The Budget and the Broadcasters

Today's interim budget was a fine moment for India's democracy. The government could have used the excuse of the global emergency to push through politically expedient policies. Instead, it stuck to the rule book and presented a simple vote on account. This is in sync with Manmohan Singh's insistence on keeping important appointments such as ambassadorships in abeyance till the next government is sworn in.
The TV channels were not swayed by the display of propriety. They, as always on budget day, were focussed on one simple question: would the market rise or fall? Since it fell, they drew the conclusion that the Finance Minister had messed up. 'Damp Squib Budget' was the headline on CNBC-TV18. The clamour of presenters faulting the government for providing no 'big bang' proposals drowned out sensible voices like Deepak Parekh, Nandan Nilekani and Uday Kotak.
Stocks in real estate companies were among the hardest hit, after their chiefs were denied the 'sops' (a favourite word of Indian journalists) they had lobbied for. I'm particularly glad about that. For years these people charged extortionately for accommodation, pricing most of the population out of the market and encouraging a speculative bubble. Their net profit margins were outrageous, over 50% in the case of big companies like DLF, Unitech and HDIL; and that's without factoring in the black money involved in most transactions. Yet, the promoters of some of these firms were so greedy in leveraging their gains that, once the price bubble burst, they found themselves on the brink of insolvency. Imagine that: a company makes a profit of hundreds of crores of rupees one quarter (these are not fictitious profits like Satyam's), and a couple of months later is almost bankrupt.
What's their response to the crisis? Instead of lowering prices to push sales volumes, they hoard their stock, waiting for the market to turn, all the while complaining the government isn't offering enough tax incentives to buyers. In fact, the buyers are out there. When MHADA offered 3800 reasonably priced flats in January, it received 430,000 applicants for the ballot, more than a hundred per apartment, a sign of how desperate people in Bombay are for a decent place to live. But the likes of DHL, Unitech and HDIL aren't interested in those five lakh citizens, or the many millions like them across India.
On the business channels, anchors looked at the market's falling graph, shook their heads and said, "Unfortunately, Pranab Mukherjee merely did what the constitution stipulates". So there you have it: 300 points on the Sensex on one side, and the nation's constitution on the other. Which is more important? The broadcasters have made their choice.

Darwin: A Bicentennial Tribute

Charles Darwin was among my first heroes. As a primary schooler, I read a Ladybird account of his life, and was deeply fascinated. Beagle, Galapagos, iguana: the words felt wonderful on the tongue. I dreamed of discovering unknown creatures in malarial swamps far from civilisation. As I grew older and realised I had capacity neither for the self-sacrifice nor for the meticulous persistence required for explorations of that kind, my admiration for Darwin and those who followed in his path was reinforced considerably.
Darwin's central thesis of natural selection acting on random variations is very different from, say, the Theory of Relativity. Anybody of sound mind can understand it. It is so simple, in fact, that that any intelligent person living in the early Victorian era might have hit upon it independently, given the right circumstances. The reason nobody did is that, while the mechanism Darwin proposed was elegantly simple, its consequences were so far-reaching as to overturn all traditional notions about how trees, reptiles, insects and humans came to occupy Planet Earth. The idea was so radical that even today, exactly 200 years after Darwin was born, in the 150th year of the publication of his celebrated book On the Origin of Species, and after a century and a half of discoveries that have proved his idea true beyond all reasonable doubt, a majority of people across the globe reject its validity.
I never had a mental block against the idea of natural selection because I didn't believe any of the explanations religions provided for the origin of life on earth. My immediate family members were not religiously inclined. The only time I attended prayers was when an uncle or neighbour installed a Ganapati during the annual festival. I gorged on the modaks made in that period, but the fervent chanting always struck me as faintly ridiculous. I found it mind-boggling that intelligent, well-educated adults could actually believe their prayers would be answered by a deity with a human body and elephant's head.
It was evident that the world was very unfair to some individuals and extraordinarily kind to others; and that the unfairness and kindness did not correlate with any discernible external factor like religious faith, goodness or intelligence. Those who worshipped Ganapati were no better off than devotees of other gods. Why, then, believe in the dogmas of one faith over another?
Once I understood Darwin, life made sense. The facts as I saw them, and as they were observed by people everywhere, could be explained in ways that did not create an infinite regression of questions ("If everything must have a creator, who created the Creator? And who created that Creator?"), or unsolvable contradictions ("If Allah is omnipotent, it follows that he made me a disbeliever. Why, then, will he condemn me to hell and an eternity of torment for my disbelief?"). By the time I turned thirteen or fourteen or fifteen (past years coalesce in memory as one gets older), I was convinced that natural selection was the driving force behind the creation of the varied forms of life visible on earth, and nothing I have read or experienced since has shaken that conviction in the slightest.
I have written this post without using the word most associated with Darwin: evolution. It is, in many ways, a misnomer, implying as it does that some states of being are inherently better than others. It places Darwin in a category that includes a number of misguided thinkers who came before him, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and leaves the door open to criticism that he was not the 'father of evolution'. He wasn't, just as Gandhi was not the 'father of non-violence'. Gandhi's originality lay in demonstrating how non-violent protest could be the basis of political struggle. Darwin's resided in his explanation, backed by hundreds of practical examples, of how life began with extremely simple forms and changed over hundreds of millions of years, without any external impetus, to the mix of simple and complex living things we observe today.

