The Chasing Iamb

N A COUNTRY as diverse as ours, communities survive on stereotypes of the ‘other’. It’s a way of classifying and ordering an otherwise anarchic world. In this wealth of comforting pre-judgments, the vein of Malayali stereotypes is particularly golden, replete with two-line jokes and an accent everyone imagines they can imitate. Scratch an Indian lightly and there will quickly emerge the stereotypes of the Malayali drunk, the Malayali letch, the Malayali trade unionist, the Malayali movie star or bureaucrat. “To get my work done, I had to run from Pillai to post,” grins a quiet Bengali about a government office expedition. Here come the clowns. Let the jokes begin.

The world of the Malayali man is one where everyone seems to read and the sense of entitlement is so strong it can skew national statistical surveys. (Journalist P Sainath once compared the attitude of the starving Uttar Pradesh farmer — who responds to survey queries with gratitude for what he has — to the relatively prosperous Kerala farmer who curses WTO regulations, the government and the state of agriculture in the South Zone.) It is also a world of inexplicable quixoticism and seemingly lost causes. Kerala is a place where a public works department employee takes a year off to redesign preschool education for his village, and succeeds so well that 18 countries send their representatives to study the model.

Yet, seeking the typical Malayali man is a slippery affair. Each one looks out moodily and introspectively at you from behind varying amounts of facial hair. He’s sure he’s not typical, sure he’s misunderstood by his community. Simultaneously, he likes being Malayali and sure he’s the distilled Malayali, and others crude abominations.

If you are a shameless believer in the utility of stereotypes you would agree Malayali men are inclined to wanderlust, substance disorders and angst. Mallus do get around. The average Malayali in Tiruvalla, Tippasandra and Timbuktu sets forth blithely towards the furthest point he can imagine. The pursuit of Mammon doesn’t quite explain it. Other communities have sold ice-golas, pushed mutta-dosa carts and made their fortune not so far from home. But the Malayali man? A teashop owner in Leh, a temple keeper in Madhya Pradesh, an arms dealer in Washington, a doctor in Nigeria, a botany teacher in Papua New Guinea – when these Malayali men left home neither they nor their families asked why they had to go so far. Once there, the Malayali abandons his languid air in favour of a furious work ethic and labours to arrange visas for the cousins he barely spoke to at home. For a long while now the location of choice has been the Gulf, from where came infinitely expandable suitcases and infinite variations of a particular phenomena: men who see their wives and children once a year for a month, men who bring up their children in Kerala while their wives work abroad, men who have never known what it is to be parented so they don’t know how to bring up children. It’s fairly normal in Kerala to have a family where four generations have grown up without parents. Men’s relationships with their mothers is thus either distant or stunted: one barely knows what these gaps are doing to the social fabric of Kerala, except when you speculate why it’s the country’s suicide capital.
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FOR MANY Malayali men in their 20s and 30s, a wide oeuvre of characters played by superstar Mohanlal and filmmaker Srinivasan (also classic sidekick and genius scriptwriter) represents Everyman. The definitive film in this lot is Naadodikattu (1987), where two young men, lazy and proud, can’t get white collar job in Kerala and, trying to get to Dubai, land up in Chennai. The hero needs to transcend not villains but his own self-destructive self. The Naadodikattu heroine, like others in this genre, is the minor but sensible counterpoint to the hero’s angst. She has a job and a well-ordered household and doesn’t worry about her place in the pecking order.

As if this was too much of a good thing, in the late 1990s came a wave of movies written by Renji Panicker, with a word-gnashing macho hero who is simultaneously establishment and anarchist (the angry IAS officer, the furious journalist, the enraged cop). The heroine is just as repulsive – a caricature of the deracinated, urban ball-busting woman suitably tamed by the hero’s fusillade of verbiage and moustached masculinity. The shocking misogyny of Panicker’s films brings us to the most frequent cause of a Malayali man’s disavowal of his roots. Wrapped in many Malayali men’s hatred of their community is hostility towards women. One Malayali frequenter of online dating sites says he never tells a woman his identity until he’s absolutely sure of her affection. “They usually leap in shock and say, ‘If I’d known I wouldn’t have befriended you.’ It’s happened to me enough times. I don’t want them to think I’m predatory.”

