a surefire need and drive to become the best. I had seen her on television and was very impressed with her acting talent. Reviews I had read of her work in a big screen production made me increasingly curious about her, about why she, of all people, would choose to be part of a dance reality show, something that could count as being frivolous when compared to the kind of work she was so good at. She was Shilpa Shukla, the intense lead in a TV drama who was the Godmother, a female don who held her own in a male-biased world. She had that kind of face – the determination burned in those strong lines and firm chin. And then you looked at the eyes, dark, strangely soft and shy, almost asking for approval as they surveyed the world from behind a screen of reluctance to show more and, in that, showing a lot more than she would have believed. In a way, I am glad she was eliminated, though I wish she had not been, since she is worth so much more than just a waggle of the hips and the portrayal of a character developed within a three-minute span to loud music on a set. I have been looking for her since then, on television, in films, on the stage, anywhere that she could bring her talent to. I look forward to seeing her again and, of course, her work.

As I do many of the others. There was a group of young choreographers who spoke to me eagerly, wanting to talk about their work and their lives. There was Javed Sanadi, who was teamed with Monica Bedi (of her, more later), who keeps in touch occasionally long after the interviews are done. There was Nishant Bhat, Shilpa’s choreographer, who wept almost as much as she did when they had to do a dance-off and were finally out of the contest. There was Himanshu Gadani, paired with the tempestuous Gauhar Khan, who was brought in after a few episodes and brought out some of the best in his student. There was Deepak Singh, well aware of the problems and strengths that his partner Parul Chauhan, star of a popular Hindi soap opera, had to deal with, and managed to bring out the best in her and change her sari-clad and sindoor-smeared image. And there were many more.

Again, for another day, another blog.

’Tis the season!

It’s starting all over again now. After a seemingly endless dose of cricket that mercifully came to a rather eventful climax with controversy dogging its last staggering steps, it is now time for the television reality shows to start their new editions. American Idol is almost over, with just six people left to sing their way into an enviable contract and more promotion than they could ever expect otherwise. The Indian shows are airing promos between any other programming and even as you watch a soap or a crimi (which is what the one-corpse-is-never-enough-for-a-self-respecting-detective-to-figure-out serial would be aptly called in Germany) or even a food-based show, you are bombarded with bytes featuring popular faces wriggling various portions of their anatomy to garner votes and stay in the game. My favourites are the dance contests, from Zara Nachke Dikha to Nach Baliye to even the less polished Saas vs Bahu. Dance India Dance is just over and Indian Idol is just getting into the groove, which makes it all a lot of fun for a viewer like me who prefers these to the average soap and is always grumbling at the end of watchable dramas like Bones, Criminal Minds and, soon, it is rumoured, Psych.

But I have a reason to like these dance competitions on the boob tube. A very special reason that verges on the personal. Last year, as I contemplated the lack of any feasible employment that could be remotely interesting, I was offered a book project by Random House, Delhi. It was to present Bollywood dance to the layperson, with the peg of a reality show to hang the whole shebang on. And even though the remuneration was pathetic and the entire deal not really worth the travel hassles I would need to go through, it would be fun, I knew, and a very charming editor at the publishing house completely sold me on it. So between her niceness and my interest and involvement with dance, any kind of dance, I decided I would do it. And it was perhaps the most fun I have had in a long time.

I have written about this before, but perhaps without too many specifics. It was not the time to talk about it then and I really did not want to, except that I was pretty excited about meeting some really fun people, some of them regrettably only over the phone. I enjoyed talking to most of them and got a little annoyed at those who acted pricey and refused to call back or even accept my calls. But on the whole it was a very positive experience, with many talking far longer than I needed, some keeping in touch even today, many months after I have done with the project and wait for it to be published. The show concept was fairly simple – a group of celebrities were trained to dance by a matching set of choreographers and judged for their dancing abilities, their charisma, their growth as dancers and their hunger to do more.

I started with the easiest part of the assignment: meeting the celebrities at a rehearsal. It took me a long drive to get there. And once I did, I needed to sort out faces and foibles as I tried to get the information I needed out of their tired heads. My first glimpse was promising. They sat in an exhausted pile of people in a cushioned corner of a room but greeted me with friendly waves and smiles – after all, this was publicity, right! I spoke to quite a few of them at the venue, saving the rest for later via telephone. There was my favourite, Hard Kaur, rapper and musician, who told me about her life in England, her current love and her relationship with her mother. There was her choreographer, Savio, a smiling gentleman who knew exactly what he had to do to challenge his student to give her best. There was soap star hunk Karan Singh Grover, his young trainer Nicole and their youthful banter; a few months later, when I told a class of would-be journalists that I had met him and, orchestrated by a collective feminine sigh, that I had spoken to him for a while, they clamoured for his phone number and wanted to know more about him than about how to write for a magazine!

And there were lots more. But if I told you all about it now, there would be nothing left for my next blog!

’Tis the season!