Artists celebrate Vibrant Gujarat

I just received an emailed invitation to view "a huge mural project celebrating the economic and cultural growth of Gujarat". I'd have deleted immediately the notice about this propagandist effort, except that it was sent by an art critic of my acquaintance named Johny ML, who edits the website artconcerns.com.
He "conceptualized and curated" the Vibrant Gujarat mural project, which was executed by ten artists at an industrial location in Baroda. I would never have expected Johny to join the Narendra Modi fan club. After all, not long ago, artconcerns was in the forefront of protests against the arrest of a student from MS University's Faculty of Fine Arts. The student, named Chandramohan, was accused by members of some Hindutva outfit of displaying paintings that hurt religious sentiments. The right-wing thugs entered the campus, roughed up Chandramohan, and damaged a number of artworks. The Modi administration, needless to say, backed the vandals to the hilt. All part of its wildly successful cultural growth strategy, I suppose.

Kiss of Death

In India, 'advice' is a countable noun. You can listen to 'an advice', or even, occasionally, 'a good advise', as if the speaker were thinking, "since I'm butchering the language anyway, why not replace noun with verb". I haven't come across plural versions yet, as in, "Five advises for saving your relationship", but I'm sure that's only because I haven't looked in the right places.
'Research', too, has switched to countable. This morning's Times of India speaks of, "a stunning research, which can change the way medical emergencies are dealt with". Reading further, one encounters this gem: "There has been growing consensus among the medical community that for people who witness a cardiac arrest if they are concerned about performing mouth-to-mouth then they should carry out only chest compressions."
In this case, the Times of India employee who repackaged the article is not to blame. The same punctuation-free sentence occurs in the Daily Telegraph piece that was the source of the Times report. Shockingly, the Telegraph's version was composed by its Medical Editor, Rebecca Smith. Smith goes on to write, "The study, published in the journal BioMed Central Medicine, shows that for every second paused during compressions there is a one per cent reduction in the likelihood of success, which was measures (sic) as return of circulation." The Times takes no measures to rectify the typo, and adds another error of its own near the end of the article: "The American Heart Association's first aid guidelines updated last year, suggesting that the mouth-to-mouth component of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was unnecessary." The Telegraph has: "The American Heart Association's first aid guidelines were updated last year..." (italics added).
Putting aside the mangled grammar of the article, let's consider its message. Mouth-to-mouth is useless at best, and potentially counter-productive. How are lifeguards on film and TV going to survive if that component of CPR is eliminated? Any plans to revive Baywatch, or make a big screen adaptation, will have to be cancelled immediately.
Indians never took to the kiss of life, even in Pam Anderson's heyday. They did, however, begin trying their hand at stomach and chest pumping. I heard this from a doctor at INS Hamla, where victims of Aksa beach's treacherous rip current are taken. The naval base has (or had in those days) the only well-equipped hospital in that part of north Bombay. Bodies pulled from the Madh-Marve stretch were brought to the base for treatment. Most would be dead on arrival, but now and then a life was saved. Hamla's authorities had put up a huge billboard on the road to Aksa, providing a regularly updated death count, but it didn't deter beer-sodden youths from venturing into the sea deep enough to be dragged in by the ebb tide.
I was invited to a dinner at INS Hamla when Baywatch was at the peak of its popularity. The conversation turned to television programmes, and that's when the doctor sardonically mentioned the CPR phenomenon. He said people were drowning at Aksa at the same rate, but fatalities were higher because companions now mimicked the procedures they had seen on television instead of rushing their friends to hospital. None of the victims ever coughed water, stood up and asked about dinner plans (that only happens in fiction anyway), but quite a few were killed by wrongly administered first aid.

