Don't know when mother died

"Mother died today, or may be yesterday" That's how Camus begins one of his stories. (outsider, I think.)

My story should begin with, ' I don't know when my Mother died, but when I learned of her demise, five years had passed." And this is exactly how it should be expressed. She must have died in 2002. I was setting up my own family then.

Camus' protagonist is a alienated skeptic. He is neither involved nor is he evolving. He does not care, rather he does not care whether he cares or not. He is an outsider.

My case is different: I am involved and I am interested in evolving. I am alienated but I am certainly not a skeptic. The common thing between us is the fact of our respective mother's demise.Both learn of it, it seems, through a third source. Both were obviously absent at the funerals. Yet something registers in their respective minds on learning of their mothers' deaths. Their expressions of it differ. Camus is resigned, it matters little to him that his mother died "today, or may be yesterday". When I learned of my mother's death five years later, I went through a tight emotional jam. I was oppressed, I was stifled. The one thing on my mind then, I remember, was to want to breathe, for I was choked with guilt. I went to Matri Mandir and sat there talking to my mother, hoping to tell her that I did not mean to lose contact with her while she was there.

The thought of her dying almost never occurred to me. It is peculiar this attitude of man to death - you do not feel the impact of the loss until you have actually lost a dear person although somewhere at the back of your mind you know that the person HAD To die one day.

Out of four of my siblings not one tried to contact me. They knew of my whereabouts in Pondicherry. When Viraj, my younger brother, died of nephritis in 1995, I was called home. My brother sent me a wire to the ashram address. When our only mother died no one bothered, and that rankles. We met recently and I said to them humorlessly that I would ask her to come back and die again so as to give "You freaks another chance". What more could I say? No matter what we do now to reconcile, I shall carry this sadness and guilt for a long time.

Lies, half truths and the art of convincing

Met Gemmon (sic) after many years. Gemmon was a boy who lived in front of our dept. in Art College. He used to come to our dept. to chat with a girl studying painting. I know him since he was about 7. Now he looks like any normal adult. He told me that one of our mutual friends had become an alcoholic. Sad, I thought. One other thing he told me was that he owned a yacht, "that white one is mine" he said, pointing to one stately yacht. Wow!, I thought. I had no grounds on which to disbelieve Gemmon. Goans have sold Goa bit by bit and have become hugely rich. And a crazy kid like Gemmon, who smoked charas in school, might as well have sold land or hash to the hoards and made bucks. Why not? I believed him despite his appearance: He was in his usual flip-flops, loose shirt and dirty jeans. Common sense should have told me that yacht owners do not dress like deck-hands. Next I met someone who knew Gemmon and I told him that Gemmon had bought a yacht. I also told him of the other thing Gemmon had told me. This chap told me that Gemmon worked at a restaurant and that he still smoked dope. He told me Gemmon was a compulsive liar. later I met the chap who was reportedly an alcoholic. He is not. He sells marble to builders. Sandeep is another c.l. He was a teacher in a school. He apparently was fired due to heavy drinking. He lies through his teeth. I needed a rental room for reasonable price so I asked him whether he knew of any. He phoned someone right there and I actually heard him say things like "my bungalow in old Goa", etc. Needless to say that nothing materialised out of that conversation except that we learned that some tap was leaking and so the entire O.H. tank did not have water in it. i have not questioned the veracity of it; I know it is a lie. Yesterday I went out with my friends to cabala (?) in Baga. There we met a group of friends. One among them was a young lawyer from Delhi., who was talking the most and he was talking senselessly. Actually he was on and on about my friend's hairy backside etc. I was beginning to get irritated. I told him that it was more like he was fascinated about hairy backs although he was criticising it, etc. so he stopped his hairy back refrain and listened to others' talk. I was listening too. Mostly the talk was lies flying in that generally inebriated field of possibilities. They seemed so impervious to it that they actually carried on conversation without betting an eyelid. The gullible me got sucked into the conversation though I did not talk. I was new to the place; I had no reference to things. Every time someone left, the others present there would remark on how that person was a 'total con', etc. Sometime later my friend began talking to someone about my art and how good an artist I was etc. That is when I came to know that in that small world the big thing was to say something profoundly sensational. If you did not have anything profound, you were ignored till it hurt. I had nothing to say. I just made polite conversation and gradually began to be ignored. It did not hurt me. I am wondering whether that was the - sample of the general tendency among Goans to fib. People fib casually. They do not stop to verify whether the lie was 'taken in' or the listener just put on an act of listening. I see it happening all the time. Police lie and lawyers lie, sub-registrars and judges lie. Polititians and bureaucrats lie. Lying is an art that is being fine tuned in Goa. I hope I am wrong, for if I am right, they will live in an altered reality where one is convinced about something that is not a fact as being real. When money making is the sole thing that matters, what values are we talking about? It will be so easy to believe yourself that a woman is a cow and sell her in a cattle market, if this becomes a habit. The thought scares me.

