The Idea-smithy

The Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2010 kicked off this morning (yesterday morning, technically, since its past midnight as I’m writing this).

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Since I quit my job a little over six months ago, the one question I keep getting asked is,

So what are you doing these days?

Interesting isn’t it, how one’s career defines one’s life? At one point of time I used to resent the fact that my I was being forcibly defined by my relationship status. Now…I guess I can’t complain. It is after all, far better to be defined by what I am or am not doing rather than who I’m associated with and how.

So let’s see. I started off on the ’sabbatical’ (and that’s in quotes for a reason. Say it in a sardonic tone). I had a stock answer ready for anyone who wanted to question my desicion and it was this,

I want to do things I haven’t had the time for all these years.

Have I done that? Well, some at least. I’ve painted the city walls (twice), started a novel, visited three different cities, appeared on TV, attended 4 weddings, 3 music gigs and an uncounted number of literary events. I have also had coffee, lunch, dinner and a lot in between with several people I haven’t had the time to meet, even though we stay in the same city and have, for years. And I even had time to accumulate a few new vices, unfashionable ones at that – Zynga Games, not to mention the compulsive Facebooking which resulted in the revival of a few friendships.

I’m exploring religion again (the last time I did this was when I was 17). And yes, quite wonderfully, I have been cooking! Now this is cliched I know. Leaving the daily rigours of a ‘typical’ life of someone of my age and background, a combination of sanyas and retirement to do these things. And so what? Ambition was learnt too early. No one told us that the killer instinct was a suicidal drug that would lead to burnout eventually. The highs came early as did the achievements. Okay, so I retired at 30. I retired from one kind of life.

I’m discovering another side of myself. The one other than that driven Alpha Female self. The one that is inherently lax underneath the compulsive time-scheduler. The one that lets time and dates slide by and has been hiding behind freakish list-making behaviour. The one that laughs with a striking, unfashionable suddenness at puns and other bad jokes. I like it.

Cooking is something I’ve always thought I detested. It turns out I don’t. The only thing I resented is the feeling that I’d never live up to my mum who is a fantastic cook. What’s more, it’s hardly ‘the thing’ for someone like me to do, is it? But well, the concept of me is very fluid at the moment (as Doctor Love a.k.a. Will Smith says in Hitch). What’s more, left to my own devices (and pun completely intended), I find there is no mean satisfaction in turning out something palatable, attractive and delicious.

Here are two complete meals I made on seperate occasions. The first was when I had a close friend over with her husband for the first time. I made Greek salad, spaghetti in Arrabiata sauce and pasta in Pesto.

Greek salad

Spaghetti in Arrabiata sauce

Pasta in pesto

I was delighted to note that the meal was received well and amazed that it surpassed even mum’s famous dahi-vada which was also part of the spread.

The second was yesterday. Mum’s not in town so this is a meal for dad and me. It has to be tasty (to suit me), devoid of oil, tuvar daal and masala (to match dad’s dietary restrictions), vegetarian (to pass mum’s regulations of her kitchen). I made Morkozhambu (that’s a sort of sambhar made with curd and moong daal instead of tuvar daal), brinjal kootu (a gravy preparation) and potato curry to be had with rice and ghee.

Morkozhambu

Brinjal kootu

Potato curry

Rice and ghee

I’m happy to say that when I came home late, dad had gone to bed but left a note on the table. It said,

Fabulous dinner!

Me a homemaker and a cook? Well, what do you know? These two incidents gave me as much satisfaction as getting promoted and the foreign conferences. In a different sort of way.

Last year, I had hit a certain point in my life where I felt I had so little to look forward to. Things had become routine, challenges had become annoying rather than interesting. If this break gave me nothing more than a peek into all the other things that I could be, the whole universe outside my career-woman cocoon, it has been worth every second of it.

A young man travels in search of adventure, in search of tales, tall if at all, to tell back home. It’s a quest for personal glory. There is also romance, the search for beautiful women, for the luxuries of life and for triumph over difficult situations.

Why do we travel?

A quest, a search for someone or something? But some of us just are running away. At the end of the travels, we find just what we were trying so hard to leave behind and we realize that we’ve been carrying it within us all along. That, indeed, we’re trying so very hard to hide from ourselves and finally, that the further we go, the nearer we come to ourselves. Because a traveler knows, no matter how light you travel, you always carry your mind with you.

In a new situation, where no one knows you, you can be whoever you want. Anonymity is the opportunity to create a new identity. And then comes along someone who knows you. Some titbit of news and the opening notes of a familiar song. With it, a growing feeling of panic and relief rolled into one.