Men and women relate to each other with some amount of discomfort everywhere in the world. But the thoughtful Malayali man finds himself in an embarrassing bind. He sees Malayali identity defined by disrespect and frank hostility towards women, by the horror stories narrated by Kerala women. This tempers the thinking man who otherwise would be proud to call himself a Malayali.

PEOPLE OUTSIDE Kerala, especially those taken in by the glamour of the state’s Human Development Index, find it difficult to believe that women have a difficult time here. In 2004, the Malayalam Manorama sent six women reporters into cities and district capitals across the state for six days to chart their safety in public spaces. The reporters’ diaries resemble mythical journeys into the Underworld as each woman writes about being groped, fondled and followed by multiple men.

While being felt up is a lively danger anywhere in public in Kerala, the real specialisation of the Malayali man on the strut is ‘comment-addi’ – a fine ear for dialogue, cinematic or otherwise, is turned into remarks on anatomy or character sharp enough to peel your skin off. Ratheesh Kumar teaches at IGNOU, Delhi, and becomes passionate when he talks of avoiding other Malayali men. “I can’t stand it when I’m stuck in the train with a bunch of Malayalis, seemingly middle-aged and respectable. They assume that I’d enjoy passing dirty remarks with them about the women out of earshot.”

The Malayali man at home is just as complicated a creature. The love story has rarely been central to Malayalam film plots. Between obscenity and near-meaningless poesy, Malayalam language doesn’t accommodate garden-variety love. The Malayali man’s world is one where the standard, most normal way of expressing romantic interest is the tepid sentence – ‘I like you.’


J Devika, an academic at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, talks of how the combination of highly educated women and the thrall of consumerism has led to a particular kind of marriage in Kerala. No arranged marriage (and frequently even the ‘love marriage’) begins without the complex negotiation of dowry. Property acts as a stabilising third party in the marriage, where a professional man feels assured that it’s only his due to earn upward of Rs 20 lakh in dowry. “Couples are equally interested in pursuing consumerism and in creating children who are groomed for the global job market. The man is then happy to delegate most of the duties of controlling children to the wife. And he can be focussed on earning money.”
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However, men still require their wives to maintain a highly controlled image of ‘decent’ femininity. This desired paragon being such an asexual object, it’s not surprising that Devika calls Kerala “God’s own country of adultery”. An elaborate system of deception is maintained so that the material comforts of marriage can be enjoyed alongside the disorienting pleasures of sex.

THE STEREOTYPE of the drinking Malayali man is more easily verified. Kerala’s per capita consumption of liquor is 8.3 litres per annum, the country’s highest. Men struggle with the morality of drinking – fluctuating between broad enjoyment and wanting it banned for its cyclonic devastation. Illicit hooch rejoices under names such as Yesu Christu (Jesus Christ) — drink it and rise after three days — or Manavati (The Bride) — drink it and have your head permanently lowered. Unlike the men huddled in cars swigging furtively in Haryana and Punjab, drinking is an everyday, public and communal all-male activity in Kerala – a venue for conversation and lavish spreads of food.

Anup Kutty, lead guitarist for the band Menwhopause, grew up in West Delhi and has a particular fondness for Mallu drinking banter. “In Delhi, people have small talk and gossip but very little other conversation. Anywhere in Kerala, you can sit down for a drink and ordinary people, even working class people, are talking politics, Kerala or South America. They are talking about cinema or some existential crisis.” Is this wishful self-description? Kutty’s description is hotly contested by other Malayali men, who say they can’t bear to be around these drinking conversations, which are an excuse for crude gossip about money and women.