Horrorificabilitudinitatibus

Here's an image of Jitish Kallat standing in front of his giant canvas titled Horrorificabilitudinitatibus. Unfortunately, the glitter I objected to is invisible, but readers will get a general impression of what the piece looks like. One feature missing when I saw the painting displayed at Gallery Articulate was the metal gargoyles on which the work is supposed to rest. They can be seen in this studio photograph. Apart from sending the image, Jitish has written a response to my post about the work, to which I have replied. Those interested, please join the conversation, which isn't only about this particular painting, but also about the use of historical reference in general.

Thoughts on Picasso and Guernica

Pablo Picasso's been on my mind, thanks to Jitish Kallat and Amir Parsa. Jitish just completed a painting in the exact dimensions of Picasso's Guernica (see previous post)


and Amir Parsa, an educator from New York's Museum of Modern Art currently delivering a series of lectures in Bombay, extensively discussed another iconic canvas, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

If laypeople were asked to name one painting to represent 20th century art, Guernica would be the most popular pick. If art historians were polled about the same matter, they'd almost certainly choose Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.
I personally believe Guernica is seriously over-rated by critics, historians and the public. Before explaining why, let me provide a brief background about the canvas. In 1937, Republicans and Fascists were fighting a civil war in Spain. Picasso had agreed to contribute a painting to an exhibition promoting the Republican cause. In April of that year, Nazi warplanes bombed the town of Guernica in the north of Spain to help out their fascist allies. Picasso set aside the work he was making for the Republican show and painted his celebrated mural-size canvas instead, as a response to the attack and to all atrocities against civilians. He used only black, white and grey, perhaps as an acknowledgment that he had learned of the attack through newspapers.
The painting is a marvellous feat of control and balance, but I find it melodramatic and dated, filled as it is with wailing, screaming figures begging for the viewer's sympathy and tears. Everything about the canvas is on its surface, there's nothing beyond, no depths to be explored and uncovered. The experience of viewing it when I visited Madrid was rather deflating.
Picasso's best paintings have the opposite effect. Even when they create an immediate impact, as does Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, they contain an intensity far greater than what is revealed at first sight. He was an extremely personal and emotional artist throughout his life, with the exception of what is called his analytical cubist period between 1908 and 1911. Having taught history-of-art modules for years, I've found that, aside from those cubist experiments, his work reaches out easily to people with no knowledge of modern art. Guernica is one of the very few major works he produced with roots outside of his personal experience. That's probably why he could not imbue it with the kind of buried, slow-release emotive values that mark his best work.
If I was to pick my favourite anti-war Picasso painting, it would not be Guernica but Three Musicians. He painted it in 1921, and made two versions, one of which hangs in MoMA, New York, and the other, the one I prefer, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