Panic as the fear of being pulled back into whatever the old identity most threatened. Relief at finding out that, uncomfortable as it was, being you is the only home there is.

~O~O~O~O~O~

Epilogue: I read this at the Caferati Open Mic event at Prithvi today. Some pieces are better read than read out aloud and I realized mine probably fall in the former.

Those of you who have been following my blog-adventures will probably see in a minute that this piece was less to do with any tangible travel and more about my own personal journey from anonymity to…identity, perhaps?

For the record, two people showed some appreciation - a good friend and a stranger who kept looking at me before I read and then asked me out to coffee after I had finished. No further comment.

I think all artists need an audience. This is everyone from musicians to sculptors to painters. Everyone who has ever expressed an idea in tangible form or otherwise has needed an audience. To those who disagree – if they didn’t, then they’d just keep the idea in their own heads. There is an undeniable need in an artist for other people to experience their art. Art is after all, an interaction between the artist and the audience. It is absorbing impressions and communicating them to the universe outside.

Each art form carries its own framework of the artist/audience interaction and I think we gravitate to art forms that fit our needs the best.

The visual arts, painting and sculpting and other related arts are at one end of the spectrum. The artists are usually recluses. They rarely interact with their audience during the creation of their art and their only communication is in the final product. How often do you see a painter or sculptor standing next to his or her work, willing to talk about it? These people are somewhat reclusive and in some cases even antisocial, preferring the least amount of conversation with their audience.

At the other end of the spectrum are the performing arts – music, dance, acting, oratory. The audience is crucial to the performance as the performer himself/herself. Ask anyone who has practiced these arts and they will tell you how important it is to relate to the audience, to get them involved and enjoying the performance. As a result I think these are also the arts that draw the more sociable artists of all. Immediate and constant interaction with other people is very important to the performer. I’ll go so far to say that performers are the artists who need other people the most, during every minute of their performance. (For the after, that’s true of all artists).

So where does writing fall on this spectrum? Are we the reclusive visual artists because we hide behind our smokescreen of words? Or are we the vivacious performers because we are constantly engaging and facilitating conversations?

I always thought of a writer as someone who lets you sit on his shoulder and view the world as he sees it. Or even better, he lets you in through a little door, into his mind and allows you to read what he thinks and understand what it is like to be him. In that sense, the writer is exactly in the middle. The visual artist is at one end, holding out his art at arm’s length for you to see. The performer is the quicksilver, weaving himself around you to take on your form. The writer, in contrast to both the above, brings you into himself and allows you to experience the world as he does.

I have an interest as well as at least a little bit of talent in music as well as painting. I’ve performed on stage and I’ve won some recognition for my paintings. But writing is art that feels most like me.

Writers are the only other people who understand my alternating between being a social butterfly and an extreme recluse. That back-and-forth is the very essence of being a writer. Letting the whole world in and then shutting it all out – it’s as natural as breathing for a writer. We have neither the stoic dignity of a visual artist who doesn’t need another person till he has finished. And nor do we have the unwavering adaptability of a performer to dissolve into other people. We have a little bit of both and we oscillate, collecting material from the world around us, turning it over in ourselves, carrying other people inside our heads and then examining how we feel about that. The words, the thoughts are constantly shifting and shaping themselves and we chase after them with nets of language to convert them into stories for the next person to ride our minds.

Movies & Music with Bombay Elektrik Projekt

I was at Café Goa this Wednesday (20^th January) for the UTV World Movies & Music event organized by the Bombay Elektrik Projekt. As it was, the trek to Bandra is a formidable thought (and I stop short of saying ‘unrealistic’ since that’s what’s I call travelling to town). In typical Mumbaiker fashion, I aim for efficient usage of time so I clubbed this with another event – meeting a longtime friend/reader of my blog. We decided to skip the movie in favor of coffee & chat and come back for the music performance.

Gillian Grassie

The opening act was by Gillian Grassie, a harpist from Philadelphia on a year-long tour of several countries including India to study the relationships between new technologies and independent music scenes around the globe. I managed to catch only the last few minutes of her act and what little I saw was quite mesmerizing. The harp carries associations of white-clad angels and an otherworldy, semi-religious feel of music. Gillian’s music was none of those things but managed to bring a sweet freshness to instantly hummable tunes. Her fingers seemed to be feather-touching, almost dancing on the strings of the harp (which was almost as big as her..and here I thought the harp would be a much smaller instrument). The harp provided only a very soft background to the songs which primarily rode on her voice. It’s quite impressive to create a song purely from one’s voice, virtually unassisted by the grandeur of an orchestra and Gillian pulled it off, holding the audience spellbound. I do wish I had made it to the venue earlier to catch her entire performance.

