Did you check the dictionary?

I just discovered there's a gallery in Gurgaon named Art Farrago. The gallery seems to focus a fair amount on selling through its website. Images of the gallery's stock on the site suggest the name's pretty appropriate.


I wonder if they serve Miazma wine at their openings.

The Mumbai Film Festival

Long queues before each screening the the Mumbai Film Festival were taken as evidence of the event’s success. The daily publication brought out by MFF boasted about those queues. It just goes to show how warped our idea of success is. A truly successful (by which I mean, among other things, well organised) festival would have large audiences but not long queues. That would indicate the organisers had arranged screenings of individual films based on a good estimate of their popularity. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia would get four screenings at the main venue, being played simultaneously on two screens twice over.

Instead the film got just two screenings. Both were originally scheduled to start at around 8pm, but one was pushed back to 9.45pm. This meant that the 8 pm screening had two halls worth of delegates waiting in line. One view of this would be: Wow, how eager the Bombay film crowd is, queuing up for hours before Melancholia’s screening, the festival’s a true film buff’s paradise. My view was: What a shambles, preventing people from seeing movies they’re keen to catch because they have to wait in line for hours to have a chance of getting a seat for films they’re even more eager to view.

Actually, less than 10% of screenings were actually full. But even one show where people are turned away creates a ripple effect, the equivalent of hoarding during food shortages which lead to massive price spikes. So, there were people in line two hours before Nani Moretti’s Habemus Papam (We Have A Pope), although the hall was half empty in the end.

The audience for Habemus Papam skewed distinctly to the over thirty-five crowd; I suspect most had, like myself, discovered Moretti when Dear Diary was screened at an IFFI many, many years ago. The youngsters preferred a South Korean gangster movie being screened at the same time.

Unfortunately, Habemus Papam is no Dear Diary. The idea of a Pope with stage fright is a good one, but one-trick feature films tend to get tedious beyond a point. Habemus Papam doesn’t lead anywhere interesting, though it keeps the audience amused.

Another old-timer, Chantal Akerman, was in even worse form than Moretti. Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly is a dreadful adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel of the same name. Why the director thought a nineteenth century tale of Europeans seeking gold in the jungles of Borneo could be adapted to a contemporary context is beyond me. I mean, are modern gold mines found by individuals trekking through tropical rain forest with maps as their only guide? To make matters worse, the main character Almayer is a pathetic loser, his daughter is cold and unfriendly, and their relationship, which is supposed to hold the film together, never comes alive in any form. The only good thing about Akerman’s Folly is its visual quality: elaborate takes in urban spaces, jungles and the seashore that one can stare at for two hours without getting bored.

Not all veterans came up short like Moretti and Akerman. Wim Wenders’ Pina, a 3-D documentary about the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch (who died soon after filming began) is a pathbreaking piece of movie-making.

For the first time in history, performance does not die in the course of being transferred to screen. The technology needs refinement, of course: characters still appear a bit like marionettes on occasion, and buildings like doll’s houses. But 3-D allows us to experience dance in ways that are impossible for an audience in a theatre to do, while retaining the crucial feeling of liveliness and presence.

Another film I liked was Julia Murat’s Historias Que So Existem Quando Lembradas (which means, ‘Stories that only exist when remembered’).

It’s about a Brazilian ghost town populated by old people, who go through a daily routine that is so set it takes on the appearance of ritual. The main character, a woman named Madalena, starts each day by baking bread. She then takes it over to a shop, shares a coffee with the shop-owner, attends church, lunches with the priest and congregation, sits by her husband’s grave, and writes a letter to him after returning home. This set of actions plays out four or five times in the film, but Murat’s exceptional framing is varied enough to forestall any monotony. The ghost town is disturbed by the appearance of a young photographer, who asks to stay with Madalena, and begins questioning the dogmas on which Madalena and the townspeople base their lives. Though the ending of Historias is unsatisfying, the film is beautifully shot and paced, and enlivened by fine performances.

The Universe is Expanding

The Nobel Prize for Physics this year has been awarded to three researchers who showed that the universe is expanding at an increasing pace. Physicists don't yet know how this could be happening; they've had to dream up a massive amount of hypothetical invisible matter to get their equations right.
As a boy, I was pretty interested in astronomy. I remember reading about quasars that were 10 billion light years away and thinking, "Well, why should quasars only be found at the fringes of the universe? What's so special about the edge, except that the light reaching us from there is coming from the farthest back in time? If a chap stood on one of those quasars and looked toward us right this second, maybe he'd see a quasar too. Maybe, the universe was full of quasars ten billion years ago."
Well, apparently it was, more or less.
Before I got to the quasars bit, I learned the universe was expanding. I wasn't a morose type as a kid. The knowledge that the universe was expanding, and the stars and planets would probably keep drifting farther apart and grow ever colder till all communication and all life ceased, was about the only thing that depressed me around the age of ten. When I saw Annie Hall years later, I realised Alvy Singer had felt the same way back during World War II.