It’s starting all over again now. After a seemingly endless dose of cricket that mercifully came to a rather eventful climax with controversy dogging its last staggering steps, it is now time for the television reality shows to start their new editions. American Idol is almost over, with just six people left to sing their way into an enviable contract and more promotion than they could ever expect otherwise. The Indian shows are airing promos between any other programming and even as you watch a soap or a crimi (which is what the one-corpse-is-never-enough-for-a-self-respecting-detective-to-figure-out serial would be aptly called in Germany) or even a food-based show, you are bombarded with bytes featuring popular faces wriggling various portions of their anatomy to garner votes and stay in the game. My favourites are the dance contests, from Zara Nachke Dikha to Nach Baliye to even the less polished Saas vs Bahu. Dance India Dance is just over and Indian Idol is just getting into the groove, which makes it all a lot of fun for a viewer like me who prefers these to the average soap and is always grumbling at the end of watchable dramas like Bones, Criminal Minds and, soon, it is rumoured, Psych.

But I have a reason to like these dance competitions on the boob tube. A very special reason that verges on the personal. Last year, as I contemplated the lack of any feasible employment that could be remotely interesting, I was offered a book project by Random House, Delhi. It was to present Bollywood dance to the layperson, with the peg of a reality show to hang the whole shebang on. And even though the remuneration was pathetic and the entire deal not really worth the travel hassles I would need to go through, it would be fun, I knew, and a very charming editor at the publishing house completely sold me on it. So between her niceness and my interest and involvement with dance, any kind of dance, I decided I would do it. And it was perhaps the most fun I have had in a long time.

I have written about this before, but perhaps without too many specifics. It was not the time to talk about it then and I really did not want to, except that I was pretty excited about meeting some really fun people, some of them regrettably only over the phone. I enjoyed talking to most of them and got a little annoyed at those who acted pricey and refused to call back or even accept my calls. But on the whole it was a very positive experience, with many talking far longer than I needed, some keeping in touch even today, many months after I have done with the project and wait for it to be published. The show concept was fairly simple – a group of celebrities were trained to dance by a matching set of choreographers and judged for their dancing abilities, their charisma, their growth as dancers and their hunger to do more.

I started with the easiest part of the assignment: meeting the celebrities at a rehearsal. It took me a long drive to get there. And once I did, I needed to sort out faces and foibles as I tried to get the information I needed out of their tired heads. My first glimpse was promising. They sat in an exhausted pile of people in a cushioned corner of a room but greeted me with friendly waves and smiles – after all, this was publicity, right! I spoke to quite a few of them at the venue, saving the rest for later via telephone. There was my favourite, Hard Kaur, rapper and musician, who told me about her life in England, her current love and her relationship with her mother. There was her choreographer, Savio, a smiling gentleman who knew exactly what he had to do to challenge his student to give her best. There was soap star hunk Karan Singh Grover, his young trainer Nicole and their youthful banter; a few months later, when I told a class of would-be journalists that I had met him and, orchestrated by a collective feminine sigh, that I had spoken to him for a while, they clamoured for his phone number and wanted to know more about him than about how to write for a magazine!

And there were lots more. But if I told you all about it now, there would be nothing left for my next blog!

The road ahead

It’s been a long and winding road – whoever did that song, I hate the concept! – for me for some years now. Occasionally, just once in a rare while, it gets to me, as it is doing right now. Of course, I could always go stand under a cool shower and bawl until the knot in my head dissolved, but that would get me nowhere except on the trail of foolproof undereye depuffing and de-dark-circling gunk which never does the right trick anyway, so why bother! Of course, I could always eat, but then that would reverse the hard-won benefits of a year-long gym regimen that has me actually believing what my former physiotherapist would say when he was doing something particularly agonizing to my legs: ‘no pain, no gain’.

Or I could shop, except that I have put myself on a budget stricter than any financial planner would do during crunch-crisis time. So no more shoes – and right after I decided that, I was pushed into buying two new pairs, since the sandals I was wearing at the time, both times, suddenly gave up being footwear and morphed unexpected into strips of leather that were totally useless for my needs at that moment. Luckily, the restaurant I was headed into just accepted my bare feet as an eccentric accessory of a fairly frequent customer and the people I met seemed resigned to the fact that a creative mind mandates a quirk or more along the way. I may not have bought the pair of shoes and the sandals that got added to my shoe closet on those occasions, but having been pushed into that specific corner, I must admit the takeaway was not a bad choice. But it was not a choice I would have made right now.

I could go gallery hopping, of course, to beat the blues, if that is what this is. There are lots of decent art shows on in the city and I could probably even find something to write about if I could find somewhere that would publish it. And, of course, eventually pay for it, which they do not do that easily, that quickly, or that happily. But the art is often interesting, frequently amusing and once in a while even worth the longwinded drive into town to see it. I have made friends of various artists that way, from the prolific and articulate Jitish Kallat to the newer talents on the Mumbai scene like Sonia Jose (“spoken” to only online, I must confess) to some pushy publicity seekers who cannot be counted as ‘friends’ but can be relied on to provide a suitable quote when required to.