The headlining act of the evening was Dischordian, a venture by Garreth D’mello (also of Split). Dischordian is described as ‘an attempt to move away from the wall of sound and aggression and testosterone that makes up most rock music, an attempt to strip music down to its basics’.

Dischordian at Cafe Goa: 20 Jan 2010

Garreth was accompanied by Howard Pereira on his guitar and Agnnelo Picardo (Aggie), the percussionist/trumpeteer. The last began the evening, hugging a trumpet close to his chest while listening to Garreth and Howard spark up the show. I’ve never seen a trumpet that close. The advantage of a place like Café Goa is the proximity it provides between the performer and the audience. So I kept my eyes trained on the trumpet, an instrument I only have vague associations with, of loudness and some sort of stiff-necked wedding band. Thus it came as a pleasant surprise when the trumpet actually made its entry into the music at ‘The Old Whore’. Aggie led it in with the kind of regal dignity and grandeur that you would associate with a quiet, well-built black man who surprises you with jazz. Yes, jazz was unmistakably what I heard in Dischoridian’s sound everytime the trumpet was a part of it.

Garreth himself has tremendous presence on stage. His face is boyish and manner as laidback and easygoing as his Goan roots. But when he begins to sing, those notions melt away as you are carried off in the power and forceful magnetism of his rich voice. It’s a deep voice, the kind that sounds mature and all-knowing with wisdom that comes from having experienced excitement and grown past it. Possibly because of the selection of songs and the jazz feel that I described earlier, it also felt like a strong but gently caress, the sort that can crush but knows how not to.

I’ve heard ‘The Old Whore’ before, live as well as a recording. It has a classic country-western feel to it. Some artists sound much better in person than on the polished finish of a recording and Dischordian is certainly in this category.

‘Scourge of Love‘ revved up the tempo and suddenly the audience was drawn into the performance, before we even knew it, thumping our feet and trying to sing along (or hum along at least). This is when Swati who had accompanied me clapped her hands and called Garreth, India’s answer to Kurt Cobain (which elicited a weak smile from Garreth when I told him later, followed by a hasty retreat).

The piece de resistance of Dischordian’s performance has to have been ‘Bucket of Blood’ (I actually thought that was ‘Bucket of Love’ when I tweeted about it);-). It’s a racy, foot-thumping number, all adrenalin and blood-rushes. I’ve not seen Garreth in his former avatar but several people I know have given me a pretty graphic account of his rockstar days as a tee-shirt ripping stage-stud, girls screaming et al. His shirt stayed firmly on and he remained seated but this song was a more than adequate hint to those days. And yes, there were a lot of people screaming, even in that tiny room in the café, men and women alike.

Agnnelo Picardo of Dischordian

The trumpet was replaced by a sort of bongo (hand-drum?) for the same song and served to showcase Aggie’s talent. All artists are trying to communicate something in their own ways and media. Musicians face that challenge by appealing to something whose response can’t often be quantified in words – melody, beat, the combination of the various sounds made by wind and strings and voice. Some instruments like the guitar and indeed, the human voice make that connection a lot more easily but it is a greater challenge to connect with the audience with the more distant (but grand) percussion. Aggie displays as much presence as Garreth does, in a different way. As the lead guitarist and vocalist, albeit with his own brand of showmanship, Garreth is the flash-and-dazzle of Dischordian but Aggie makes his presence felt subtly and yet, noticeably. It’s an impressive talent and makes for a great performance.

Garreth solo

Garreth performed solo on ‘One of these days‘ and ‘How I wait”,  which while melodious, didn’t quite send me into rapture like the earlier songs. They could just be the kind of songs you’d prefer to listen to within the intimacy of headphones and in solitude rather than with a big group of people. Fortunately Howard and Aggie returned to perform ‘She lied to me’ and a cover version of Jello Biafra’s ‘Are you drinking with me, Jesus?‘ which really had the crowd howling in appreciation. The other songs they performed were ‘Same old conversations‘, ‘Your Right Heel‘ and ‘Baby, Maybe’.

The performance closed a few minutes after midnight.