Jogi the Bhogi and Suhas the ass...

Suhas Shilkar The first memory I have of Suhas is of him playing flute in the college canteen in Miramar before classes began. He was learning to play the instrument from Pt.Venkatesh Ghodkhindi, a flautist from Karnataka. Suhas was/is a sensitive musician. He gave up playing the flute. Why? "you can't do it part-time"says he. He paints 'full-time' now. Nothing much has changed except the colour of his moustache: last they appeared silver. This time they seem'd red. Suhas went to Paris recently. May be red moustache in Europe made a better statement than silver, he must have thought. Methinks, Blond would'a'been perfect!

Jogi J. Makhani

Suhas Shilkar

Jogi J. Makhani Meeting these two friends after several years, I was thrilled. Also, I was looking to see every wrinkle marking their faces, every quivering muscle, every detail. Particularly in case of Jogi because twenty years or so back Jogi was full of hair. One saw only hair and not much else. Now he has lost most, shaved the remaining and ignored the rest since he can do nothing about them. He has put on weight and he bumped his knee in Delhi recently, trying to catch a prank-mongering dachshund. That stressed his other leg in order to bear his bear-bulk. While walking down the Altinho slope I saw in him a striking resemblance to something or someone very known indeed and suddenly I got it! Jogi resembled The Laughing Buddha.

Pen and ink

Boy with house

Weirdo

Drawing

Owl

Migration

Head

Sphynx

Transplanting

Man-Rooster

Taming Chance

There is a painter friend of mine who has gone all abstract. (read nuts) He has strength, but he is not a strong painter, according to me. He is aware that I don't particularly like his kind of work: it is serendipitous.Not that it does not work, only I tend to see almost nothing of the man in his work. Besides, he has a scattered sort of continuity to his work. One of his works in room A, for instance, could be quite removed from another of his in room B. Nothing wrong with that , I know, but it leaves me with a unfulfilled sense of that something which is so vital to the seeing of art.

But these are times when absence of virtue in a painter can be convincingly proposed as his very quality. In other words, a chap who can not draw puts up his bad work as his original 'style'! (reminds me of a remark this same abstraction-ist had made regarding someone who could not draw. "...forget a straight line, but he can not draw even a crooked one" He'd said. Made me laugh that, but all this is besides the point.) The point I am making here is that there are artists who follow their experience with admirable honesty, "with a dangerous disregard for money", yet there are others who chance upon something that works once, and since it worked for them once, they capitalize on it and make it part of their natural repertoire. Taming chance is what I call it. Chance was an important part of a certain phase of Dada, the art movement. Arp and others used this gimmick to make a statement. Up-till there it is acceptable to me because Dadas and the Surrealists were exploring possibilities of language. Besides, their manifesto justified the Gimmick. My abstraction-ist friend's case however is, personally, unacceptable. This man has indeed taken up the entire field of abstraction - Gorky, Man Ray, De Kooning,Kandinsky, Hartung, Gaitonde, Raza, Kolte - they are all there in some corner of his work, along with other marks and dents - and is freaking out a free-for-all-dance in that huge ball-room called ABSTRACT ART. There is no appraisal, no self doubt, no analysis. The only thing that matters is whether he can sell or not. He sells, and going by his telling, he sells quite some. He seems happy and confident. That is what matters in the final analysis, for at the end of even the most selfish act on the part of man, he should be happy. Otherwise, what the hell. *** A crow lay her egg in a kite's nest. The eggs hatched and a crow among kites was born. Little did he know of his origin, his identity. He was happy and hunted and grew up with kites. He even learned to soar high up in the sky and on spotting a prey could swoop down upon it quite like a kite. It was a time when there were no mirrors. But one day the crow and his sibling kites were made aware of their identities. It was a fox, let's say, in keeping with the tradition of tale-telling, who told them of their difference. They did not believe the fox, but agreed to follow it to a lake to see their reflection in the clear water. One by one they sat on the rock in the mid stream and each looked at his image in the water. Each one found nothing wrong. They were feathered brothers of a feather. The fox realised that unless they compared each with the other, the difference would not be noticed. It wanted to make them all look at once at the images of each other, so it asked them to fly some distance right above the water and plunge . "look," it said, "at your image as you fall. Look at your bodies and the crow's." The birds did as they were told and noticed that the crow was very different indeed from the rest of them.