The painting appears at first to be a comical, childish cut-and-paste job. Looking more carefully, one identifies figures popular in the European carnival tradition like Harlequin and Pierrot frequently used by Picasso. The painting gradually casts a melancholy spell; its dark background, and the stillness of the three figures conveys a sense of music that played once but has been quieted forever. It has been surmised that Three Musicians is an elegy for one of Picasso's closest friends, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918. The figure of the monk is supposed to represent Max Jacob, a former room-mate of Picasso's who introduced the Spanish artist to Apollinaire.
I've always taken the headgear worn by the figure on the left to be a helmet, representing the great war that ended in 1918. It took the lives of an entire generation of European youth, and even those left alive found it impossible to remake the connections which existed between them before the fighting began. Picasso and Georges Braque, for example, worked closely for years between 1908 and 1914. Braque spoke of their collaboration as being akin to two mountaineers roped together. Picasso accompanied Braque and Andre Derain to the train station from where they departed for the front lines. He was later to say of that farewell: "They never came back again" (sometimes translated, "I never saw them again"). In fact, both Braque and Derain did return from battle, and met Picasso frequently enough, but the community of artists that existed in Paris before 1914 had been shattered. I believe Picasso imbued Three Musicians with the nostalgia and grief he felt at the passing of that incredibly rich period in his life.
The painting, then, is not an anti-war image in the classic sense, but for me it is more powerful than Guernica because it mourns the effects of war in a profoundly personal fashion, without recourse to the obvious typology of victimhood.
As a post-script, let me bring in what T.S.Eliot wrote about Shakespeare's Hamlet, which he considered an artistic failure. Eliot suggested that good drama involves the "complete adequancy of the external to the emotion". He continued, "And this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear."
I believe the contrary is the case: the exceptional power of Hamlet, its great success, derives precisely from the 'excess' of emotion to which Eliot alludes. And that is also what makes Picasso's greatest work so powerful and almost unique: there is an emotion there in excess of the available facts, which has somehow been transferred from the man to the work.
A second post-script: Picasso said once, "What matters most to us in Cezanne is his anxiety". Again, the opposite is true: what matters to us in Cezanne is his overcoming of anxiety. But it would be accurate to say about Picasso himself that what matters in his work is his anxiety.

Sheetal Gattani and Jitish Kallat

Sheetal Gattani's solo opened at Chemould Prescott Road on February 2, marking the second anniversary of the gallery's move to its current location. Sheetal has for years painted watercolours on paper in a fashion that simulated oils, so her recent move to acrylics on canvas doesn't create a radically different look. That isn't a bad thing, since she's accomplished at producing thickly layered paintings that look like monochromatic blocks, cracked and speckled in places allowing the underlayers to shine through.


The big change in this series is her use of three dimensionality. The paintings are made up of segments, some of which are recessed in the mounting, creating a play of surface and depth, shadows and light. Sheetal works within a tradition of abstraction that has been unfashionable for a long time. But she has doggedly stuck with her vision, and her latest offering makes for a mature, substantial and satisfactory show.
To coincide with Sheetal's opening, Jitish Kallat exhibited a giant canvas with a giant name in Gallery Articulate downstairs. The painting, titled Horrorificabilitudinitatibus, is headed for London, where it will be part of a 40 person group show at Haunch of Venison's new space at 6, Burlington Gardens. The building formerly housed the British Museum's ethnographic collection and was called the Museum of Mankind. After a refurbishment in 1998, the ethnographic artefacts moved to back to the main British Museum, and 6, Burlington Gardens was taken over by the Royal Academy. Haunch of Venison have leased it for 3 years, agreeing to pay some 4.5 million pounds for it in a deal which may now seem a big mistake.
Horrorificabilitudinitatibus is a play on honorificabilitudinitatibus, which is the longest word with alternating consonants and vowels in the English language, and means 'the state of being able to achieve honours'. By changing 'honor' to 'horror' Jitish focuses on 'the state of being able to receive horrors', referring particularly to the fascination with which the spectacle of 26/11 was greeted. The artist gathered together news photographs of citizens staring up at the burning buildings of South Bombay, and crafted one composite image which he then transferred to canvas. The figures in the finished painting have coagulated cityscapes resting on their heads, a motif Jitish has used for the past two years, and seen in this picture from his Dawn Chorus series exhibited at London's Albion gallery in late 2007.