The neighbors are complaining. You wouldn’t think an acoustic band could make much noise. But apparently we can.

was Garreth’s wry observation as the audience begged him for an encore.

In sum, the evening was well-spent and totally worth the trip to Bandra. The second half was good but I think the first few songs took away the show. Dischordian is great, live in action and I’ll gladly make the trek again to hear them. I would also like to hear their recorded songs to be able to compare it to their live performance. But my feeling is their real talent lies in the tangible connection they are able to make with their audience when they are right in front of them.

The BEP Movies n Music event at Cafe Goa

* Dischordian is on Facebook and Twitter. The Bombay Elektrik Projekt is on Facebook. My tweets of the event are hashtagged #bep.

Last night I was trying to sleep but a stupid mosquito kept buzzing in my ear. This despite the fact that the mosquito repellent is plugged in just above my head. WTF happened to MMR (Mosquito Mortality Rate…I kid you not)??!! So I switched on the light to swat it. Of course the bloody (and all of that blood is mine!) thing had vanished.

So I switched the light off again and tried to sleep. As an added precaution, I covered myself all over as best possible, hair and eyes included, leaving only the lower half of my face open for breathing.

Of course the maddening thing about the common cold (and why oh why don’t those scientists find a cure for it by now? Already??!!) is that you can’t breathe. Not through your nose. So you can guess what happened. Mouth open, I proceeded to sleep. Maybe I snore but thankfully I sleep alone (though that’s probably not a fact I should be proud to advertise).

Would you believe it? That damn mosquito found me again in the darkness. It flew….gak gak…straight into my mouth!

Okay you can call me a insectivore now. At least I get to sleep in peace.

This is part of my series on fabric painting (after Peacock and Kathakali). But this was actually painted much earlier than those two.

I had this terrycot shirt checked orange and white. The overall effect was a sort of mustard. It’s not a colour I’ve ever been fond of or one that flatters me. Painting it was a rather delayed decision since it doesn’t occur to one intuitively to paint over something that already has a pattern on it. But I realized that the pattern was neither overwhelming nor highly visible. And it would serve perfectly well as a background.

I used several pictures of roses to figure out the basic geometric shapes and swirl-patterns that I’d need to use. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. I started with a round wavy shape (like little kids drawings of flowers) using black paint (Fevicryl no.02 Black). Then I added more waves and curlicues inside it. After that it’s just a matter of colouring and adding leaves.

The painting was actually loads of fun, the messy, splashy way. I made blobs of the basic red paint (Fevicryl no.39 Carmine) on the fabric. Then before it was dry, I daubed on the shimmery pink (Fevicryl no.303 Pearl Pin). The pink was probably an older bottle so it had gone a little creamier while the red, newer was liquidey. The net effect was that the pink stood on its own but blurred into the red at the edges to give a lovely shaded effect. I waited for these to dry before outlining and highlighting in black again.

The leaves were done using a similar principle – outlined in black, filled in with basic green (Fevicryl no.06 Dark Green) and daubed with the shimmery green (Fevicryl no.357 Pearl Metallic Green). And finally redefined with black once that was dry.

The details came in later. I added hairfine strokes of black to show the stems. Tiny buds with triangle-shaped leaves in blue (Fevicryl no.32 Cerulean Blue); these were done with  a thin brush dipped in colour and then pressed flat down on the cloth. These were given yellow (Fevicryl no.302 Pearl Lemon Yellow) centers. The leaf veins were lined with bronze (Fevicryl no.355 Pearl Metallic Bronze).

I started intending to only paint the back since it had an unbroken visage (the front has buttons all the way down so it’s difficult to do one contiuous painting). Then it looked so good that I added some detail in the front to match the theme.

The front detailing is not uniform copy of the back. While the back is just one pattern of roses scattered all over, the front shows a rose-trellis creeping up on one side and small bouquet-like collection of flowers on the other side that look like they’ve been plucked off the plant and dropped on the ground.

On the same side, I added a tiny rosebud and leaf detail on the collar.

Garment: Waist-length shirt with short sleeves and collar

Material: Terrycot with tartan texture

Background colour: Orange-brown with white threads running through

Paint colours used:

• Fevicryl no.02 Black
• Fevicryl no.39 Carmine
• Fevicryl no.303 Pearl Pink
• Fevicryl no.06 Dark Green
• Fevicryl no.357 Pearl Metallic Green
• Fevicryl no.355 Pearl Metallic Bronze
• Fevicryl no.32 Cerulean Blue
• Fevicryl no.302 Pearl Lemon Yellow