Kutty’s cheerful notion of an articulate working class is also strongly contested by others. The allegation states that, under the guise of democratisation, Kerala erases intellectual adventure and doesn’t allow individuals to sparkle. Ravi Shankar Etteth, Delhi-based cartoonist and journalist, says, “Why is it we have no heroes in Kerala since the 1950s? When the lumpen become the commissars of culture, it requires everyone to be the same.” Not just Etteth, almost every man you speak to will invoke the crabs-in-a-pot metaphor to illustrate destructive jealousies in Kerala. But, on the other hand, the Malayali man’s compulsive sense of egalitarianism is the stuff of satire too. A Malayali activist from the Narmada Bachao Andolan narrates the story of a padayatra to Delhi. “The groups from Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh agreed to go and that’s all they needed to know. With the Kerala group I was leading, I had to have a committee meeting before we agreed to cross the street.” Ramu Menon, a 29- year-old NGO consultant currently based in Ahmedabad, left Kerala years ago and relishes many of the stereotypes: “It’s true. There are no leaders in Kerala. Everyone is a leader in Kerala.” But nitpicking and self-righteous political disputes bring Kerala to a standstill and often fuel the already-healthy Malayali bellicosity.

The Malayali man is so relentlessly belligerent towards regulation that it is a truism that all seats of power in Kerala can expect to be continuously challenged. This tendency is, on the surface, contradictory to the growing power of Malayali bureaucrats. Prim, thin-lipped and precise, over the last couple of decades the Malayali phalanx has been on the way to replacing the UP cadre in collective influence. Image guru Dilip Cherian — one of our most influential Malayali men and perhaps the only one to ever be seen on Page 3, comments. “The Malayali bureaucrat is a result of three confluencing factors. They are overeducated, have a desire to flee Kerala and are anarchic. That means they are bright, mobile and have an overarching instinct to control anarchy in other people.”

Intellect and cynicism can be a tiring business. Perhaps it’s a reflection of Kerala’s longing to be no longer trapped in the mind that the energetic physicality and frank passions of Tamil cinema are hugely popular among Malayalis. This cinema is popular in a way different from the way North Indian culture is gaining ground in Kerala. It’s also reflected in the upwardly mobile avoiding Kerala’s bizarre naming practices in favour of Sanskritised names. Blogger Sidin Vadakut — a Malayali whose online reputation is founded on his self-deprecatory lad lit — once wrote about an imaginary Malayali stuck with an emasculating name: “Business is safe in the hands of the Mallu manager. After all, with a name like Blossom Babykutty he can’t use his Rs 30,000 salary anywhere. Blossom gave up on society when in school they automatically enrolled him for cookery classes. Yes, my dear reader, nomenclature is the first nail in a coffin of neglect and hormonal pandemonium. In a kinder world they would just… throw him off the balcony.
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Where the rest of the country imagines Kerala’s education levels translate into a modern and liberal state, Malayali men complain that it’s yet a very narrow and stifling society. Gens, a 26-year-old lawyer in Pattanamthitta grew up in Kerala and went to law school in Kolkata before returning home. Like many others who returned, he’s bitter. Gens particularly hates the conformity of appearance that he says Kerala society requires of him. “You can’t even have a different hairstyle without being punished,” he says. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to discount the political imagination or culture capital of even the most deprived Malayali man, when compared to the rest of the country’s. A few summers ago, this writer spent a befuddled fortnight with a Malayali filmmaker travelling across Kerala. The entourage was composed of roaring drunks and intense, quiet men, but their tenderness was revealed in the way they carried the dying flame of Kerala’s Film Society Movement. Between two tiny towns in Wayanad there were enough strange sights for a lifetime: Kurosawa-loving adivasi girls (“my favourite is Rashomon”), auto drivers watching French films and a middle-aged rehabilitated sex worker looking forward to an upcoming screening of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. And all because the small filmmaker and his friends, incoherent and drunk after sunset, spent their days carrying ethereal cinema and a heavy projector to villages.

IN CINEMA, in the distinctive parody culture, in literary fiction, in iconic comic strips, the Malayali man has always used understated irony (or crude wit) to cut the oily sheen of sincerity (women, on the other hand, are expected to be uniformly sober). “Malayalis in general have a tendency to fall into existential angst.

And humour obviously is the only antidote. Probably it neutralises sentimentality too,” says Baiju Parthan, one of the many Malayali artists who live in Mumbai (the canard being that they all live next door to each other in a Borivili colony called Immaculate Conception). From the 18th century poet Kunjan Nambiar to Channel V’s Lola Kutty, the Malayali wit has combined meanness with a silly grin. It’s part of the encompassing Malayali self-hatred that this wonderful trait, too, is looked at suspiciously.