The striped 'rays of the sun' background he employs is also familiar from past work, particularly a sequence titled Carbon Milk he exhibited in Beijing in mid 2007.


A few insect-like forms float down from the sky; they look like flayed body parts and are also supposed to be reminiscent of Rorschach inkblots. The picture surface is covered with glitter dust, perhaps meant to signify falling shards of glass. Unfortunately, the glitter, together with the stripey background, makes the painting look cluttered and a bit kitschy. I have a feeling a plain background of the sort Jitish used for his Albion show would have been more successful here. Perhaps the problem with the image is that the central group of figures is uninvolving and Jitish has overcompensated in trying to rectify the situation.
Aside from its formal shortcomings, the canvas is also hampered by its subject. To this day, no truly important work has been created about the 9/11 attacks, because there is no way art can compete with the astonishing images of the planes hitting the Trade Centres and the collapse of the towers. In similar vein, the terrorist strike on south Bombay made a tremendous visual impact on the public at large, being carried non-stop for three days on every news channel. That's something difficult to assimilate and respond to adequately by means of a painting. Jitish is intelligent enough to realise this, which is why he has focussed on the reception of the attack rather than the attack itself. But there's been a lot of attention paid to this aspect of the event as well, and Horrorificabilitudinitatibus has no new insight or perspective to offer on the matter.
Jitish is nothing if not confident, and, by making the painting in the exact dimensions of Picasso's Guernica, he advertises the scale of his ambition. There is a congruence of subject between the Kallat and the Picasso, of course, but the Guernica reference serves only to diminish Horrorificabilitudinitatibus further. It is never wise for artists to bring to mind comparisons where they are going to come out second best.
Jitish is one of my favourite artists, but Horrorificabilitudinitatibus feels like a mis-step. In general in recent years, his sculptural and photographic works have made a far greater impression on me than his paintings. I'd never have thought that possible, given his exceptional gifts as a painter.
Update, February 7: Jitish informed me that the glitter was always part of his plan for the painting and wasn't meant to represent anything specific.

Sunita Narain Hoodwinks the Media and Public Again

The Centre for Science and Environment periodically comes up with sensationalist 'studies' that are lapped up by the media, create confusion and panic among consumers, and garner loads of publicity for the organisation's head, Sunita Narain. I put the word 'studies' in quotes because the CSE's aim is not to produce useful information, but rather to attack multinationals and further its anti-globalisation agenda.
A previous scare they manufactured related to pesticides in carbonated beverages. At the end of this post, I've written about the duplicity involved in that report. For the moment, let's focus on the current kerfuffle. It concerns trans fats, and features prominently in the dailies this morning. The front page of the Hindustan Times asks: "How edible is your cooking oil?" The article, written by Chetan Chauhan and Sanchita Sharma, begins with the line, "You may be better off using butter than cooking oil, suggests a new study". The Hindu's headline reads: "Most edible oil contains harmful trans fat, study shows". The paper quotes Sunita Narain as saying, "The study found that if all oils are compared against Denmark standard, then no edible oil in the market could claim to be healthy".
That is NOT what the actual study found. On page 28, section 13.2, titled Trans Fatty Acids, the CSE's report states: "In 21 refined edible oil samples analysed for trans fats; trans fat content was in the range of 0.08 to 3.3%. Most of the samples were within the trans fat limit of Denmark of 2%... except Saffola Gold... and Shalimar's Classic Basmati."
Sunita Narain says no edible oil meets Danish trans fat standards; her own organisation's study says that 19 of 21 refined edible oils DO meet that standard, and 2 have trans fat levels slightly above the allowable limit. What's going on?
CSE has created the confusion by fudging two different categories of product: refined edible oils on the one hand, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils on the other.

