What is it? Tushar Kanwar explains...

The What-ification in Social Media? If that’s your reaction to the word gamification, you’ve come to the right place. At its simplest, gamification refers to the application of typical elements of game play—point scoring, competing with others, rewards and following rules of play—to other areas of activity. By adding game-design elements such as competition and problem solving to your website or social communities, the idea is to make them more fun and engaging, prompting users to come back again for more. Still confused? Remember the bottle crown caps you may have collected as a kid to get that gift from the cola company? Or how parents turn a baby’s food spoon into a airplane so that the baby has fun trying to catch it (while being fed)? Everybody wins—the cola company and the consumers, the parents and the baby—and the audience has a good time to boot! That, ladies and gentlemen, is gamification.

Despite the trend of gamification set to rise—according a report last year by Gartner, “more than 50 per cent of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes by 2015”— gamification, even in the social sphere, is not a new concept. Think of Foursquare, the popular location-based check-in service? Ever wonder why millions of folks started checking into places and sharing their whereabouts with the social web? It started off with getting all those cool new achievement-based badges, for checking in to the most locations, or checking in most often. Then it was about checking into specific ‘favorite’ places, say a coffee shop, often enough to become the mayor of that location…at times, competing with others who want that mayor title as well! You’re certainly enjoying yourself with this harmless sparring, but who wins in the process? Of course, Foursquare, which is building up a rich database of places with commentary about each location, but there’s another unlikely winner. Yes, it’s the coffee shop, where you’ve been for 26 consecutive days buying a cup of coffee and telling all your friends where your favorite coffee is served!

Beyond the fun and games, social gamification has been seen to deliver measurable benefits when embedded into a broader marketing strategy. Without a doubt, brands see increased engagement levels with their target audience, and the engagement levels only increase if reaching these goals/challenges results in a reward. What’s more, gamification features have a way of making community participation stickier, as is the case with discussion forums. What may start as a short-term competition to see one’s name on the community leaderboard often forms into a daily habit, ensuring that your consumers stick around for the long term and become truly engaged and vested in the discussions. Besides, unlike traditional marketing tactics, customers going through a compelling gamified experience don’t feel like they’re being marketed to, which allows them to be more receptive to the subtle product messaging you could be embedding into the game.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is that there are a number of pioneering brands out there experimenting with gamification, and research coming out of it shows that the concept is indeed worth all of the attention it’s been getting. Sample some of these:

Nike: The brand’s Nike+ campaign gives users free apps for mobile devices that allow you to keep track of your running times, distances, accomplishments and more. Not only does this make it easy for Nike’s followers to track their own progress, but they can also share these workout statistics with their friends on social media. If you’re a daily runner, you get a fun and valuable app to track your progress, and Nike enjoys the free brand advertising that comes from you promoting your running accomplishments online. The brand even made an entire product based on gaming principles (Nike Fuel Band)!

Intel: Intel teamed up with Angry Birds, the biggest property in mobile/ social gaming, to create the “Angry Birds in Ultrabook” adventure within Intel’s Facebook page. The game included 10 new Intel-themed levels including a new Intel “blue” slingshot, Intel core chips, Intel mini circuit boards and animated visuals of the ‘Ultrabook’ in each game level. The game also gave users the opportunity to learn more about the product with an Ultra book video embedded into the experience and links through to intel.com. Users were invited to share their high scores with other Intel fans, and in a rather innovative twist to the Facebook sponsored post mechanism, users could play a level within the ads that popped up occasionally on their Facebook timeline. The campaign blurred the lines between advertising, education and entertainment, and had over 5.5 million unique visitors complete 17 million levels with over 56 million timeline impressions through published actions across Facebook.

Zomato: The popular eating joint directory lets users rise through the ranks from a mere foodie, to a big foodie, a super foodie and a connoisseur, where progress to each level is earned by the reviews you post, and the followers you have on the Zomato network. The site gets richer content in the bargain, and connoisseurs get to see their work featured on the Zomato leaderboard, are widely respected in the community and often get invited to invitation-only events for restaurants in their city.

India, like its national bird, the peacock, wears many coloured plumes. Delhi, the cultural melting pot, of this multicultural, multiethnic, tolerant nation has remained largely immune to the occasional regional skirmishes marring the democratic image. But no longer...It has many new labels to wear—protest capital and racist capital among them.

DEEPAK DHAMIJA// The question of race is a curious one in Delhi, and India. We tend to define social differences in terms of community, caste, religion, language and gender. But, a discussion on race is mostly kept out of public discourse. Indians have travelled the world over, but within the country their interaction with the racial difference is rather limited, unless we start addressing the question of caste, tribals and other ethnicities from a racial lens. Many writers have argued that racial difference finds expression in prejudices that we tend to camouflage in cultural terms.

Now there are two new entrants in the public debate which have made racism a buzzword in India, though largely in Delhi. People from the Northeast—whose migration to Delhi for education and livelihood over the years has now attained a critical mass to be counted as a political category— and the migrants from African countries— who started becoming visible ever since India started opening up its economy—have brought the focus on racism in a much more direct way. This directness comes from the fact that these two social categories cannot be defined in any other traditional Indian lexicons of both marking and fighting injustices. Moreover, the African migrant brings with her an international and historical vocabulary of fighting injustice in racial terms.

In the present time where the world is fast becoming a global village, cities everywhere have started resembling each other. We see similar kinds of buildings, interests and cuisines and similar ways of human exploitation, though these exploitations find manifestations in unique manners in different cities. On the one end of the scale, there is Mumbai, where violence in the name of regionalism keeps raising its head every once in a while and towards the other end is Chennai, where the Dravidian movement subtly ensured the non-involvement of north- Indian population for decades. Similarly, on the one end of the spectrum, Calcutta has witnessed rare instances of violence against women, and on the other end, Delhi is slowly becoming the rape capital of India.

Though the instances of violence are becoming more and more rampant among the so-called civilized and educated city population, the capital of the nation is also leading the polls for being least tolerant, most insensitive and most racist city in the country. It is quite a difficult feat to achieve, considering the presence of VIPs and ministers in the city.

In such circumstances, it is quite easy and convenient to pronounce the judgment about sensibilities of city residents and write it off as a city of boorish people who cannot respect ethnic and racial differences. But, if the idea is to go a little deeper than merely being judgmental, it will require a lot of effort and patience to know why the Delhi psyche has developed the way it has.