Some years ago, a Mumbai filmmaker was in a tiny fishing village in north Kerala which was resisting the sand mining industry. The sandminers were carting away the estuary, one truckful at a time. At the heart of the film and the movement were the fishermen, who had set up a nursery to care for the eggs laid by turtles on their beach. The enterprise was all dashing beard and moonlit rescues, but the fishermen leading the movement stonewalled any attempt to deify them. At her wit’s end to understand the movement’s emotional landscape, the filmmaker asked, “When you’re in the boat at high sea, do you discuss romance?” Came the laconic, deadpan response, “Premathinapetti samsarkinnangil privacy vende? (To speak of love don’t you need privacy?)”

One can only seek romance in the Malayali man despite him.

Published here.

Posted by The Chasing Iamb at 11/17/2009 | 5 comments  
Labels: features, tehelka

YOU MAY ASSUME that Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani‘s hill station sets are so patently fake that irony is intended. But once you get past that, the film is for most part easy viewing, if rather overlong. From its comic strip opening credits to the last frame in which Prem (Ranbir Kapoor) chastely pecks Jenny (Katrina Kaif) on the cheek and chortles, Ajab is consistently fun for a ten year old. Prem (Ranbir Kapoor) is a sweet wastrel, focussed only on getting starcrossed lovers together. When he eventually meets Jenny (Katrina Kaif), he has to deploy a lot of that ingenuity for himself. A frame in which the Happy Club boys are luxuriating in sloth particularly makes you wonder why this film was not sold as a summer blockbuster for kids.

But Santoshi has always had an attractive sense of humour — not just in the Master Gogo and omelette ka Badshah-filled Andaz Apna Apna. Damini’s Meenakshi Seshadri was one of the few heroines of that decade with good lines, but the vastly underappreciated insanity of Lajja is where to look for Santoshi’s turn for irony. In the midst of melodrama, you realise the one-armed thakur is the villain and the low-caste daku is the good guy. When the thakur’s other arm is chopped off, one can only applaud the excess.

This Disneyfied production has neither the goofball unpredictability of Andaz Apna Apna nor the quiet evil of Lajja. You see mere traces of that interesting Santoshi. Just when you have recovered from the political incorrectness of a muscular troop of ‘attack’ hijras protecting a woman, up comes a sequence in which you have the woman and her Muslim lover thanking Prem for rescuing her from her terrifying Hindu husband. Santoshi then dispenses this couple (in over-the-top 1980s film style ‘Muslim’ clothes) off to Goa! You can hear Santoshi chuckling at this shot in the arm for the love jihad.

The film does have the pie-throwing energy of Ranbir Kapoor. His loosey-goosey charm is perfectly matched by a Katrina Kaif dressed like a Wonder Years girl. Kaif only annoys occasionally when she calls her hero ‘Pram’ like the the 1990s Indi-pop horror Jasmine Bharucha. If family viewing concedes to adult and nonanodyne tastes you may prefer to avoid Ajab and take everyone to a two-hour dastan-goi performance with magicians, violence, frank ribaldry, no concessions to realism and, oh yes, wit.

Published here.

Posted by The Chasing Iamb at 11/16/2009 | 2 comments  
Labels: Bollywood, review, tehelka

(A shorter, annoyingly truncated version of the following piece appeared in Tehelka a few weeks ago.)

Almost every reviewer calls Anjum Hasan’s novels ‘quiet and well-written’. This is currently a phrase in our literary world that veers between praise, parody and put-down. It is also a description that does disservice to at least one aspect of Anjum Hasan’s books — their rich vein of comedy. Book critic Chandrahas Choudhury, for instance, remembers Lunatic in My Head as a very serious work. “She is someone who cares for language, for the beauty of sentences, for getting the basic units of prose right. Tender and empathetic, but funny?” asks an amused Choudhary. From the broad shock of Firdaus Ansari, the elegant lecturer in Hasan’s 2007 novel Lunatic in My Head, getting bitten in the nose by her colleague to the comic unravellings of several characters’ obsessions in her new book Neti Neti, Hasan’s novels are full of warm humour. So why have reviewers' approval been awash in such seriousness?