A QUESTION OF CATEGORIES
The first of these categories consists of any oil you can buy in shops: sunflower, peanut, coconut, mustard, olive and so on. These oils have been used in cooking for millennia. The second category, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (PHVOs), refers to margarine, shortening and, in the case of India, vanaspati. PHVOs are created through an industrial process that was invented a little over a century ago. It involves taking liquid vegetable oil and modifying its chemistry so it turns solid. The higher melting point of PHVOs makes them easy to use in baking, and because they don't get rock hard in the fridge, they are convenient breakfast spreads.
PHVOs grew popular because they mimicked animal fats like butter while being much cheaper to produce. In India, Unilever marketed a PHVO which mimicked ghee, the country's favourite animal fat based cooking medium. Such ghee-mimicking PHVOs were given the wholesome sounding name vanaspati. Unilever's vanaspati brand, Dalda, became the cheap ghee-substitute of choice in most Indian homes, particularly in the north.
Until the mid 1990s, PHVOs were actually considered healthier than their animal fat counterparts. Margarine was supposedly better for you than butter, and Dalda preferrable to ghee. That's because, at the time, the main division health professionals made was between 'bad' saturated fats with large amounts of cholesterol and 'good' low-cholesterol unsaturated fats. PHVOs had lower levels of saturated fat than butter and ghee, and contained no cholesterol, and were therefore marketed as healthy substitutes for animal fat based mediums.

THE EVIL TRANS FAT
Over the past decade and a bit, a more complex view of fat and cholesterol has come to dominate dietary thinking. We now speak of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, good (HDL) cholesterol and bad (LDL) cholesterol, essential fatty acids and so on. At the same time, the health industry has found a new super-villain in the form of trans fat. Trans fat occurs naturally in small quantities, but it is mainly created in the process of hydrogenating vegetable oil. PHVOs are chock-full of trans fat, and therefore, far from being healthier than animal fats, they're considerably worse for your heart. They are also, apparently, carcinogenic.

CSE's OBFUSCATION
The CSE study repeatedly confuses edible oils / cooking oils with vanaspati / PHVO. Section 6.2 is titled: Major Players of Edible Oil, but lists a number of vanaspati brands. In its conclusions in Section 14, however, the study makes a distinction between edible oils, which, as remarked upon earlier, contain very low levels of trans fats, and vanaspati brands, which have high levels of the same.

TAUTOLOGY
The central conclusion of the CSE report, then, is that vanaspati has unhealthy levels of trans fat. But that is true BY DEFINITION. Trans fats are created in the process of hydrogenating vegetable oil, and vanaspati is made by hydrogenating vegetable oil. To tout this as an unusual finding is a bit like printing a front page headline screaming, "Large Scale Tree Felling Can Deplete Forests", or, "The Oil You Cook With Contains Fat". My guess is that CSE began its investigations hoping to find high trans fat levels in refined cooking oil. Having failed to do so, and recognising that a report about high trans fat in vanaspati would get little attention, they decided to mix up the two categories, so a bewildered media would spread the word that refined cooking oil was dangerous.

THE COLA CONTROVERSY
A few years ago, Narain cooked data in similar fashion to 'prove' that fizzy drinks contained dangerous amounts of pesticides. The actual amount of deadly chemicals the study found in Coke and Pepsi was vanishingly small, so tiny that no lab could have detected it ten years ago. But that was still acceptabe science. Bad methodology was introduced when CSE compared the pesticide levels in these fizzy drinks with European Union norms for WATER. Water standards are particularly strict because people drink a lot of it. If Pepsi and Coke had been compared with, say, EU norms for pesticide levels in vegetables, they'd have fallen well within allowable limits. So problem one was that the study involved a false comparison.
Since Pepsi and Coke are made from water and sugar, and no pesticides are introduced during the manufacturing process, it stands to reason that at least the same concentration of pesticides resides in our water or sugar. And since every Indian drinks water in far greater quantities than Coke or Pepsi, and ingests sugar in many different forms, it's clear that, if there is a health issue here, it relates not to fizzy drinks but to our water and sugar. But this fact was entirely ignored during the weeks of discussion that followed the release of the CSE's cola 'study'. This was problem two. Indian consumers were given no comparative data regarding pesticides in water, vegetables and other substances, and therefore could not make up their minds about how relatively safe or dangerous the targetted beverages were.
The public relations departments of Coca Cola and Pepsi did a horrible job of conveying their own viewpoint. After weeks, they framed a coherent response, pointing out that dozens of products like apples and cauliflowers contained pesticides in much higher concentrations than what the CSE found in colas. The CSE's reply? " You can't take pesticides out of apples, but you can clean up colas".
This, of course, is entirely false. Pesticides do not occur naturally in apples, and can therefore certainly be removed from the production process. But that is a fight CSE doesn't want to take up, because it involves farmers rather than multinationals.