Talking of Delhi in the 18th century, the famous poet Mir said,“Dil ki basti bhi shahar Dilli ho jaise/jo bhi guzra usne hi loota(As if my heart is like the city of Delhi/whoever passed through it destroyed it)”.

At times, the poetry, stories, folklores, myths and songs of an era reveal much more about it than its historical landscape can which is contained in voluminous books. Such is the case with this couplet of Mir from the 18th century Mughal India. Imagine what all Delhi must have seen that it became a metaphor of sorrow for poets to convey extreme pain of plundering. And, since then, the city has not only witnessed the cases of extreme violence but has also been home for thousands of victims of extreme acts of violence. Whether it was the Partition riots of 1947 or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the city accommodated all the victims within its open arms. And, all of them stayed back, carrying deep scars and indelible marks in their heart.

The impact of such acts of mass violence had bred a generation of extremely insecure, aggressive and temperamental individuals, who were not willing to trust anyone beyond their families and communities. Over the years, the same insecurity has been passed on from one generation to another as a cultural legacy. Though the hurt has come down considerably with time, but the hangover of fear still looms in the heart of most of the witnesses of those massacres.

This hangover has ensured that citizens often find it difficult to accept anyone or anything which is not identical with their regional identities. A child develops a certain sense of aggression as part of their personality within the first few years of their childhood as a defence mechanism to survive in this part of the country.

With this baggage of Partition and violent history from a different era, it may be quite difficult for Delhi to lose its shades of aggression over the next few years. Though more tolerance and sensitivity is not only the demand of the era but it will also prove to be a positive step in the healing of its own wounds.

MADHURESH KUMAR// Delhi being the power centre and base of most ‘national’ visual media houses is in the news on a daily basis more than the other metros in the country. This is good as well as bad. It is good in the sense that this focus helps bring many issues to fore for debate, and every time it happens, things improve. The deep-seated issues of discrimination against the other is endemic to every city in the country, irrespective of their location, be it Mumbai, Bangalore, Guwahati or any other city. Compared to other cities, Delhi is no one’s city, because it is the national capital. There are claimants for every city but none claims Delhi. Bangalore is considered to be the pride of Kannadigas, Mumbai of the Marathi manoos; Hyderabad is witnessing a tough tussle between the people of Seemandhra and Telangana and Chandigarh between the people of Punjab and Haryana and so on. Delhi is not parochial and regional in that sense.

Delhi being a financial, intellectual and activist hub, it is not surprising then that the racial debates are most vocal in this city. However, these are still early days, but some trends and confusions are already visible. On the one hand, we see people using the term racism rather loosely to mean any kind of cultural injustice and, on the other, there is a tendency to see common patterns among cultural, gender-based and racial discriminations. Yet, Delhi seems more tolerant than other places when it comes to amalgamation. Though it is a city believed to be dominated by Punjabis, Gurjars and Jats, but the census figures will belie that, and so will the composition of elected representatives to the Delhi Legislative Assembly or any of its municipal corporations, where those from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and other states find place in them. The MDMK, a Tamil party, fields its candidate outside of Tamil Nadu only in Delhi. Delhi that way is more cosmopolitan than other cities, like Kolkata, Bangalore and Hyderabad, which are parochial and vernacular. All this shows a very different picture of Delhi.

Everyday some form of racism or discrimination is witnessed by every community or linguistic group that comes to this city from outside, and there are pockets where people from the same cultural group live together. Delhi has varied examples of accommodating each other: Jangpura, a Sikh- and Punjabi-dominated area in central Delhi, has become a hub for those coming from Kashmir, Afghanistan and other Islamic countries. And, no wonder, Khirki Extension in the south has become a hub for Africans, the areas around the North Campus of the University of Delhi for those from the Northeast or Munirka in the south for people coming from all over. There are also pockets like CR Park where every non Bengali is the other and is unwelcome as a tenant. Yet, adjoining Punjabi Kalkaji pocket is a an amalgamation of of all castes, creeds and races—you have Africans, Sudaneses and even goras strolling down the local M-Block bazaar.

However, when it comes to people who look distinctly and are culturally different, Delhi has its underbelly, where discrimination persists. That is the reason we find those from African countries or the Northeast having difficulties in finding accommodation or being called names. But, that underbelly exists everywhere. I wonder if the experiences will be any different if a north Indian were to rent a place in a Northeastern city. One of my friends, teaching in a prestigious institution, tells me about the attitude of her own colleagues from the Northeast towards her, which borders on discrimination. She is not physically attacked, but she is on the guard.

There is no unwritten law in Delhi which establishes its ownership: in fact, everyone is the other in this city. The prejudices here are more reflective of economic differences. Those who can pay and afford to live in posh south Delhi neighbourhoods do not have the experiences of discrimination. It is in the cut-throat world of Delhi villages, localities like Khirki, Jangpura, Munirka, etc., which will occasionally see these tensions erupting, but they will never explode the whole city. The logic of market comes into play, and at the end of the day, rent economy takes over social differences. Somewhere in the growing cacophony around these issues, things like this one are not factored in.

There is a hue and cry on the issue of racism, but migrant workers coming from Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and others have an equally harrowing time in this city, who are exploited. But, no one talks about them, other than on occasions when news items mention maids from Jharkhand being trapped in some south Delhi localities by their employers.

However, these differences and similarities cannot be a justification for the Khirki Extension incident or for everyday intolerance or discrimination towards people from the Northeast or Africans or any other cultural group in Delhi. If Delhi wants to become a world-class city, then it must learn to co-exist with differences. But, more importantly, it needs to worry how it can become a city in which the dignity of labour is recognised and those from margins find izzat and peace.

Life as a Unisex Salon

I WOULD LIKE TO meet someone who has never had a haircut. It’s a silly urge, I know, but this goes back to my Sunday Doordarshan days, of near miracles shown in a programme called Aisa Bhi Hota Hai, a colloquial for yes-it’s-true-suchthings- also-happen. Sunday mornings would bring strange people into our drawing room, those who had never cut their fingernails, someone whose moustache had never been trimmed, and which ran up to a few kilometres (or so I thought). Such people were rare, but surely there must be people in the neighbourhood of our lives, real and virtual, who have never had a haircut?

