Our strange democracy

A lot of razzmatazz is being thrown into the JNU issue. It is plain and clear that the minority Opposition has once again managed to upstage the actual issue. Umar Khalid has quietly gone off the radar, Kanhaiya Kumar has been pushed to the center of the storm conveniently for the anti-BJP Inc. to mount an assault on the Parliament precinct with the next election in mind. The actual issue of Afzal Guru, the Kashmir separation agenda, separatist propaganda on Indian soil by Kashmiris (who in this case did not come from JNU and consider themselves Kashmiris not Indians and hence any expression by them in Delhi or any other part of India that is not Kashmir is anti-national activity, since they aim it so!) have all been quietly consigned to non-issue. As usual a lot of importance to the (secondary) messenger is being given and everyone is aiming their guns at the messengers and the recipients, rather than the sender of this missive. 

Today it ridiculously has come to the state that a lot of Indian citizens want to question and debate on the notion of What is India? At a time when we must be, like China and Japan, South Korea and other progressive nations, be discussing the one-point of agenda of how to make our nation strong, these politicians with nothing else but political divisiveness on their minds are opportunistically manipulating this freedom of expression thingie. Is this required? Have we become so reactionary, emotionally susceptible to being brainwashed by the political forces who really do not care for the existing national identity purely because it is not convenient that they are not in the seat of power? Do we even have the spine to call ourselves rational beings, falling for these cheap-tricks by phoney cardsharps who claim themselves the good samaritans of the country? Is this democracy?

A democracy, by definition, is that where there is opportunity and scope for peoples of all genders, faiths and classes to participate in the majority. Now the situation we have is this: one group that has been in the majority is afraid that another group MAY become equal if not insidiously dominant; their case is vindicated by the example of Kashmir; then there is another group that has so long been on the minority because, at some point, their founding fathers wanted to shy away from forming the core of nation-building when they had the opportunity and reinvented the wheel aka Pakistan. A majority of this minority that did not fit their vehicle with the reinvented wheel, lives in the rest of the country besides Kashmir, wants to have equal if not dominant status. However, their heart is rent between fighting for the majority status quo of the majority minority, viz their Kashmiri brethren, than changing their own minority minority status quo into equal majority. Inside this scenario we have the majority and the minority fighting on religious preferences than economic. Looking at this conundrum from the periphery, there is a third group, who has no ideals, credo or canons but a vote-bank sense of ruler ship and manipulates the sentiments of the minority, the which the periphery successfully divided into two different minority. Now it is altogether a different matter that the second minority, that has been made to live with delusions as the real minority, is the majority in some states. So how do we get out of this state? 

Get the third party out. This sounds like the story of the cat that helped the two monkey come to a conclusion on how best to share their food, right? Of course, the third party had given us a sense of themselves as the center of gravity. But 'things fall apart, the center cannot hold... the beast turned towards (proverbial Bethlehem and had) its Second Coming.' As a result, sanity and sense of order was restored and the periphery was dumped back to the margins. With it trying to claw back to center, it is time for the original two to come together and stay together. A start has been made. All reconciliations are difficult to start with, but if persisted with, will settle down given time and patience. Hope similar starts can happen in Assam and elsewhere in North-East too!

Musing about random ideas

Everyone says, when they are slighted or appalled by anything they think is wrong with society, 'What? In this day and age? In 21st Century...!'

I ask: What is this forced mystique about 21st century? Is it just a number in the mind? Isn't everything in the mind?  If it's not 21st century, is it OK to have those whatever-malaises the people, the press asks the so-called oppressed or denied or marginalised about?

We used to say, how can evils persist. This is 20th Century. Now it is 21st Century? Does the passage of time automatically mean progressive minds?

Henrietta Horn - Contemporary Tanztheater Artist

The second person I am featuring here is Ms. Henrietta Horn - the famed Tanztheater artist from Germany. She was the co-artistic director at the Folkwang Tanzschule Essen of Pina Bausch alongside Pina Bausch from 1999 - 2008 as biography would show.