Unlike Alvy, though, I stopped doing homework a while before I read about the Big Bang theory.

Koh Samui: Making the Connection

I've travelled a fair amount over the years, but that evidently hasn't stopped me from planning dumb itineraries. After Jabeen and I decided to vacation in Koh Samui, I booked the tickets on Bangkok Airways, which now flies daily to the Thai capital from Bombay, and has the most flights to Samui (I read somewhere that the airline owns Samui airport). The cheapest available flight from Bangkok to Samui was scheduled just an hour after the arrival time of our Bombay-Bangkok flight. I thought to myself, "It's a squeeze, but Samui airport offers visas on arrival, so we just need to transfer directly to our connecting flight without any intervening visa hassles".

An elementary mistake, as I was informed at the check-in counter in Bombay. Since the Bangkok-Samui leg was a domestic flight, we'd need to get visas before boarding it. Recalling how long the visa process had taken on my last visit to Thailand, I recognised there was little hope of making our connecting flight.

But Bangkok Airways and Thai immigration outdid themselves in helping us out. Our plane landed just ahead of time and, as we entered the terminal, I spotted a Bangkok Airways staffer holding up a placard with our names on it. This was 6 am, IST. He rushed us to the counter where visa forms were handed out. By 6.10, we had filled the forms and changed money to pay for the visas. He then led us to a fast track counter, where our visas were stamped in under five minutes (the other counter was thronged with applicants, mostly Indian). In another five minutes we went through passport control. At 6.25 we passed security. At exactly 6.30, we were at the gate from which the Samui flight was to take off. It began boarding seven minutes later, and we touched down on the island by 8 am, Indian time.

I said to myself, "Here's a country that takes tourism seriously".

Despite all their efforts on our behalf, we almost managed to mess things up in another way. We'd completely forgotten that our photographs would have to be attached to the the visa form, whether we filled it in Bangkok or Samui. Luckily both of us happened to be carrying mugshots of ourselves in our cabin baggage. Jabeen said, "There's always so much stuff in my handbag that I don't need but leave inside 'just in case'. Well, now all the junk I've carried all these years has proven its worth".

Home Spun and The Skoda Prize

I'm in the middle (or, hopefully, near the end) of a longish period of blogger's block. I have nothing to say about current events that I feel is worth saying, but I don't want to leave this ground fallow any longer. Which is why I'm posting about two events in my professional life, a show I've curated and an art prize I've helped conceive.
The exhibition I've curated, called Home Spun, opened a couple of weeks ago at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, which displays work from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar collection. The press has been kind thus far. Here are previews / reviews from Anindita Ghose in Mint; Karanjeet Kaur in Time Out; Manjula Narayan in Friday Gurgaon; and Chitra Narayanan in the Hindu Business Line.
The show runs till 27 December and, if you're in Gurgaon before then, on a day which is not a Monday or public holiday, please consider dropping in to take a look.
I'm an advisor to the Skoda Prize for Contemporary Art, an annual award for Indian artists under forty-five which is now in its second year. We had the first jurors' meet for the current year in Delhi last week, and cut the 128 entries down to a longlist of twenty. These shows will feature in a catalogue, to be released at the opening of the Skoda Prize Show at the Lalit Kala Akademi on January 23, 2012. On October 24, 2011, the four member jury will be joined by Heike Munder, curator of Zurich's Migros Museum, to narrow the selection down to a three-person shortlist. The final selection will happen after viewing the Skoda Prize Show, and the award of Rs 10 lakh will be presented on January 28, 2012. The two runners' up receive a four-week residency in Switzerland courtesy Pro Helvetia.
Take a look at the list and let me know if you have any favourites, and if you think somebody was unfairly excluded or included. And here's a look back at the inaugural award ceremony, where Anish Kapoor presented the trophy to Mithu Sen.

Atul Dodiya

In advance of his new show opening at Chemould Art gallery, I've written this piece on Atul Dodiya in Time Out.

Anna the Fanatic

Anna Hazare rules the village of Ralegan Siddhi with unquestioned authority. He forces meat eaters to turn vegetarian; has men who drink liquor tied to a tree and beaten; prohibits cable TV; disallows political campaigning and elections.
There's a word for this sort of person: it is 'fanatic'. Everything about Hazare's behaviour, his posture in negotiating, his threats and fasts, points to a fanatical and authoritarian personality, a modern Savonarola. But the word fanatic has never cropped up in the media in relation to Hazare. Maybe it is because the man doesn't give fiery speeches.