The reputation of an author (or lack) has a way of shaping the reception of her books. The ‘serious’ reviews of Hasan’s work have partly grown out of the sense that Hasan is a writer whose career is to be followed with interest (long before Neti Neti was longlisted for the Man Asian). Partly it is because Hasan the Sahitya Akademi published poet with her self-confessed admiration of gravitas and meticulous control of language can be intimidatingly stern in person. There is Hasan’s explicit and implicit self-assurance in her writing — her choice of publishers has been guided by her desire for as little editorial intervention as possible. This does not come from some unseasonable arrogance. Anita Roy of Zubaan books who edited Lunatic says she has seen few books which needed such light and minimal editing.

Hasan’s books have important insights into the Indian urban experience. So it would be a pity if her books are under-read because of rumours of slowness. Hasan’s strength does lie in her ability in the contemplative but as book critic Jai Arjun Singh says the acceleration of pace from Lunatic to Neti Neti — matched by the city each is set in — is huge. When Sophie Das, one of the three major characters of Lunatic moves from Shillong to Bengaluru in Neti Neti, she also steps into a narrative filled with every manner of incident including a casually conducted murder.

Perhaps readers are miscued because of Hasan’s underexploited potential in her dramatic sequences. Where a David Lodge would have run riot with Neti Neti’s fantastic episode of a Meghalaya election hanging on the arrival of Bob Dylan, Hasan moves her action off-stage. “No, this was not deliberate,” says Hasan smiling a little at the thought of having to ring the bells harder than it is to her taste.

However there is a way in which blurbs will always find it difficult to capture the subversivesness of Hasan’s work. Her standard issue family recurring in both novels — Sophie, Mr and Mrs Das, Mukulika — is a thumbed nose simultaneously at the three-generation family saga and the rootless urban angst. Hasan’s twin books imply that no one is as incapacitated by leaving home as some genres would have you believe. Nor are you as rootless as others genres would like you to think. With her two novels Hasan talks about an almost unexplored but hugely important phenomena – Indians moving within the country to towns far from their homes. This has been the story of Hasan’s family — a Punjabi Hindu woman who fell in love with an east UP Muslim and moved fecklessly to Shillong about which they knew nothing. Bengaluru, its violence and anger and slow growing class rage has been home since she was 26 --- the first time she left Shillong. Hasan and her four siblings (including writer and fellow Man Asia longlister Daisy Hasan) have since moved around a lot. With husband Swedish novelist Zac O’Yeah (one of his crime fiction novels features a futuristic Sweden taken over by Indian bureaucrats) Hasan continues to travel. “Europe is addictive. I could never live there but there it is – antiseptic and clean and quiet…,” Hasan trails off acknowledging the seduction of order with a dreamy grin.

Hasan’s characters are memorably awkward. And almost of them are dreamers escaping boredom and non-careers and their own awkwardness through a fully formed fantasy life. Romantic love is only one of the victims of this fantasy life: “Like Aman who thinks if the girl he is in love with likes Pink Floyd, everything will be okay,” says Hasan. Their awkwardness, they themselves may imagine for a while, comes from being an outsider — North Indian or Manipuri in Shillong, Shillong girl in Bengaluru. But the reader eventually realises that the oddballness is inherent.

But Hasan is deeply respectful of place and the successful evocation of landscape, envies Kiran Desai’s capture of Darjeeling. Lunatic is marked by its incredible ability to conjure up Shillong’s rainy, up-hill-down-hill streets, a Flaubertian attention to detail. Neti Neti is just as strongly marked by its absence of description of Bengaluru. Hasan talks of her second home’s proliferation of sameness, its inability to offer epiphany. This inability of the city to feed the imagination is reflected in a cast of characters who are otherwise kind and thoughtful but do not have the intellectual resources – fed by books or music or arts – for reflection. Hasan’s uses various minor crutches in this regard by attributing of a few interests — Aman’s Pink Floyd, Sophie’s Madame Bovary, Mr Das’ Hamlet — to her characters. But the characters’ understanding of these objects are so wonderfully flawed that Hasan does not have too easy a time. As skilfully as David Lodge uses the sentimental tripe of pop singer Jennifer Rush to track romance in Small World does Hasan. And this is where Hasan’s greatest success and bravery is --- to write about the inner lives of those deeply culturally impoverished.