The story above can take a turn in any direction: Propaganda is like that. It sees reality as a coin with two sides. The flipping of it is not left to chance, but to a careful appraisal of social or political climate. Motive determines the presentation of art as ART or saleable art object. When latest research in particle physics suggests an implicit subjectivity present in matter, who is to say what is what? But then, why define and categorize, set aside and compartmentalize? The need in the mind to deduce seems to be losing its hold on things. Or is it? The utility of this seems to me to come to an agreement in order to share our common heritage, simply for the joy of living together. May be man has come full circle with his mental approach. May be he needs another tool of inquiry, for it seems the age of reason is coming to an end. May be we also need a new field to inquire into. Spirituo-materialism may be? Or materiospirituality? For that we will need something else, not mind, but perhaps, Supermind. Till that happens unlimited abstraction has a life-line,. May it live long and my friend too, who is quite a likeable chap. Only, I wish he made his point a little less aggressively.

Acquarelle jottings

The swimming pool at Perola Do Mar in Candolim is a place where day trippers come to swim. Families with young come and break every rule in the resort. They drink and eat at the swimming pool, dive, make noise and they leave filthy plastic all over, after chucking their packages of chips and things. Most can't swim at all, but a dip in the pool is a must. It is cool. This chap here in blue was there, literally like the pillar of strength to his son, who was so scared of getting into the pool that he remained sitting on his dad's shoulders all the while they were in the pool. I saw how dead statues can become objects of admiration and worship to angels. The size is all that mattered: The dead statue is BIG and the angels small. ...And I saw a cock in Fontainhas. He has a personality. He reminded me of my years in Fontainhas between 1970 -85. Not much has changed, I think, except economic conditions. People in Mala have become cockier! That one is a thing that comes again and again. Sometimes it is a tiger who is carrying his belongings and his house and wife and all, other times it is people or birds who carry their homes on their heads or backs. I had seen Luis Bunuel's film-don't remember which- but in it, there is a rich man who is so tired of his way of being that he goes on a holiday. He carries with him a sac of his burden. After checking in a hotel, he rests, freshens up and free from his burden, decides to go for a walk to explore the town a bit. But as soon as he steps on the street a funny thing happens. The sac of his burden clings to his back. That, I thought then, was witty cinema. You can't rid of your worries by escaping them. A friend of mine has become a succesful lawyer. I met him on a Sunday. Court were closed due to elections etc. and although it was a Sunday this lawyer friend of mine was wearing his tie and a spotless clean white shirt and Black pants. We sat down in casa Xetyo to drink. More of his friends joined us and a passionate conversation soon started. During the course, he made three points with perfect logic, but he craftily kept shifting premise. Most were impressed, I was too, for it showed me how 'arguing' must work in courts. But I objected to his line of argument. I remember giving him a funny analogy: I said that his case was like shifting of IPL venue from India to South Africa and back, two times. He seemed to like what I said, for he laughed heartily. Narendra Bodke was an intelligent student as I remember him. I notice many grandfathers with their grandchildren. Perhaps their wives are busy cooking since their daughters or daughters-in-law and their sons or in law sons must be officers. Children need to be looked after, right? These old shriveled up men tend to their 'fruit' in this manner to be useful. How much of the old values can they infuse into generation next. Old values seem redundant. They seem to influence modern life negligibly, if influence at all.