A child’s first haircut must be special, and many cultures have wrapped the event with rituals like the familiar mundan. I cannot explain why infant hair, rolling into curls on a baby’s soft head that has never been tonsured or where the length of the hair has never been trimmed, becomes a metaphor of innocence for me. When my nephew was given his first haircut at a little over a year, his face, and of course his head, looked bereft. He pointed to the loss with his little fingers, failing to recognise himself later in his photographs. By the time he was given his second haircut, he had grown a vocabulary of accusation, and he called the barber who had come home ‘duttu’, dushtu, the Bangla child-speak for naughty. Prone to theorising, my husband and I watched with near trepidation and worrying annoyance as to how a two -year-old boy was being initiated into a lifelong career of beautification, one which would require him to be dependent on fellow humans.

It is this feeling of utter dependence on others for something as seemingly basic as a haircut that came back to me repeatedly as I watched two short films on haircuts. In what marks the pleasant aleatory character of our lives, I discovered the two films within hours of each other, both on my Facebook news feed. The first is Anand Tiwari and Sumeet Vyas’s short film Haircut. It is a 9:09 minute film that traces the story of one particular haircut in a man’s life. The man is characterised as a near subaltern in relation to the unisex salon (Drama Salon is its name) he decides to visit. He wants a special haircut because he is about to get married. The receptionist says it would cost him Rs 800. He is willing to pay the amount. The salon is a fantastic world for him, almost completely removed from his own. Through the glass partition he watches male-female professional relationships play out against the singular trope of the haircut. The two worlds, of the salon and the man, the new client, clash, as one can make out in this conversation:

Receptionist: Can I help you?

Man: Haircutting.

Do you have an appointment?

Not naukri. Tomorrow marriage special day

... Tea or coffee?

I tea.

Right. Iced tea.

The female hairstylist washes his hair; the expression on his face reveals that this is the first time he’s had his hair shampooed like this, sitting with his head held out on to a basin, the rest of his body dry and clothed. A snip here and there, and after much has been made of his transition, he emerges out of the salon and looks into a mirror. Utterly frustrated at what he sees, he goes to the familiar roadside barber for a ‘real’ experience – a shave. At last he is satisfied. It is an enjoyable film, one that uses the trope of the haircut to talk about the inequalities of capitalism, allying this with class aspiration and frustration. A man’s hairstyle, seemingly the simplest and basic of the genre, is conditioned by social class, true, but no matter how much capitalism works its way into a person’s upwardly mobile instincts, the heart refuses to move. And so too hair, the thing closest to the head.

The other film is Emmanuel Parke Arthur’s Haircut: A Ritual Film, ‘shot on location with American friends volunteering as teachers during summer school at Heritage Academy in Ghana’. We watch a young girl being given a haircut by a woman at Jimycom Guest House. She is surrounded by girls and women with different kinds of hair—dark hair, light hair, some straight, other curly, some coloured. Unlike the man in the Hindi film, the girl looks happy with her new hair. There is also another significant difference: the man is given a haircut by professionals; the girl in the film has her hair done by a friend.

It is easy to spot how hair is gendered in the films. When the female stylist Becky asks him the name of the shampoo brand he uses, the man replies, ‘Lifebuoy’. While the background song in Parker’s film carries the word ‘wonderful’, ‘beautiful’, ‘meaningful’ to our ears, in Tiwari and Vyas’s film, the male singer sings these words:

Jeb pe apni par gaya daka ...

Kauwa chala hans ki chal ...

Laut ke Pappu ghar ko aaye ...

(He’s been robbed; The crow wanted to be a swan; Pappu returns home ...)

But what brought the two films close to my lived experience was when my mother read out an incident from a local Bangla newspaper: a thirteen-year-old schoolboy had been suspended from his school for refusing to get a haircut. My mother, a retired schoolteacher, said that she was shocked that his parents had supported him. ‘Is the boy a Samson that his hair can’t be cut?’ she said. I reminded her of the many tiffs she and I had had about my experiments with short hair, all of which she disliked and criticised. ‘Long hair suited only Rabindranath Tagore,’ she clarified. In response I told her that capitalism worked in strange ways: men might get higher salaries than women but a woman’s haircut is more expensive than a man’s. She, not to give up so easily, replied, ‘That is what the village adage really means –that the ghost lives in the woman’s long hair but not in the man’s’.

Two days after I’d watched the films, I saw an aged woman being given what is called a ‘widow’s cut’ under a tree, this on National Highway 31 D. I watched the woman’s long strands of hair fall and then collect on her white sari. That long hair and her long years of companionship with them and her partnership with her husband—both brought to an end. Scissors. Hair is indeed gendered. I know I would not have cried had the woman’s husband got a haircut after her death.

What makes math wizard Anand Kumar’s life less ordinary?

He is your average common man. More common than the men who are flaunting caps emblazoned with aam aadmi logos and are hogging the news headlines. Yet, Anand Kumar is a newsmaker in his own right. As recently as at the time of filing this story in February end, Kumar was making headlines of a different kind. He is to feature in a book on education being published in Poland by Polish journalist Jonna Irzabek. Irzabek has called Anand an international figure and Super 30 “something that is globally known”. Earlier, Kumar featured in a Japanese book, Indo No Shougeki, that had a chapter exclusively on his struggles and the success of his Super 30 initiative. Kumar has been covered by media in the US, UK, Canada, Dubai, Taiwan, Oman, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Philippines, and his fame continues to reach wider shores.

When I meet Kumar, his utter humility throws me. Acclaimed mathematician and Founder Ramanujan School of Mathematics and world renowned Super 30, the unique programme that has made the hallowed gates of IITs open up for 30 super talented economically backward students every year, has no time to sit on ceremony. There is more of Shastri than Gandhi or Nehru in this son of the soil. Soft spoken, courteous and humble, Kumar says “I was like any other child,” dashing all my hopes of finding a sensational modern day wunderkind Abhimanyu.

His tale is also the ordinary middle class story of struggle and sacrifice. “My parents loved me and wanted me to do well in life.” The discovery of his mathematical genius happened along the way. “It first came to fore, when I was in class 9 and gradually grew,” informs Kumar. Kumar though was good in mathematics since childhood and tended to spend more time with the subject. India’s original mathematical giant, Srinivasa Ramanujan too, had demonstrated unusual mathematical skills at school. Incidentally, Kumar named his school after the original whiz.