Posted by The Chasing Iamb at 11/02/2009 | 0 comments  
Labels: books, tehelka

THERE ARE urban legends about people who fall in love with inanimate objects, like buildings and cars. You may not be the lunatic who wanted to marry the Eiffel tower but Manjunath Kamath knows about your secret relationship with objects. Kamath’s art is attracted to everyday and mythic objects like a magnet tugs iron filings.

Thirty-seven-year-old Manjunath Kamath came to Delhi over a decade ago with a BFA from Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, Mysore, under his belt and absolutely no prescience of an art market that was about to explode. He was and still is part of the chummy, slightly-uncomfortable-withfame circle of contemporary artists that include Subodh Gupta, Chintan Upadhayay and NS Harsha.

Kamath works out of a mostly bare yet warm studio in Hauz Khas village in Delhi. The air is full of softly-spoken English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu and Oriya. Kamath is vivacious and his two assistants intense. Between them they have endless stories that roam from the Delhi art scene to the politics of his home state Karnataka or anecdotes about his two little daughters.

Kamath is best known for his witty, plot-packed paintings that constantly surprise with their endless invocation and variation of familiar objects. An object invested with menace in one work mutates into comedy elsewhere. Tiger jaws grin here, but there a tiger skin lies tamely waiting to be smoothed on an ironing board. This grinning donkey could be Bhupen Kakkar’s or from Aesop’s Fables or from a Mullah Naseeruddin tale. You pause to understand your sense of déjà vu. Have you seen this story before?

Perhaps you have, just not in this way. Kamath talks of going with his father as a child to watch Yakshaganas — a dance drama form from Karnataka —the energetic story-telling of which is an intrinsic part of him. Just as important though, he says, is “the sight of the empty fairground the morning after the performance”. As much as Kamath’s work swarms with lively harlequins and banana peels, it is also full of quiet spaces for the viewer to fill. These reflective pauses came a few years ago when he began emptying his frames, placing fewer and fewer objects in them. The resulting flat watercolours are like Kay Ryan poems and James Thurber cartoons: startling for their simplicity and frightening suggestability. Kamath’s almost wince-makingly bright backgrounds inspire infinite stories.

Marriage in May, for instance, has a formally seated bride and groom lonely in a frame who must suffer in the heat of their finery. The guests are present only in a row of casual footwear at a corner of the canvas. Somewhere else in the canvas lies a swimming pool, the blue coolness of which could be relief from the heat, background to a hotel wedding or simply escape. Delhi-based Art critic Johny ML says of Kamath’s work: “the objects in his work seem to be trying to displace and dislocate each other in order to find a place on the pictorial surface.”


(Not for Kamath, the laziness of many artists’ Untitled 1, Untitled 2 unto infinity. He gives sharp titles to paintings, which at first seem like easy threads to the narratives. But the titles abandon you in a koan-like quest.)

This shift to a lush minimalism he marks with his falling in love with lines from a poem by Kannada scholar Gopalkrishna Adiga — ‘Do something brother/anything, anything brother’ — which rejects the need for thoughtless, compulsive action, such as the modernisation committees of his hometown Mangalore who appall Kamath by replacing lovely temples with cement monstrosities.

Kamath may paint his teenaged cousin sprawling aside his ram-rod straight grandfather but their ambiguous relationship on the painted surface rejects sentiment and nostalgia. “At one point the sign of a south Indian art school product were all painting boats without knowing why,” he guffaws. Kamath seems to know what he is doing. An easy clue to his lineage and love for stories lies in the massive Bengali patta chitra that hangs on his studio walls. With its cozy rounded lines and familiar palette you may miss for a few seconds that it is in fact a seven-foot rendition of 9/11 and the panel-breaking protagonist is Osama Bin Laden. Around Kamath you think past grim, pompous gallery notes and feel lucky to be in such a playful period of contemporary Indian art when even a melancholic Atul Dodiya will pop grinning into one of his watercolour Gandhis or rib SH Raza with his Bindu Re Bindu.

THE DAY BEFORE the interview, Subodh Gupta had been at Kamath’s studio chatting into the early hours of the morning, sharing notes on the difficulty of saying sensible things to the press. Unlike Gupta’s Icarus-like rise, Kamath himself has been on a quiet and steady climb into the public eye for works ranging from sculpture and video art, multi-media installations and of course paintings.