Of course, perhaps the easiest way to dispel the low mood is to cook, for me at least. I could whip up a culinary storm with my famous sinful chocolate cake, except for that I need to go out and get chocolate and flour and…well, you get the idea. I have a fridge full of food that needs to be eaten, but none of it – or at least very little – is of the conventional variety and would be instantly recognized by anyone with less exotic and esoteric tastes. I recently revived an old favourite recipe of mine for a deep, dark and very sinful chocolate cake that used four egg whites and lots of chocolate. But I am now told that those with a compulsive need to eat chocolate are most likely depressed, which is in part caused by the chocolate that they crave. Not really craving chocolate but more than willing to eat some if it is given to me, I navigate myself out of those waters for now…

I could, of course, figure out what I am feeling low about and get around to fixing it. It could be the result of watching too much late night television with the sound off so as not to disturb the rest of the family, or it could be due to the fact that it is very hot and sweaty and I am not happy about that. It could, indeed, come from the fact that I should get around to working again and I want to but do not know how to go about finding something to do and I feel terribly guilty about not being as involved in doing so as I should perhaps be. Convoluted? Yeah. True? Yeah. Unsolvable? Nah. Let me just pull myself out of the trough of not-quite-despond and labour onwards, along the long and winding road that I hate traveling but can’t seem to find a way off of. Until then, I smile and tell the world just how happy I am. And I actually am!

The meaning of art

Over many moons of watching the whimsical world of art from a distance and at comfortably not-too-close quarters, of meeting and speaking with artists, of wandering about museums and galleries, of writing about shows and gazing with great puzzlement at some works, there is one clear-headed and much-amused conclusion that I have come to. Art is a lot like fashion. Or history. Or even the seasons. What goes around invariably, inevitably, comes around again before long. And if there is something that arouses argument, debate or, best of all, protest with a degree of violence, it is considered to be not just successful art, but path-breaking, significant and, perhaps most importantly, saleable. Along the way, there have been many occasions where I have had to call some artist or the other and ask about the ‘latest trends’ in art, a question that is surpassed in banality only by that masterpiece of mundane mumbling: ‘Who do you think will be the artist to watch?’

Today, art and its makers have changed. There is indeed a trend, one that veers towards alternate professions and adventuring. A recent show in Mumbai that I saw had a number of women artists who were better known – or perhaps more visible – as illustrators, architects, fashion designers, graphic designers, photographers, or other fields that are indeed art-related, though not from the obvious, conventional perspective. This is in keeping with the trend to more experimentation in art. From the maverick MF Husain’s Shwetambari many years ago, where pieces of white cloth and shreds of newspaper scattered the floor of a large gallery space all covered in white, to the more recent model of a water tanker (Aquasaurus) made of bones crafted from resin by Jitish Kallat to an esoteric display of experimentation in fashion by Shilpa Chavan (aka Little Shilpa) at a current show, art has slid off the canvas and into spaces that are still being explored. At each stage, of course, there has been a degree of shock greeting the display – Husain’s work was reviled by many, but lauded by ‘those-who-should-know’, of the ilk of Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta, whom you would think would be a better judge than the average Joe. Kallat’s bones aroused curiosity and a certain morbid fascination that his eloquence did much to dissipate. And Little Shilpa’s hats have taken the fashionista audience by such a great storm that the arterati have got carried, perforce, along with it.

In all this artistic adventuring, even the averagely-talented creative expressionist has gone global. Many claim fame with local self-sponsored shows and citations from ‘foreign’ names decorating invitations, along with a resume that includes exhibitions in various parts of the world that they may have traveled to. Some of these exhibitionists – in the literal sense of the word - of course, are genuinely talented and gradually find inclusion in reputed collections and support from enviable fund-pundits. A few become international celebrities, trotting frenetically around the globe from show to show, working hectically to keep pace with demand and, somehow, pulling off the coup of always remaining creative, inspirational, lauded and coveted - again, Kallat is a case in point. And one or two think beyond their own careers as artists to become support systems for others and curators of the kinds of shows they themselves want to see, like Krishnamachari Bose, for instance.

Along the way, the medium has become, in a strange way, the message. The use of video and audio clips is more popular now. Often, painting melds with photography and can become part of an installation that includes sculpture, with a few bytes of sound and moving pictures thrown in to complete the sentence. That sentence is meaningful at various levels – to the artist as an individual, to the viewer as an unconnected passer-by and to society at large as an audience that needs to be made aware of something, from child abuse to contemporary forms of suffrage to political rot. A work by Sonia Jose that impressed me recently had a white rag rug lettered in black reading ‘so much to say’ – the message could be anything, the directions of thought countless and the mood an entire spectrum from dark and deadly black to a clear, joyous white. It left the viewer to decide, even as it hinted of a deeper mental process for that same viewer to decode and debate.

Perhaps the best part of art today is that it gives the person looking at it, feeling it, experiencing it, something to do. It is not interactive in that you need to get hands-on and fiddle with buttons and knobs and listen to beeps and whistles like with a video game, but it provides a sense of freedom of interpretation. There is something serious going on, but it’s all left up to you to decide what that something could be. And that, methinks, is really what art should be about!