I do not know her personally. I was once introduced to her at the lawns of Max Mueller Bhavan at KNK by Prasanna Ramaswamy very briefly when she was in Madras and presented three of her solo pieces at a very casual evening in front of a few select audience. I do not remember the year a-tall...

Then in 2004, I had the fortune of being at Duesseldorf for 4 months, visiting and associating with theatre artists and artists in general all round NRW area. On Dec 8th or 10th I do not remember exactly, I was at Essen to watch Ms. Horn's Artichokes in Silver Sea - one of her lighter works, she being a quite intense artiste - as part of the Essen-Werden Tanzfest. It was a pure delight later after the show when I went backstage and met her briefly and got her autograph at the back of this little showbill.

Thanks Prasanna-ma. It was a fantastic 4 months visiting K-20 and K-21 and other places, getting to see the works of masters such as the whole Expressionistic canon, Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian... (the list is very long) in person, at touching distance. Thanks to Frau Rahimi who was the head at MMB then. KNK MMB brings a lot of flooding memories! The reason why I pulled this out is a bit oblique. I received invite from Mr. Sadhanand Menon for the recent exhibition at Spaces. Thinking of the great legend Ms. Chandralekha led me to think of only one other person I know - Prasanna-ma, which inevitably for some reason led me to think of Pina Bausch (I remember fondly doing a lot of odds and bits backstage work during Nelken - Carnations - India tour of Pina Bausch & Co back in 90s) and in turn triggered this memory of meeting Henrietta Horn.

The Portrait of a Photographer as an Artist - Mohan Das Vadakkara

Today, my walk down the past lane takes me to putting in front of a whole new generation of young audience two people. The first person I introduce here. The second one in another separate post. 

One I have very personal acquaintance with and have had the opportunity of laughing, kidding around, fighting, having my works watched, analysed, photographed, videographed.... and whom a whole lot of Madras artists are familiar with. I consciously use the word Madras, even though you could have noticed my posts refer to my beloved city more as Madras and only when talking of contemporary inevitables as Chennai. No artist who has walked the Theatre in specific and Arts scene in the city will be unfamiliar with his work or him in person. A very genial, humble and knowledgeable person, I fondly call him as padakkaaran... Mohan Das Badagara. 

The accompanying photos are from a random album of his I chanced upon to take along with me, when Max Mueller Bhavan cleared up from KNK to its current residence. 






  


   

I bought a horde of German books for pittance, was gifted a horde of books - both in German and in English by a lot of Heads there from Herr Augustin, Herr Schindler, Frau Behlke, Frau Wetzkubach, Frau Rahimi.... as and when they left Madras for another pasture. Also, when MMB moved from KNK they were throwing away such a load of things because 1) they were old, anachronistic 2) they couldn't find place for those 3) the new place was getting digitised. So, like many a person, I also became richer with books, posters, media. 

One of those riches in the middle of rags was this album by Mohan Das. It is a simple collection of faces and places. I haven't met him in a while. Am sure he is quietly around at rehearsals, film festivals, art shows, theatre performances clicking away like there is no tomorrow, unassumingly, as he always does. He always tells me the need to buy printed photos, burned DVDs of performances in preservable copy saying "pinnaale venumna kedaikaadhumaaa.... negatives enga pogumnu solla mudiyaadhu, tapes enge pogum, memory card eppo erase aagum..." (later if you need you won't get, negatives and raw data files being erasable!). So I believed him and I BELIEVE HIM because after 25 years of being around, I realise the importance of old materials. I have materials - books, show tickets, fliers, program bills, souvenirs, photographs I myself took, bus tickets on the back of which several artists drew casual sketches and threw away which are documents now, plain paper sheets and tissue papers on which people like Mitran (Devanesen) and others drew stage and set first sketches.... so on and so forth. From 60s (when I hadn't even started taking firmer steps)... till 2006. After that I stopped collecting except those I own from my company. There are too many artists in the business now to keep track of and I lost the excitement of watching many of the theatre shows because they are purely of no aesthetic value to me and commerce never really excites me. 