Kamath is not a household name yet but may easily become so. His recent crop of limited graphic prints (an orgy of kitsch and dangerously self-parodying) has proved hugely popular. Museums abroad have begun acquiring him. The art market works in wondrous ways. During the boom, Kamath, never a Sotheby darling, was selling for anywhere between Rs 5 and Rs 9 lakh but the downturn has not affected him at all. He continues to sell steadily. Nidhi Jain, director of Gallery Ragini talks of how likeable he is, saying outrightly that she is glad he was not one of those artists ‘who during the boom were almost producing like a factory, art by the yardage’.

“I am amazed he is not more famous than he already is. He is accessible, playful and his technical skills are superlative. Unlike many graphic artists he can actually draw,” says Mumbai-based art critic and author of the forthcoming The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma, Deepanjana Pal. Far from the penury of his first few years in Delhi or even the worry of becoming a hobbyist while he worked for a newspaper, Kamath (represented for years by Renu Modi of Gallery Espace) now has the leisure for scaling up (like his large sculptures) or scaling down (postcard-sized miniatures). He finds it a little funny that his buyers are sometimes the lucre-loving, seemingly thoughtless people he makes fun of in his work. Not all, he hastens to add. His first buyer all those years ago in a self-financed solo show was the far-seeing Delhi-based collector Ebrahim Alkazi.

Kamath’s reappearing donkey, in case you wondered, was a response to Bhupen Kakkar’s work, You can’t please all. But Kamath the person and artist has the gift of being universally pleasing. You just have to bump into him.

Posted by The Chasing Iamb at 10/02/2009 | 1 comments  
Labels: art, features, tehelka

Rahul Gandhi on his secret visit to Uttar Pradesh may have annoyed Chief Minister Mayawati but we cool-hunters got an unexpected new style icon this week in the form of our favourite incognito prince. A memo to all lifestyle brethren for the future coverage of the Sabyasachi Mukherjee of the political world.

1. You may know that millions of people in this country bathe in the open but don’t let your reader catch on that you know. Punctuation is key to this process of exoticising. Please enclose the phrase handpump bath within quotation marks so that the bathroom fixture stores across the country are thronged with those seeking handpumps and ‘vardiwallas’ to operate it.

2. Regardless of the wordcount allotted to you remember to work into your front page copy that Gandhi is fair and wore a white towel. Sub-editors will be amazed at your prescience when (like when Clark Gable showed his undershirt in It Happened One Night) the sales of white towels shoot through the roof.

3. If one day you hope to write two page essays on Vietnamese-French sushi in Goa you must learn to today invest with élan all your prose about familiar food. Don’t skip lightly over the meals you know Gandhi consumed in dismal surroundngs. Detail out that he ate ‘pooris’ with a vegetable dish or that he had a cup of tea and biscuits. Extra points if you can work in the condiments used and if they require italics.

4. As a lifestyle reporter it must be your job to create and anticipate trends. You should have been able to spot that after the UP trip, the Kashmiri Gujjars would offer to feed Gandhi ‘'makki ki roti' (corn flour bread), 'mirchi' (chillies), 'makhan' (butter) and other specialities’. If you are a rookie and you have failed in this task, quickly make a few calls to far-flung ethnic communities and ask them what they would feed Gandhi if he visited their ‘sleepy village’ or ‘remote hamlet’.

5. England is full of noble homes whose sole claim to fame is that that they once housed Bonnie Prince Charlie or Queen Elizabeth for a night or even an afternoon. If you value your future, map and photograph the charpoy and the hut that Gandhi slept in. It has the additional advantage of making you useful to your political correspondent colleagues who want to find out who is the next unlikely political candidate after Kalavati.

6. If you are afraid of your political colleagues’ contempt of Rahul Gandhi, publicly join them in their mockery of the austerity drive. But in your hearts remember what Gilbert and Sullivan wrote about Oscar Wilde in the libretto Patience “Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band…If he's content with a vegetable love/which would certainly not suit me/Why, what a most particularly pure young man/this pure young man must be!"
   
   

Posted by The Chasing Iamb at 9/28/2009 | 0 comments