Vikram Seth Reading 'Beastly Tales from here and there' — Mar 23, 2013

Vikram Seth read a fair portion of his 1991 book of stories in verse, called Beastly Tales from here and there. The occasion was the release of a sumptuously illustrated version at the India Habitat Centre Amphitheatre in New Delhi.

 Vikram Seth reading, takes flight

Not only did he read, but he answered questions from the audience, interspersed with his reading of five of the tales. He gave advice when asked about writing, recounted his journey in the literary world starting as a humble economics student in Stanford, and talked about his interest in several forms of art from calligraphy to painting and music.

 Vikram Seth Absolut vodka Blue paintings with Urdu script 'In Blue and Gold, I watch the evening sky Darken, till neither remains nor I'

The audience stayed late into the night, for Vikram Seth was like a musician who is set on fire by the audience response. He congratulated the illustrator, Prabha Mallya, and had the audience give her several rounds of applause.

 Prabha Mallya, illustrator of Beastly Tales, with Vikram Seth

And then he stayed back, liberally engaging in conversation those who queued with books to be autographed. He wrote personalised messages, and didn’t hesitate to share his vast stock of knowledge and instant wit with those who waited patiently. It was two hours before KumKum came to the head of the queue with two copies to be signed for her grandchildren. He apologized graciously for the readers’ inconvenience, but was indefatigable himself. And smiling.

Vikram Seth signing and smiling indefatigably

For a full account click below.

Poetry Session ‒ Mar 8, 2013

Ten readers enjoyed the poems of ten poets at this session, the second of the year on Poetry. Men and women were evenly represented among the readers, but the poets were predominantly male.

 KumKum & Thommo

Three poets were read in translation from Urdu, Russian, and Persian, including the incomparable Mirza Ghalib, and the great poet of the Russias, Alexander Pushkin.

 Priya

International Women’s Day was celebrated on the same day. Aptly, we read the poems of two fearless women , Maya Angelou and Forough Farrokhzad, who battled the burdens imposed on women by society. In addition, we considered the matter of whether women hereabouts are flustered  by the admiring gaze of men!

 Kavita & Talitha

We welcomed back two readers who had long been missing from our company, Bobby and Kavita. Here we are after the evening’s reading —

 Priya, Talitha, Kavita, KumKum, Zakia, Thommo, Bobby, Mathew, Sunil, Joe

To read more click below …

Short Stories of Anton Chekhov ― Feb 14, 2013

 Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov, master-storyteller and dramatist, keen observer of human behaviour, and professional physician, has left an enormous number of short stories which seem ageless.

 Gopa

Many of them have no point to make; they are descriptions of mundane things that happen to ordinary people, without any dramatic element, or surprising revelation at the end. Others like Ward No. 6 have the plot lines of a novel. The inversion of fortunes at the end makes one wonder how easily a person may be passed off as insane.

Arundhaty reads from Chekhov's play 'The Three Sisters'

As numerous, however, are the carefully plotted gems, such as A Work of Art.  Humour, surprise, the small deceits of human beings, and sense of fate coming full circle, contribute to its masterly hold on the reader.

 Priya ponders a point

Salman Rushdie hid his identity during the fatwa period under a name composed of two of his favourite authors, the first being Anton Chekhov. The surprisingly graceful translations available in the public domain do great credit to Chekhov.

 Gopa learns Kindle e-reader techniques from Priya, as Thommo and KumKum watch

Here are the readers assembled before the reading:

 Talitha, Priya, Thommo, Gopa, KumKum, Mathew, Sunil, & Joe

Zakia & Arundhaty came later

Click below to read more ...

Chitra Banerjee Divakruni reading from her works — Feb 12, 2013

David Hall hosted the Indian-American author, Chitra Banerjee Divakruni, on Feb 12, 2013. She gave two readings from her works. The first from her retelling of the Mahabharata, The Palace of Illusions, speaks of the trembling in her heart as Draupadi goes to face the swayamvara, escorted by her twin brother, Dhristadyumna.

  Chita Banaerjee Divakaruni, reading from 'The Palace of Illusions'

In the second reading from a recent novel, One Amazing Thing, Chitra Banerjee Divakruni deals with seven characters isolated in a building by an earthquake. The title has to do with the characters breaking the ice by narrating the one unbelievable event that has taken place in their lives that they’ve not told anyone about. 