Bose Krishnamachari's Relative VisA

For years, curators were unkind to Bose Krishnamachari. He was excluded from shows like Century City at the Tate Modern for which he should have been an automatic selection. No artist better interpreted the changes in Bombay in the 1990s, but political blinkers prevented curators from comprehending his achievement. As a sort of response to such rejection, Bose mounted a show called De-Curation in which he drew a personal canon of Indian artists. He then turned curator-impressario himself, employing an excellent eye and open mind to spotlight new and established talent. He's recently received a major international curatorial assignment in the form of the Panorama: India section at Madrid's ARCO art fair which opens next week.
Back in India, he's put together Relative VisA, currently on view across Bodhi's two galleries in Bombay. The idea is to bring art, architecture and design in dialogue with each other, something Bose has done quite a bit in his own work. The Wadibunder space has the more interesting selection, though the quality is patchy. Neither Gulam Sheikh nor Rimzon are in top form, and Gargi Raina offers a cabinet stacked with fabric that makes you feel you've stepped into a branch of Fabindia. Sujit S N's painting appears rather derivative of N S Harsha. Nataraj Sharma and Manish Nai make a satisfactory pairing, the former represented by large-format drawings carried over from his recent show at Bodhi, and Nai providing new elaborations of his characteristic pattern-cut-into-jute style. Nuru Karim's listening pod crafted seamlessly from Corian is the most striking of the architects' contributions.
For me, the high point of Relative VisA is the room given over to Charmi Gada Shah's photographs and sculpture. I hadn't seen her work before and was very impressed by its conceptual and formal rigour. She's shot the front of an old, partially-demolished building, then built a model of this facade and, aside from exhibiting it in the room, has photographed the model placed against other parts of the same or similar buildings, playing with scale and with notions of memory, destruction and conservation.
The best thing about Bose's shows is that they invariably throw up interesting new voices like Gada Shah.
The portion of Relative VisA on view at Bodhi's Kala Ghoda gallery (Bara Bhaskaran, Gayatri Subramainyan, Shankar Natarajan and K M Madhusudhanan) seems pretty dull. Perhaps my mind was clouded by the toxic fumes that filled the space on opening night: painting of specially constructed walls had been completed only at the last minute. I'll take another look in a day or two and, should I find something noteworthy, will add a few extra lines to this post.

The Slumdogs Bite Back

This, I promise, is my last post about Preity Zinta. A week ago, I'd written about her criticism of slums in Bombay. On Saturday night, the actress celebrated turning 34 with a party at her home in Bandra. The noise, apparently, was too much for some of her less privileged neighbours, who complained to the police and eventually succeeded in getting the music shut down. It seems to have been a reprisal complaint. One of those who protested, Irfan Shaikh, had this to say:"Whenever there is music or programmes in the slum areas, these people in big buildings complain against us and we have to shell out large fines. We also get disturbed and so we complained to the police".
I've mentioned, in a previous post, how vigilant Bombay's police are regarding party music. There's money to be made from them birthday bashes. Since the DJ at Zinta's was allowed to keep spinning till 2am, I suspect the police paid the actress an early visit and conducted intricate cost-per-minute negotiations.