Kumar’s life was in a way shaped by his father who was a major influence. “When I entered college, my father was impressed with my interest in mathematics and wanted me to pursue higher education in Cambridge, Harvard or other acclaimed institutions.” Kumar applied accordingly and received a call from Cambridge University. But it was not to be. His father, Rajendra Prasad, an employee in the Department of Posts, passed away leaving his family in penury. All the plans also came crashing down.

The struggle for sustenance that ensued would have put paid to the dreams of an ordinary man. But Kumar was made of uncommon grit and passion. His merits too are unique. He set about helping his mother to fund the family kitty. “I had to sell small edible items prepared by my mother door-to-door.” Sometime later, he started giving private tuition to students for a small fee. “Some of the students from poor families were provided free tuition, as they were unable to afford even the nominal amount,” he says, revealing the philanthropic bent of mind that was to infuse his endeavours later. Through all these struggling years he remained undeterred in his pursuit of mathematics. “But still, I continued my studies.”

Did he never think of studying another subject? Mathematics is the bane of a large population of students. It was a wonder to find someone so fond of number crunching. “Never”, says the teacher whose aptitude for the subject is legendary. I was startled to learn then that Kumar is just a graduate in mathematics. “As I got into teaching quite early, I did not study after my graduation. I could not find time,” he says simply.

Remarkably, the mathematician is feted across the world and regularly writes for foreign journals. Unlike ordinary mortals he does not begrudge anyone for his destiny. There is no trace of bitterness or regret when he says, “For me teaching started quite early due to family hardship. Initially, it was a source of sustenance and later I began enjoying it. Once Super 30 took shape, it became a full time involvement. I realised it was close to my heart. After that, there was no desire to look beyond.” Teaching is a notoriously low paid job. But Kumar has no love for the tinsel. “Money does not attract me too much. I do earn enough for a decent living.”

It is this selfless giving culture of a gurukul that made Super 30 a model of success. Kumar who never dreamt a future beyond being a mathematician is today the architect of many an impoverished student’s engineering dream. The shades of the guru were visible in the graduate student of mathematics at B N College, Patna. He started Ramanujan School of Mathematics as a college club in 1992 and also a free training programme in mathematics. Kumar’s genius was meanwhile being noticed by his teachers, chiefly Devi Prasad Varma, Md Shahabuddin and BG Prasad, whom he calls major influences in his life. They helped him in these early projects and satisfied his thirst for query.

The child who was very fond of mechanical toys and often dismantled some transistors bought from the local mechanic’s store, in 1994 set about systematically putting together the building blocks to a different model of Ramanujan School of Mathematics. This school would train small groups of talented students for nominal fees and the most economically backward for free for competitive exams. The foundation of the school was laid over the bricks of his own shattered Cambridge dream.

The vision for Super 30 is also as simple yet far reaching as its founder. “It is to bring smiles to the faces of as many people from underprivileged section as it can by empowering them in the real sense. Its mission is to bring them to the mainstream deservedly and once they reach there, generations change,” says Kumar. In the age of mass commercial coaching, it is strange to find a teacher spouting gospels of no winning formulas or shortcuts. “There is no formula. The only thing is that I select talented students from underprivileged families through a screening test. Poor students don’t lack in talent; they lack opportunities. At Super 30, it is like an extended family, where students don’t have to care about anything except studies and they get round-the-clock mentoring.” His confidence is infectious.

Super 30 had come about later in 2003 when Kumar called upon his brother Pranav, a gifted violinist, to strengthen his hands and start the super innovative programme, a still more evolved version of Ramanujan school. The two brothers got deeply involved in the project that was to shake the nation. It helped that the family was supportive. While their mother Jayanti Devi provided home cooked food for the resident students, Kumar took extra tuitions to arrange for funds and Pranav took over the reins of management.

A decade on, the structure remains intact. “It has an informal structure. It runs from my home. The funding comes from my efforts. This is the source of my livelihood as well as a source of sustenance for Super 30.” The only difference is the expanded family of the Kumars—Kumar’s wife and son and Pranav’s wife and daughter who have to live off the same source. It is a full time involvement for the Kumar family, but he is fulfilled. “The students live like my family members.” With so many mouths to feed one would expect him to look for help or at least accept it when offered. But by now I knew Kumar’s answer before he articulated it. “Yes, many people have offered help, but I don’t take funds from any private or government agency.”

Kumar is a man much in demand, travelling all over the country and abroad giving talks at one institution or the other. Yet, he has no thoughts of replicating Super 30 and going commercial. “I don’t do it for profit. It is a novel initiative.” Some state governments have requested him to start Super 30, admits Kumar, “Perhaps a variant of the model may work. Let’s see how it shapes up,” he shrugs. The spirit is anything but commercial or selfish.

When Tokyo University professors had come calling, they wanted the students to pursue careers there. “They will also provide financial help to them,” informs Kumar. But for now, they are content pursuing the IIT dream. “So far, close to 300 students have reached IIT,” Kumar shares, whose simple reason for this labour is “because I like doing it.”

In Kumar I see Everyman, an unashamedly common man who only courts good deeds.

Does India fail to understand the special expressive qualities inherent in our art?

A FEW WEEKS AGO I read a newspaper piece by a well-known columnist in praise of Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus. Nothing wrong with that— Ship of Theseus is a very fine work, especially remarkable for a debut feature. But what put me off were some of the generalisations in the piece, and how the film was used as a pretext to run down more conventional forms of Indian cinema. Among the assertions made: “It was very, very different from—and better than—anything else that has come out of Mumbai so far […] subtle and restrained.” And “Everything about this film smells revolutionary to me.”

In fact, there is a familiar ring to such gushing, and it came up elsewhere when Ship of Theseus was discussed. In case you haven’t seen it, this film is a cool, understated work, full of thoughtful silences and an almost documentary-like minimalism in some scenes (though for my money, some of its best moments were the showier ones that made superb use of lighting, sound design and cinematography). It is explicitly driven by ideas, right from its title, which comes from a philosophical query (“if all the planks of a ship are replaced one by one, does it remain the same ship?”) and connects the film’s three narratives about people who have organ transplants.