Anna Hazare and individual mobilisation

The first time I attended a demonstration, I was struck by an odd fact. Most of the audience was poor, composed of party members trucked in from different parts of Bombay and, perhaps, out of town. The speakers were all middle class graduates. Those attending didn't seem deeply involved in the cause being discussed, they were just there to make up the numbers.
The same pattern played out repeatedly in succeeding years. I did attend a few demonstrations composed of motivated individuals, but these were inevitably small. For example, I was part of a group that would march on August 6 demanding an end to all nuclear weapons. I don't think we ever had more than a hundred people at any public meeting.
It was different in England, where I noticed a greater homogeneity between protestors and those who addressed them. Though the demonstrations I attended in England were fairly small, far larger ones, such as marches against the Iraq war, drew thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of individuals in Europe and the US based on shared beliefs rather than party membership. Labour unions and political parties were often part of such marches, but a substantial portion of the demonstrators seemed to be independents who had just turned up because they believed in the cause.
The anti-corruption crusade is perhaps the first large-scale demonstration in India that has not involved political parties drumming up support and trucking in the public. The middle-classness of the movement has come in for criticism, but I can't imagine poor people spending valuable hours to protest in favour of something as abstract as the Jan Lokpal bill.
In the latter stages of Anna Hazare's fast, various unions showed support by striking work, and they probably had a party-political background; but the crowds at Ramlila Maidan appeared to be composed of individuals and small groups of friends and family members without strong party affiliations. In that sense, the Lokpal movement has something in common with the Arab Spring. It's probably the first time a nation like Egypt saw such individualised demonstrations. As in Egypt, all established parties in India seem to have been taken unawares by the intensity and persistence of the demos; politicians are used to being able to label crowds, and they were left playing catch-up in this instance.

This might also tell us something about the changing nature of Delhi. I've argued the city is taking on the aura of an imperial capital, but, contrarily, it is also becoming less dominated by politics. In past decades, a substantial portion of the middle class population of the capital was directly connected to the government. I haven't seen statistics, but I'm certain the percentage has fallen dramatically.

Amitav Ghosh on Anna Hazare and the deep State

Some of India's best thinkers have written about the Anna Hazare movement, and now Amitav Ghosh joins the group with this article in the Hindustan Times. While agreeing with Ghosh's analysis of the malaise within the Congress Party, where position has been divorced from true power, I find myself wishing he'd gone further and spoken of the same thing happening among opposition parties.
During the Shiv Sena-BJP government of the 1990s in Maharashtra, real power vested in Bal Thackeray who, unlike Sonia Gandhi, didn't even fight elections. To this day, no Thackeray has ever bothered to fight state or national elections. It was to Bal Thackeray's home and not the Chief Minister's office that Rebecca Mark of Enron went, straight from the airport, when attempting to get the Dabhol project restarted. The result was a U-turn by the ruling coalition and a financial disaster for the state.
The BJP boasts, with a lot of justice, of not harbouring dynasties, and of changing party heads democratically. However, it faces its own 'deep State' crisis in its relationship with the RSS, whose unelected leaders have have veto power over decisions taken by BJP ministers.
Another feature of 'deep State' politics, as Ghosh points out, is the refusal to reveal details of illnesses suffered by top leaders. The secrecy surrounding Sonia Gandhi's surgery is very similar to that surrounding Hugo Chavez's treatment in Cuba; and of Fidel Castro's illness. Here, again, the BJP was no different, having drawn a veil over Atal Behari Vajpayee's health problems while he was Prime Minister.

Delhi in the Time of Anna

On the flight I chat with a woman who works with ONGC, in finance. She's deeply sympathetic to the Lokpal campaign. She cites problems ONGC faces because it's a government organisation. Like, it has been headless for months, despite being one of the nation's most valuable companies.

"The stay on appointing a Chairman is coming straight from the PMO, so don't tell me Manmohan Singh is not corrupt. People say he could not control Raja because of coalition politics; but why can't he control this kind of thing in his own office?"

She tells me ONGC hired expensive rigs from Reliance, because Reliance had hired them and had no use for them. ONGC has no use for them either, but is now picking up the tab instead of Reliance.

This is all, of course, hearsay.

In the Delhi metro, on the streets, in cars, I see people carrying the tricolour and wearing Gandhi topis inscribed with Anna Hazare's name. Drivers can talk of little else, since they've faced Anna-related traffic jams for days.

Yesterday, I took the Metro to Chandni Chowk, and then back to Gurgaon. I was in a hurry and very tired when I got off at HUDA City Centre, and in no mood to haggle with rickshaws, so I agreed to pay the driver a ridiculous sum for the short drive to my destination. He said, "Our union forced us to strike today in support of Anna. I've only plied this auto from 6pm, so I have to overcharge today."