Anyway, back to Mohan Das. I have some old random pictures. I hope you enjoy these. Some of these have solid history behind them. Notice how his places and facades have the same personality and character as some of the faces he captured. PLEASE FEED ME YOUR THOUGHTS AND VISIT HIS FB PAGE AND GIVE HIM A PAT FOR HIS UNFLINCHING STAND. He's been a very unassuming but steadfast soldier among people of his tribe. Like an artist refusing to budge to the demands of commoditisation making aesthetic works even when there is no cash in the bank or gas in the vehicle tank, he has been plugging away stolidly. As against a lot of photographers I have known started with lofty ambitions and have ended up shooting all kind of things and people for the lure of filthy lucre indiscriminately, Mohan Das is an artist among photographers in the same breath as a lot of documentary film makers, theatre directors who choose their work with a certain politics at heart and mind. Soldier on Badagara...

The fallacy of our nuclear policy

Last evening my daughter received a copy of The Wings of Fire by APJ as prize for creative writing at school. I've read the book before and was not impressed. So I don't own a copy because I never wanted to own one. I tried reading it again and found it boring and overrated. I simply can't stand these Chicken Soups, Management mantras or Inspirational crap. Also, I think the man himself is overrated, revered and venerated as he may. I realise the dangers of such sweeping statements as I have made. However, two things strike me. In the aftermath of a news item I read about Marshall Islands. a) What really are his achievements? What is really patriotism? Do we misconstrue reactionary and emotionally-spiked nationalism for a false sense of Patriotism? If he is the nuclear man of India, then by the same token why should we hate the nuclear men of other nations? Are we implicitly arm twisted by our netas to buy nuclear warfare and thus be made unwitting perpetrators of genocide, in the same way the world paints every German of Nazism? Another important inference is the implicit acceptance of the superiority of science over arts and humanities in Indian society. b) The gullibility of captive hero-worshipping audience and reading public. 

We have the tendency of ostriches when it comes to bringing the faults of a hero under the microscope and shoot the messenger instead of verifying the message. We look at morals conveniently from the point of people than issues. From mythologies to modern narratives, the discourses are dominated by figures than facts... our collective consciousness is warped in a sense of points of views of those who speak than what is spoken. Every acceptance of a figure as figure-head is a statement of acceptance that a truth has been buried. Any amount of justification that nuclear use is in the interests of national need cannot negate the stockpile alarm which is in the non-interest of global danger.

Civilian needs have non-nuclear alternatives we defer to look at. Thus, the title of the book is not some fancy and proverbial chicken soup for souls needing inspiration, but an innuendo to the nuclear arms race via rocket science. Are we a peace-loving nation? Makes me think. I'm going to be thinking this out a long time!

Before, we wind this up, let me give a bit of info about Marshall Islands that I linked at above. Marshall Islands, officially referred to as the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI) is a group of small islands (more a grouping of nearby and sporadic atolls) located halfway point between Hawaii islands and Australia, if we travelled East from Equator.With an estimated population of approx. 70,000 inhabitants in 2014, this group of islands is also home to 800 species of fish and 160 corals. It is not to difficult to see that this like a lot of islands that include more popular ones like Maldives is sinking slowly due to rising water levels, thanks largely to global warming. I do not think I would go to the extent of assuming my readers are daft enough that I need to expound on how global warming is caused, one of which is definitely nuclear arms race. So, there is the context. There is the content. There is the man. There is the hypothesis, inference and conclusion.

Meanwhile, check this latest on Marshall Islands: 

Drought in the Marshall Islands

The Pacific Island nation has declared a state of national emergency.

For more on this story, go here