It is unquestionably exciting that a young Indian writer-director has made a film like this, and equally encouraging that a well-known personality— Kiran Rao—took the initiative to distribute it, so it could reach large audiences. But to welcome and praise Ship of Theseus is one thing; to use it as a salvo against “regular” Indian movies, and to bemoan the idea that we have not so far had an intelligent cinematic culture, is nonsense founded on both elitism and ignorance. This attitude overlooks how many different types of movies—good, bad and mediocre—there have been in India for decades (often divided into simplistic categories like “commercial”, “parallel”, “new wave” and “middle cinema”). It also fails to recognise that there are many possible modes of cinematic expression. At one extreme is kitchen-sink realism—spare and stark—and at another extreme is great stylisation, or the expression of emotions through hyper-drama. What should concern the critic is not the mode itself, but how well it is executed to realise a film’s internal world.

I was thinking about these things when I happened to read Vikram Chandra’s new book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, a collection of essays about seemingly disparate subjects, including computer programming and literary theory. There are so many stimulating ideas in this book that even a long review wouldn’t be able to mention them all, but I was struck by something Chandra touches on fleetingly. Writing about the history of Sanskrit, he discusses concepts that have informed artistic expression in India for centuries, such as rasa (the aesthetic pleasure derived from tasting artificially induced emotions while watching a performance) and dhvani (the resonance that poetry can create within a reader). There has been a long tradition, Chandra points out, of the mixing of rasas in our art. To take just one instance, the great epic Mahabharata has a sequence after the war has ended and the grieving women are running helter-skelter on the battlefield, looking for the dead bodies of their husbands and sons. In one passage, the wife of a slain warrior finds his severed arm, places it on her lap, strokes it gently and begins a remarkable monologue: “This is the hand that took off my girdle/That fondled my full breasts…”

Here is, Chandra says, an example of the combining of emotional registers. “The stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savouring of karuna-rasa, pathos.” In other words, the tone of an essentially tragic scene has been heightened by the introduction of a very different— some might even say inappropriate— mood. And this is also what mainstream Hindi films often do—merging different emotions and formal devices, so that a tragedy can accommodate inspired comedic scenes (consider the role played by Johnny Walker as the dejected hero’s resourceful friend in such solemn films as Pyaasa or Madhumati).

A few years ago, when his superb novel Sacred Games—a very “filmi” story about the intersecting lives of a policeman and a gangster in Mumbai— was launched, I had a conversation with Chandra. “I feel very strongly about this notion of what is ‘too filmi’ as opposed to what is realistic,” he said. “In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we’ve had an education that has trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the Western tradition of psychological realism. But given the history of colonialism, we should be suspicious about this.”

Related points are addressed in Mirrored Mind. Chandra recounts how, as a young writer, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling in the Panchatantra or the Upanishads and the cool minimalism of modern American writing. And he writes very eloquently about “the cult of modernity”: how imperialism required that colonisers cast the colonised as primitive, childish, undeveloped, and sentiment-driven. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s description of Africans making “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” in Heart of Darkness, he points out that even the drums played by those “primitive” people contained a sophisticated artificial language: the drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages.

Conrad, given his own background and education, was understandably oblivious to much of this. But it would be a pity if we in India were to fail to understand the special expressive qualities inherent in our art and culture—whether it be the heavily stylised beauty of local dance forms or the heightened rasa offered by song sequences and drama in Hindi movies.

A Leftist, Marxist thinking NGO

“AI was started by some forward-thinking women such as Primla Lewis and Sreelatha Swaminathan who realised and were concerned by the loss of agency of the marginalised classes. I was a school teacher and a homemaker at that time teaching at the mobile creches and I got to know about them,” says Chaudhary. In simple words, Action India believes in the “power of the people”. The organisation provides a community-based platform for advocacy to secure the rights of the most marginalised— especially focusing on the women. The NGO’s goal is to reach a society with gender equality. A world where all sexes work together to change the system which is—at best—ambivalent against the poor, the Dalits and especially the women in particular. As they started their work, AI representatives understood that the foundation of its programme should be based upon women’s health and reproductive rights, seeking control over her body, asserting her autonomy and identity. So workers sought to distribute knowledge and information creating awareness among the most vulnerable of these women—the immigrant workers who travelled from several Indian states to work in the NCR. The goal was to work for social, political and economic transformation. “We work on the principles of collective action. Our community workers organise collectives of women and youth and mobilise members on specific issues with an understanding on all aspects of social, cultural and political discrimination with a strong focus on gender inequalities and the rights of the marginalised,” says Chaudhary. That was 20 years ago.

Now the emphasis rests on certain issues; growing gender disparity being one of them—leading to one of their most important programmes the Beti Utsav, in which mothers are felicitated for the birth of a daughter. “The utsav is a public jattha—it is at a public place. We give out stickers, we talk to the community. We try to start a dialogue with the fathers, the men. You get a few men to support you and that impacts the other men also. Frankly, the impact of the utsavs would be clear in the next census. Because the proliferation of ultra sound technology is too wide and too deep. People continue to seek sex detection. We feel it is equally important to change mindsets and simultaneously work on the law,” explains Chaudhury.

“With the growth of the market economy, since the 1990s there has been an increase of ad lines where advertisers ask parents to save `500 now and get `5 lakh later for their daughter's marriage, the mindsets are not changing for the better. In fact, there has been regression.

‘Celebrating the birth of the Girl Child’ programme was started from 2010. “AI welcomes new born girls, their mothers and their families and honours them. The doctor of that particular area’s government hospital congratulate and talk to them. Rallies are held, a nukkad natak is presented and parents are honoured with a card and a box of sweets,” says Chaudhury.

Apart from the save the girl child campaign, the other programmes of AI include the organisation of Mahila Panchayats, education for equality campaign, access to water and sanitation campaigns, and rural programmes “looking through the gender lens”. One of their most impressive programmes has been the Mahila Panchayats— women’s courts—a forum for dispute resolution. The panchayats comprise local women and paralegal workers who have been trained on legal rights of women with a focus on gender questions. The paralegal workers, too, hail from the community.

Today, Action India runs nine Mahila Panchayats in Delhi, with 14 paralegals and 225 mahila panchayat members. Their offices remain open between Monday to Saturday and members meet every Wednesday. In the past 20 years, AI’s Mahila Panchayats have resolved around 24,000 domestic disputes at the community level. Only when the members realise that a particular case is insolvable at the community level, does it take it to the court. Usually the cases involve desertion

From its humble beginning of being a group of five women bonded with a feminist vision to change the world, with the idea that “personal is political” AI has today created spaces where women can come together to share their joys and sorrows.

“The concept of Sabla Sanghs gave birth to women’s collectives subversively changing the unequal power relations in the family with new ways of assertion we spoke a new language of freedom and justice for all. Women spoke out on violence, deprivation and denial to be as we wished and to seek our own identity. Our own identity, our own potential,” says Chaudhury.

Winder gives readers humour and pathos in the history of the Habsburgs

EUROPA REGINA is a mannerist-era map of Europe drawn in the guise of a queen. The river Danube, like an artery, runs through the continent that for over four centuries was controlled or more aptly was in the fidgety hands of the longest and the most bizarre of royal families, the Habsburgs. Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe is an oddball, if somewhat long, description of kings and queens with strange names and extraordinarily complicated titles; made-up family ties to Hercules and Odysseus; clumsy negotiations; territorial exchanges; intermarriage and ugly jaws; and humiliating consequences of many of their innocent mistakes. At the same time it is unmistakable to see that their influence across Europe was vast. Winder says that “time and again the defining moments of Europe’s history were brought about as much by the Habsburgs’ uselessness or prostration as by any actual family initiative.” It is remarkable how laughable many of the Emperors were, and yet an almost uncountable number of potential rivals ended up gathering dust while the Habsburgs just kept moving forward.

Winder’s “personal history” is a journey across central Europe, where the “plural, anarchic, polyglot” lands of old had given way to the “small and dirty cages of new nation states”. How different the future if? – is the question Winder keeps coming back to, from the emergence of the Habsburgs in the Middle Ages, through their centuries of rule over the Holy Roman Empire to their inglorious end in 1918. For instance, Charles V arranged to marry his son Philip to Mary, the sister of the now dead English king. If Mary were to have a son he would inherit England and Burgundy creating a formidable and curious state. Mary suffered from a phantom pregnancy, which if real would have had the most astounding consequences. But she died five years later, taking a possible Habsburg England with her.

Danubia describes the Habsburgs and their Empire, which from 1400 to the beginning of the First World War was the center of almost all major incidents in European history. Winder’s spirited run-on sentences testify Habsburgs’ role in defining European national boundaries, languages, religious practices and the appearance of their major cities. They defended Central Europe against fierce Ottoman attacks. They were the champions of tolerance in a 19th-century Europe driven mad by ethnic nationalism. They developed marital or military relations with almost every part of Europe they did not already own. Keeping the empire together was achieved through practical measures but also through the creation of a formidable magic circle, which each generation reinforced through manipulation of special objects, ceremonies and events. Winder describes how the Vatican had to exhume alleged Christian martyr’s graves, subsequently called the catacomb saints and decorate them with garish jewelry and install them in public squares - an example of the mysterious and crazy workings of the Catholic Church and the Habsburgs trying to control their seesawing power relations.

The book moves chronologically but common themes about each generation surfaces which makes it lively and interconnected through centuries of history. Winder’s writing cannot be considered old-fashioned history book material. The book is a travel-ogue, with stunning descriptions of Hungarian villages, Transylvanian mythologies and postdiluvian abstractions. It is combined with an autobiographical foray – often anecdotal and funny – but at all times filled with excitement and fascinating discoveries about art, architecture and music.

Like most of the things the Habsburgs did Winder earnestly and with seriousness emphasizes that to think of them as a coherent, central authority is to miss the point. And it is immediately clear from the first chapter that Winder’s approach to his sprawling subject is more of amusement and irreverence than that of a solemn historian surrounded by thick footnoted tomes. Winder and us as readers of his book find humour and pathos in the history of the Habsburgs, who for five hundred years ruled territories stretching from North Sea to Peru with a “dizzying blend of ineptitude, viciousness and occasional benignity”. And clearly, Winder’s vocabulary for describing the peculiar circumstances the Habsburgs found themselves in is inexhaustible.

A Call for India to Reboot

REIMAGINING INDIA is a topical book. McKinsey & Company have chosen a great time to unleash more than 65 thought leaders from around the world to scourge India’s already tottering self-worth. The ratings are down and economic growth in India decelerated to 4.8 per cent in 2013 from 5.1 per cent in 2012. The United Nations projections of growth for calendar year 2014 is a dismal 5.35 per cent, while The World Bank has downgraded its growth forecast of the country for the current fiscal to 4.7 per cent. In this scenario, even Indians and diehard Indophiles are growing weary of the tired litany of India shining by its spin doctors in blinkers.

Reimagining India’s star cast of jurists (authors) call upon the world to take a second look at India with a promise that all is not lost. They set the historical context and then set right the records. It is not that the India they show is no longer shining, nor that the credibility has worn off the ‘Incredible India’ show. In fact, the India that they show was flawed all along, down the pages of history and polity. Our branding and campaign has been informed with overenthusiastic naivety of PR. It’s time to rein in this overzealousness and reimagine a new Indian reality. This contrarian India, reforged with equal parts lustre and base, is the key to unlocking the potential of Asia’s next superpower.

In the last few years, India has become a mere brand being pushed at Davos. The real India has been brushed under the carpet. It is this real India of 1.2 billion, almost half of who lead a life of hardship, that Bill Gates calls the real power of India. Gates has seen this India in action and credits them with the success of India’s polio programme. Here lies a tantalizing glimpse of India’s soft power—the power of can-do when its people put their shoulders to the yoke of development. Not only the world but many India born too can only see “India’s obvious talent and energy” and miss “its hidden strength—the rich, the powerful and the poor working together toward a common goal,” as Gate’s observes post enlightenment.

There is indictment of India’s political culture—of nepotism, corruption and dynasty—and also the booming middle class of India, exposed as a pathetic spineless creature surviving on the offal of its political masters and yet biting the hand that feeds at every opportunity. Yet there is praise for the India that is arising with the hope of a new dawn. All said, Reimagining India is a bold book with a positive message about India and for India. Read it!

… culmination of grand tradition and warm hospitality

We don’t realise how important Google and Wikipedia have become in our lives. But with the age of blogging, looking up just about everything on the internet—that too, on our cellphones—it is inexcusable to be ignorant about the culture and cuisine of a destination that you are just about to visit. I offer all this up as the reason why I reached Kashmir in July 1987, without knowing anything at all about either its culture or cuisine: Google was still over a decade away.

I was on a photography assignment, and my only brief had been—“we don’t want any more pictures of shikaras and houseboats. Concentrate on the rest of the stuff”. There was only one slight hitch: I had no idea at all what the other “stuff” constituted, and whether, indeed, there was anything in Kashmir apart from shikaras and houseboats. Twenty-seven years and marriage to my Kashmiri boyfriend later, I can only cringe at my ignorance.

Hardly had the plane touched the ground, than I was heading towards Hazratbal, the shrine that is located on the banks of the Dal. I found it the very essence of poetry. A white marble shrine, topped by a dome, reflected upon the water of the lake. Once I went there, I figured that it was like a separate village on the outskirts of the city. There were bread sellers with breads of several sizes and shapes; there were vegetable shops and vendors with coal-fired bhattis from where the irresistible aroma of spicy mutton tikkas arose. There were little old ladies with tinned copper vessels in front of them selling steamed rajma interspersed with grains of husked wheat.

I have watched the funky little row of tumbledown stalls grow bigger and more self-assured over the decades. I have also realised that the little old ladies are all from the nearby village of Telbal and steam one or two types of dal—rajma or moth ki dal—all night long on a slow fire, to sell it to those who come to offer prayers at the Hazratbal shrine. And that few family elders would visit the shrine without bringing back a handful of the dal, sprinkled over with spice powder, for the children in the family. I learnt, too, that shrines and playgrounds were the best places to scout around for snacks, and that Kashmiri snacks contained no preservatives and were not even necessarily fried. The one exception to the rule was moinj gool.

Either my husband’s family are moinj gool fiends or every Kashmiri is a secret moinj gool freak, but the vertically cut lotus stems, roasted grams, small whole fish, and potato chips all dipped in seasoned rice flour batter and deep-fried, are more than a treat: it’s an addiction. Served with an accompaniment of chopped onions with green chillies and vinegar, it’s our collective tea-time snack.

In 1987, it was easy enough to walk around the city. Hazratbal was at the furthest end: the old city crowded around the hillock of Hari Parbat, and the Dal and Nageen Lakes were navigable by boat. I soon found out that shikaras were just one type of transport on the water, and that the entire city seemed to be built on a network of waterways that led off from the River Jehlum. There were tiny skiffs, large boats called bahach, residential boats called doongas and a host of others. At the very top of the chain was the tourist’s houseboat. Houseboat owners were warm, hospitable people and their interaction with foreign tourists over a century, have given them an edge in knowing what non- Kashmiris like. So it was with trepidation that one of them offered me my first cup of noon chai. One sip, and I was hooked onto salt tea.

Fortunate that I acquired a taste for it, because in my new home, salt tea was served at breakfast with a couple of types of bread and at tea-time, with a whole host of biscuits, breads and savouries. My favourite has always been the soft as butter kulcha, sprinkled over with poppy seed, but there are baqarkhani, sheermal, pheni, tchot and tchachvoru as well. They were completely distinct from the cookies and tea-cakes that accompanied regular tea. You could visit a friend or relative and come back home too full to even think of dinner—such was Kashmiri hospitality.

With the prosperity that has set in over the last few decades, thanks in part to the tourism buck, mutton has overtaken every other ingredient as suitable nourishment for the body and the soul. To go to someone’s home for a meal and not to be given at least one mutton dish is to get a strong and rather negative social message! Go for a wedding or one of the myriad ceremonies around it, and you will be fed at least 10 if not 20 dishes, most of them of meat. Is it overkill? For an outsider, it is as much of a challenge to sit on the floor around a large platter of rice, along with three others of the same gender, all eating neatly from your own side of the platter. For a Kashmiri, however, polishing off most of the meat is an art borne of long practice. “The trick,” a kindly aunt told me in the first month of my marriage, “is to eat hardly any rice, but as much meat as you can.”

It is advice that has stood me in good stead for 23 years. For the wazwan is certainly the culmination of a grand tradition of dealing with every part of the lamb, leaving no waste. Each dish in the wazwan calls for a particular part of the animal. You can no more use shoulder to cook methi maaz than you can use the breast to make dhaniphol. Each dish is cooked differently and combined with different spices, and each has a complete different texture. It is only the male members of a particular community called Wazas who are qualified to cook the wazwan, and they cook it traditionally over a wood fire on enormous tinned copper pots.

“There is a protocol to the way wazwan is cooked, served and eaten, and at the risk of sounding like a fundamentalist, you only mess with this protocol at the risk of interfering with the final product.” That is our family Waza’s favourite dictum and I tend to agree with him.

To have a restaurant serving wazwan is meaningless: you need a modern kitchen for that, which means no wood fires burning in an open courtyard, and that is the death-knell for a banqueting tradition that has survived at least a couple of centuries. It will certainly be a shame the day we have to Google wazwan to know what it tasted like!

Surendran Nair is an artist who defies description, his work more so.

In the melee of India Art Fair’s VIP-vernissage this year, I was missing something. I could not quite put my finger on it till I took a second round of the makeshift stalls. Yes, the numbers were down this year (from 104 to 80), and there was more glitz and glamour; Delhi’s swish crowd was swirling the wine glasses, but the greats, yes! The greats were missing. Last year, when I had met Anjolie Ela Menon at the venue, her assessment had been quite prophetic—dismissive of the tinsel. This year mostly the floss remained. So it happened that I could not find Surendran Nair at the venue.

Some of his artworks were on display but there was nothing like the huge mural that had made up a wall of one of the two Sakshi Gallery stalls in the last Art Fair. Origins: A Tableau – Epiphany (Cuckoonebulopolis), 2013-2012, had visitors crowding in the narrow passageway. As usual, Nair had art aficionados scratching their heads in bemusement trying to arrive at the epiphanic conclusion hinted at in the title.

That’s the effect of Nair’s work on the uninitiated. It helps then to be armed with a little understanding of the man to start peeling the meanings of his works—the idea behind this interview.

Describe yourself as a person, I ask him, and he laughingly complies. “It is difficult to answer it without a touch of irony to it; nonetheless, let me try—may be someone unassuming; someone quite reluctant to arrive at early conclusions about things around; someone who is prone to look at the ironies and the lighter side of things?” he leaves a lingering question in the air, same as do his paintings.

His works too, leave one fumbling for answers. They are all open-ended, inviting multiple conclusion each informed by the history and perception of the individual viewer. Nair’s work like him has a hint of irony, a stroke of mischief, a brush of quizzical, and a large dose of mythical and something close to surrealistic. One of India’s preeminent artists, Nair, defies being boxed into clichéd compartments. Some critics have tried to label him as surrealistic in the tradition of René Magritte, but Nair would have none of it. He has more of symbolism and an admixture of mythic and mystic, both of the West and the East, and yet contemporary, modern, classical, mundane and surrealistic come together to construct a vocabulary of images that uses the cosmic man as its grammar and forges an identity that is distinctly Surendran Nair.

The making of Surendran Nair, the mythmaker and the artist, goes back to Onkkoor, Kerala. The 57-yearold artist was fond of doodling as a child, “if I remember correctly, from the primary school days onward,” he reminisces. But colours did not come to Nair for many years. To be precise “from the high school days and the pre-degree days,” he recalls.

If it had not been a chance discovery of a small book of drawings by the early masters of European Art in the college library, ““I think that was the only book on art in the entire library, which was absolutely inspirational...Probably it is also a book that made me aware of the seriousness of art as a practice,” perhaps the world would have been deprived of a great body of thought-provoking work including the controversial An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus. This 2000 painting which ruffled right wing feathers and was withdrawn from National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, catapulted Nair higher than Ashokan Pillar on which perched his actor in contemplation.

They were also exciting times—the 70s—says the artist with a twinkle. “I had a number of friends with whom I could discuss the altogether new, unconventional and exciting approaches and expressions that were in full flow in disciplines such as literature, cinema, art, etc.” And then comes the great confession, “I think I got distracted by such things a great deal and ignored my studies.” Be what it may, it was beneficial for India’s art heritage. We stand enriched, I say, by his digression. He laughs.

It was Nair’s brother who finally gave formal shape to his wandering muse. “He suggested that I go for the fine arts. Since I hadn’t shown much of an interest in academics, he thought applied arts could be a career option.” It was at Fine Arts College in Trivandrum that Nair gradually started to understand the nuances of art as a practice and discipline. The artist who evokes the imagery of surrealism and the mystery of mythology to paint contemporary sociopolitical realities, fashions his canvases “at the normal hours; between 10 am and 8 pm.” But adds, “I can work even all night and beyond.”

The output: Metaphors on canvas shrouded in a quietude of colours, with the dignity of giant murals, expressed through the language of Indian and western mythology and art weaving intimate ‘Nairicons’ that engage viewers in crucial dialogues concerning contemporary issues of individual, community and national import. The human–sized tableaux are dramatic yet precise in presentation. Nair talking about one of his works, Corollary Mythologies, had remarked: “I imagine it to have political undertones, however subtle, which is informed of history, mythology, real and imaginary events. Art history, notions of tradition and identity and its relationship with modernity, of language, sexuality, politics, religious and other faiths, etc. Without emphasising any of these in particular, I address these issues simultaneously. Sometimes rendered sentimentally, literally, cryptically or otherwise metaphorically oblique, they are both detached and reflective and at times often with a mischievous gaze, making innocent jokes, and at other times being ironical and quizzical too.”

His paintings are rich with these many subtexts and undertones. It takes a little time and an understanding of his native background apart from Greek and Indian mythologies to penetrate the many layers of his work. The drama behind Nair’s work is replete with the rich cultural tradition of Hindu deities and performing arts of India including Kathakali. The expressive lexicon of dance expressed through elaborate makeup, fanciful costumes and enchanting eye movements and hand gestures further accentuated by props, is used by Nair to express the poetry behind his paintings. The pictorial strategies of surrealism like the dream landscapes, the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects, and symbolic creatures further add drama to the canvases. The result of this disparate fusion is a unique aesthetic blending of classical Indian representational techniques with a figurative style similar to those of surrealistic masters but that is very Nair—a commentary on the sociopolitics of post-colonial India through ancient myth and contemporary imagery.

Nair’s family was uncertain of his choice to go into painting though. “They were hoping that I would go for applied arts,” says the master, adding “they were uncertain whether or not it would be a wise idea in terms of earning a livelihood.” Nair even thought of teaching in the early days of struggle as an artist. I am aghast at the thought of the wasted talent. He only smiles. “But unfortunately or otherwise I was not selected. After that I haven’t thought of doing anything else.” But he did a lot of painting, producing an enviable body of work for posterity.

Nair’s first solo show was in 1986 or 87, he thinks, at the Lalithakala Akademy Gallery in Ernakulam, sometime in the month of August. “It was pouring incessantly all the five days of the exhibition. So, hardly anybody came to see it, other than a few friends.” The dampener of a first show did not douse his spirits though. But, immediately after, a few months later, the same body of works was shown in a two person show at Gallery 7 in Bombay. “The response I thought was quite encouraging. I remember senior artists like Tayeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee coming to see the show and saying few encouraging words.”

The fledging’s repertoire evolved over the decades. Starting with strong pen and ink drawings and etchings and lithographs in works which were primarily portraits in the 80s to oil and canvas paintings, best exemplified in his corollary mythologies—an artistic reinvention of ancient allegories as modern day fables. At the fag end of 1990s, Nair created a rather large and exceptional portfolio of hand-coloured etchings collectively titled The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight that had critics comparing him to Italian surreal artist Francesco Clemente.

I ask him if there are any projects that he still wishes to do. “Nothing special I would say. I am trying to cope with completing a series of works collectively called, Cuckoonebulopolis, loosely inspired by ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes’ The Birds, begun in 1999. The title piques my interest and I ask Nair to explain. “If I may talk about Cuckoonebulopolis, I may be able to give you a fair idea of what preoccupies me currently,” he begins. “Cuckoonebulopolis is something like a utopia and it is one of the translations of the Greek word Nephelococcygia coined by Aristophanes in his play. Though ‘Cloud-cuckoo land’ is the most popular version, I felt that it is a bit too descriptive for my liking and it also seemed to foreclose the possibility of exploring the ironies of things that was what I was looking for. Now, my interest in this idea of utopia dwells only at the most elementary level, and not a full-fledged imagination of an alternative. I think the moment one engages in imagining an alternative becomes, by default or not, a critique of the times that prompts one to imagine the same. It is this basic aspect that I am interested in, and not a watertight proposal for an alternative resolved of all problems.”

By default, Nair has also managed to give an illuminative peep into the functioning of his imagination that lends colour and contour to his blank canvases. I take my leave intrigued at the myriad possibilities.