 The audience for Chita Banaerjee Divakaruni's reading

Introducing the session was a mime by Bharatnatyam dancer Dr. Mini Vettickal. Her marvellous interpretation of a poem, The River, by Chitra Banerjee Divakruni was enacted with great spirit, exploiting all the resources of Abhinaya. We hope to see more of this fine dancer on the stage in Kochi.

 Mini Vettickal 'performing' the poem 'The River'

Please click below to read more.

Poetry Session ‒ Jan 11, 2013

Zakia, Priya, KumKum, Talitha, Sivaram, Thommo, and Mathew listening to Sivaram, gone digital with his iPad, to read 'Burnt Norton' by T.S. Eliot

The poets we read were from the world over: India – 1, Britain – 3, USA – 2, and Greece – 1. Two were read in translation from Malayalam and ancient Greek respectively. Only one poet was a woman. The readers were split, 4 women and 3 men.

 Talitha reading 'The Great Lover' by Rupert Brooke

The missing four readers lost out on the great enthusiasm with which the New Year’s session started. The Malayalam poet’s idiom was modern and Sappho speaking through the voice of her translator came through as a lyricist (and lyrist) of love and longing. 

 

Priya in soft focus

T.S. Eliot, a favourite of Sivaram since college days, was recited for the third time in our group whose collective memory is preserved at Poets& Poems, here to the right.

 KumKum reads fragments of Sappho as Priya and Talitha watch

Our general mood, always enlivened by the give and take of exchanges, ended on a note of great merriment when Mathew read from Ogden Nash.

  Priya reading Balachandran Chullikad's poem 'Winter in Stockholm'

Here are the readers at the end of the session (Joe is clicking and Zakia was away).

Priya, Talitha, Thommo, KumKum, Sivaram, Mathew at the end

For a full account and the text of the poems click below.

Kochi Muziris Biennale — 2

The Biennale featured a number of artists who used the inviting walls of Fort Kochi to express their delight in working here. Artist Daniel Connell from Australia created two huge faces of his friend Justin Alan Magridge from Port Augusta, South Australia. The artist imagines that people from this very place migrated to Australia 60-80,00 years ago to form the aboriginal population there:

 Grandson Gael poses by Daniel Connell's work

Here is Daniel engaging with local people, which was seen as one of the projected benefits of the Biennale:

The start of the Biennale occurred on 12-12-12 when Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., performed on the opening night on the Parade Ground. Joe was among the groupies who waved hands above his head and swayed to the chorus of a thousand folk who had assembled:

But it was nothing like the experience of hearing Joan Baez, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, or Bob Dylan in his youth.

Colourful art enlivened the unkempt walls of a property near Aspinwall House:

The heart-brain connection stimulated by art is symbolised in this street painting:

On the morning of Dec 30 we had the rare pleasure of meeting painter, muralist, Murano glass sculptor, and the most famous modern artist in India, Anjolie Ela Menon. Here she is with KumKum at Le Colonial hotel in Fort Kochi:

The day before, a Times of India reporter had persuaded her to provide a reflection in art on the death of the courageous woman victim of the Delhi gang-rape which galvanised India. Here is the resulting memorial, sketched spontaneously:

 Nirbhaya’s million sisters mourn today. Let us keep up the fight. Let us not let them forget.

We went in search of Mandalay Hall in Jew Town but it was closed with three locks on the door and a drooping Biennale flag:

Earlier Htein Lin and a companion performed a re-enactment of the maritime links of Kochi with Burma, courtesy of the Clark House Initiative, an art gallery in Mumbai:

However, we  enjoyed some sunny moments in thriving Jew Town. Here are KumKum, Raja Menon, and Anjolie Ela Menon:

Gallery OED on Bazar Road is hosting a collateral show of artists on the theme ’Re-picturing the Feminine’:

Yvette Vexta's overwhelming nude is suspended on the eastern wall of OED gallery:

Nearer eye level is Dhruvi Acharya’s painting of women with thought bubbles:

Kate Benyon has painted women in circles; the central figure has a Medusa-like aspect:

Chitra Ganesh's woman transfixes the gaze with fingers dripping off her tongue:

Another painting depicts a woman, high on a hookah with unusual plumbing:

A gentler woman by another artist has embroidery blooming from her head, however:

For this hanging drape, artist Fiona Hall may have been inspired by a vision of the skulls of Cambodians killed by the Pol Pot regime in the Killing Fields:

As we waited to view the art at Moidu House two Brahminy kites alighted on stumps of coconut palms at the Customs jetty on Calvetty Road:

After viewing Moidu House Raja and Ela Menon completed their circuit at the Pepper House:

Kochi Muziris Biennale — Dec 2012 to Mar 2013

Grandson Gael & KumKum at David Hall, one of the venues

The idea of a Biennale, in order to provide a stage for modern Indian art, has been around a long time. Indian art was to be set off against a potpourri of global art. The first Biennale ideas in India were mooted long ago and one was even held without a second edition to follow. Whether this will happen in the case of the Kochi Muziris Biennale (KMB) will be known only in 2014. Incisive questions have been raised about the lack disclosure of how public funds (Rs 50 million) were used:

http://johnyml.blogspot.in/2011/12/kochi-muziris-biennale-biggest-story-of.html

Yet KMB has descended upon the Fort Kochi, an under-prepared small town with none of the splendid viewing spaces or neatly kept public thoroughfares equal to hosting a Biennale for India’s outpouring of contemporary art.

The exhibition galleries in Fort Kochi are little more than dusty old warehouses, for decades fallen into disrepair, and nothing tangible has been done to refurbish the decrepit hallways and crumbling wooden/brick stairways at the main venue, Aspinwall House, on Calvetty Road. It is an old warehouse on the estuary of the Cochin harbour where spices, coir, rubber and other goods in trade were stored before shipment. Except for a coat of paint on the external façade of the main portal, nothing has been done to make the warehouses a people-friendly or art-friendly space. The air is stagnant and musty, the humidity near 100%, and there are no exhaust fans in the cavernous halls.

For the sum of Rs 50 an art-lover can gain entrance to each of the venues. But if Aspinwall is decaying and stumble-prone, the other two sites further along the same road are in a greater state of deterioration.  Only in our chalta hai Bharat would a foundation set up for the express purpose of providing a platform for artists from India and the world (Sweden, Australia, Scotland, Iran, China, Egypt, …) be satisfied with such arrangements.

What impelled me was curiosity, and it was the same for all the others, the great majority of whom were not art-lovers, but like all Indians inexorably drawn to a mela. What then could one make of the artistic attempts of those who were invited to display their works?

One of the first layouts awaiting the viewer upon entering the first hallway was called ‘Dutty’, a plastic screen with splotches of dirt on it with hosepipes on the floor leaking water onto a muddy floor. It symbolised what’s dirty in the world, not something anybody walking in from Calvetty street needed reminding of. I forget who erected this curtain on the world’s dirt and its offshoots (e.g. mosquitoes, again an oppressive nuisance in Fort Kochi). But let it pass.

Next to it was Vivek Suhasini’s photographic re-imagination of The Last Supper, set now in Gaza, not far from the original scene, with black burqa clad women gathered around a table set with bred rolls and fruit. The lighting heightens the sense of  impending tragedy:

 Last Supper in Gaza

Vivek has a another series of backlit photographic films in which he uses the two faces that Picasso often gave to portraits of women (Portrait of Dora Maar), and uses his own profile as one of the faces while impressing on it the face of some other well-known personality. Here’s an example: 

 

Further down the same long passage hang some of the artistic creations of Maya Arulpragasam better known as the pop singer, M.I.A.  She has devoted much craft and art to producing holographic 3-D designs mounted on mirrors:

Sumedh Rajendran in the adjoining space has installed a blocky 3-D art in wood with black boots. You may like the crisp lines and sweeping curves and the odd disarrangement:

As you exit the first long hallway to re-enter the light, there stands a small pyramid that I could only associate with the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre Museum:

In another darkened room (why so much darkness one has to ask) is a moving tribute to an old school teacher-turned-seed-farmer’s  lifelong attempt to gather varieties of rice suited to all climes in his small 2-hectare farm This remarkable man is Natbar Sarangi; little wooden boxes along the wall contain the 350 varieties he has grown and archived. A little book tells the story, but it is hard to read in poor illumination and standing in the stifling atmosphere is even more enervating.