Talking of things

I am looking at the screen. Letters in black get typed here. They make sense as sentences. Sentences which I read conform to the thought-vision. They are manifest forms of the abstract depth of my being. The other day I was looking up at the ceiling fan, and as it rolled, round went my own thoughts. I registered some of them in my mind, put them to memory. I type them here as I recall them. But not everything is from that recall. Some of the things are 'inspired', additives. (I may be accused of meddling with 'facts'. They are fabricated. But they seem truthful to me, the experiencing agency.)

I was thinking: as an artist, a painter, I have a continuity in my drawing. By continuity I mean that there is a logical growth over the years. Way back in '86, Gulam Sheikh had invited a British artist by the name Gillian Barlow to paint with us for a week. She had told us how she brought home her subjects from the outside, the streets and bazaars and fields, to her studio. And she painted them from recall.

I began drawing from then on with more emphasis on memory, and the recall factor. I would stress more on retaining an image and drawing from there.

Later I attended a workshop by a Dutch sculptor, whatshouldacallim, who said that there was no need of 'copying' what you are drawing. That furthered my cause as far as drawing was concerned. I began since then drawing with my eyes closed. Not always, but most of the drawing I do without looking.

The advantage is a more intimate sense of tectile-ness; they are more sensuous, a shade more uninhibited. Besides there is the element of surprise which more often pleases than otherwise.

***

Kishori Amonkar

Gaanasaraswati Padmabhushan sreemati Kishoritai Amonkar sang the other evening at Kala academy. I missed another event I was invited to because I wanted to listen to Kishori. Given the choice of listening to Kishori Amonkar on one hand, and a few arty-farties on the other, the former is several times valuable, I thought. Kishoritai was bang on time! The programme was to start at 6.30. It started at 6.30 alright, but then, the flowery felicitations and other formalities took another 20 minutes or so. More minutes went in tuning the swaramandal and other instruments. Then Kishoritai was not satisfied with the acoustic arrangement. She kept on ordering the staff stage manager to shift this and that ; lower the violin out put and kill the boom. Then she made as if to start. Within the first two phrases she established the rukh(face) of Miyan ki Malhar. Then she stopped to order the poor stage manager again. She asked him to increase sharpness of the sound, which was promptly done by the tech-man. But Kishoritai was not happy. She wanted it sharper. The techie had gone to the max capacity sharpness level, so he told her, very guiltily I must say, that it could not be increased any further. Kishori seemed to understand the limitation of the machine and the helplessness of Kala Academy's technical staff, so she began the alaap. She was doing it so well, so beautifully and effortlessly that I caught myself shutting my eyes in anticipation of bliss. The very next moment I had to open them wide, almost in horror, because Kishori Amonkar had stopped singing abruptly! she was complaining now that she could hear only through one of her ears. She placed her swaramandal down and spoke to the audience in that packed auditorium. She spoke in Konkani. She said that as long as she could not enter 'that' mood, she would not be able to sing. She excused to be given the chance to re tune her instruments. "Would you please give me another twenty minutes?" she figure speeched her adamant plea. The audience responded with that peculiar inaudible collective murmur which is normally taken to mean yes. However, my own contribution to that peculiar inaudible murmur was this: madam, your problem may be simple. Why do you not see an ENT expert? And then I went some distance outside the auditorium to smoke a cigarette. When I returned, Kishori had started singing the Kyaal. It was not, I was surprised, Miya ki malhar, but what I heard was a striking Shankara. Yet the manner of singing Shankara was new to m. The blend of upper dhaivat and nishad in the descent, the avaroha,was superlative. The raga developed, and soonbegan galloping like a beautiful wild stallion in the wild. The taans were incomparable to any other woman vocalist I have heard. None among the living can sing quite like Kishoritai Amonkar. I am toying with the idea of forgiving her thiose pre-concert delays.