  Legend for Natbar Sarangi's 350 varieties of rice  planted on his 2-hectare farm 

Sidling along the walls of the passageway you enter what is labelled as a Conservatory, a place to store old toys and cast away amusements. It is a fine piece of buffoonery to see this figure of a clownish man on a dog blowing on a horn:

There is a Scotsman’s (Dylan Martorell) experiment in the next tenement, a kind of Rube Goldberg device to employ programmed actuators striking with a stick on various surfaces, in the expectation that a pleasing rhythm might result. Euphony is in the ear of the listener to this ensemble:

The next exhibit saturates the senses with an overpowering aroma of jeera before you even come around the corner to glimpse it. It looks like nothing so much as an attempt at an Alexander Calder mobile, with aluminium degchis filled with jeera powder and agitated, to produce a heavy spice scent:

In an outdoor covered space outside stands artist Jonas Staal's tribute to revolutions that have swept the world – ‘the supressed political subconscious of so-called democratic states’, he calls it. They are the iconic flags that have carried the hopes of small groups denied rights in some corner or the other of the world:

One of the largest in the sheer number of exhibits is photographer Atul Dodiya’s tribute to those who have put modern Indian art on the map. Well-known artists are there, and relatively obscure artists too, upon whose labours ultimately rest the achievements of Indian art. They are pictured in his frank naturalistic portraits, often in the company of others:

 

In the attic of a building in the Aspinwall complex stand these slanted tiled roofs set up perhaps as a tribute to the ubiquitous Kerala tiled roofs:

Nearby, in a disorderly clutter, granite holes lie around, yearning to be filled, or are they merely cast-off grinding stones? This is by Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz:

As if to reinforce the clutter, artist Subodh Gupta has suspended a Kerala vanji (boat) filled with found objects — trash of the kind that is commonly scattered about in Fort Kochi's ill-kept streets and would not have been hard to find:

One of the meticulously designed scenes is by artist Vivan Sundaram. It might be the scene of an excavation of a lost city in ruins, constructed out of broken shards of pottery. The topography of the red terra-cotta is alluring:

It is nice to come upon an actual artist at such a Biennale. Here is artist and photographer, Vivek Vilasini, with my daughter, Michal:

After a gulp of fresh air in the open and some conversation we were waved to the upper floor of Aspinwall on the right hand side. Artist Clifford Charles has depicted the alienation in the modern world, and gone to town with the second work below:

 

If this below were in greyscale it could have been the surface waves in a Japanese sand garden, for meditation. But its sheer brilliance of colour transformed it instead into a Holi scene:

In the next room these swirls of colour, blue, green and beige, are the work of the artist, Zhang Enli. We need not seek their signification, because there is none intended:

In the next several small rooms artist TN Upendranath uses his body and skin in several levels of undress, to represent what he claims are a 'reflection of psychological & sociological interpretations,' whatever that means. It is best to view the works and ponder awhile, and pass on. Reading words on the subject will often spoil the experience, especially if they were written by a publicity hack.

The next work is an exquisite etching on rock by Siji Krishnan. His fertile imagination exposes a woman trapped in a dragonfly's body. In the second close-up you can see genial animals caressing her body:

Photographer Anup Thomas seems to have a fascination for men in uniform. The primates of various Christian churches in Kerala are standing in full regalia beside their palaces:

Further along, a string of jagged copper plates align themselves to form a median strip. This artist is in search of patterns  and has found one by stringing together perfectly unremarkable artefacts - art by aggregation it might be called:

There is a wonderful black and white short film on the washing away of an island in the delta in Bangladesh. What’s remarkable is the quick artistic hand of a potter drawing on wet clay the topography of the island and the structures on it. The rising tide flows in to obliterate the clay map itself that he has sketched with such wondrous facility. A lesson for global warming perhaps:

'Hallo, how are you,' says the legend on this exotic abstraction:

We learn from a map near the exit about the Roman trade routes to India in the 1st century AD -- Barygaza (Bharuch in Gujarat) and Muziris (near Pattanam), in Kerala:

The on-going Muziris archaeological excavations are shown in this photo collage:

One cannot leave an art exhibition without buying a few books. The DC Books store  has a few inspiring signs — We read to know we are not alone (C.S. Lewis) and There is no friend as loyal as a book (Ernest Hemingway):

The Indian anchor trick at Pepper House by Anup Mathew is worth seeing if you care to walk half a kilometre down Calvetty road:

For sheer craftsmanship, Sudarshan Shetty’s intricate trellis (jhali) in wood scores high. It is, perhaps, the only object I coveted upon exiting the galleries:

His 'swan sculpture' too will stand out anywhere:

Hossein Valamanesh, born in Iran and settled in Australia, has set up a meditation room with cylindrical pillars of light surrounded by (Indian) carpets:

The only half-serious attempt at sculpture of the human body was by KP Krishnakumar: