It is a strange experience to befriend the silhouettes of things and people. These days, I find myself tracing the walls of crumbling buildings, feeling for fingerprints. As an artist, or rather as someone who's been let loose with the tag of an artist, I have the privilege of writing out the stories of those who once inhabited the spaces between these walls, as per my will. However, the more their lives are remembered out of nothingness, the more I have the responsibility to recollect the truth and discard all those bits of fancy.
I once read a book by Gita Hariharan called When dreams travel, where she conjures up the life of Scheherazade, story-teller extraordinaire. The author sifts through sand dunes and broke down palaces, resurrecting Scheherazade's search for stories that can save her life - and those of many others. I'm given to flowery prose and little wordy embellishments; I can load them on to a page until I get SICK in the stomach, and this book was the end of all my excesses. I mean to say that this is a good book for those who like to listen to stories about stories. And two years later, its coming back to me now as a reference book, a manual, on how to speak to dead people, even if they are fictitious dead people. It is also a good reminder that there is no rule that reality has to have any more bearing than imagination.
Currently, I've been commissioned with a dream-like project; to build a narrative around an ancient ruin. They gave me a legendary place of learning, the Nalanda University and a dance form called Bharatanatyam, and said, go, now make something of this, make the two come together. They gave me an office and a magic wand and shut me up in peace to whisk up some sort of potion, that would let the story of one flow into that of the other. Yes, in my mind, its as dramatic as all that.
But in real life, it involved scouring over journals, books, papers and photographs, surveying facts and examining the remaining proof of life, to sketch a story where there was none. It is at once creative and monotonous; it borders between bull-shitting and actually visualizing a space that truly existed. The unravellings of my search have startled me, because the connections are so obvious, I cant believe they havent been noticed before this. Ideas of move from the minds people, on to the bodies of people and start resembling them- as deities, idols, messiahs and incarnations- that are then immortalized on the hard surfaces of rocks. And then, some day, when enough time has passed, the rocks remind people of what their forefathers aspired to be, so they take a cue and restore the idea back into present.
How do I know all this? I don't. There are two ways to substantiate your hunches . One is to look to history and physical evidence. The other is to recreate the scene in a new space and show everyone how it might have been.
But before I close, let me acknowledge the absent person who has, by merely existing in a corner office, rounded up the essence of my quest, through conversations that we've only ever had in my head.
I once read a book by Gita Hariharan called When dreams travel, where she conjures up the life of Scheherazade, story-teller extraordinaire. The author sifts through sand dunes and broke down palaces, resurrecting Scheherazade's search for stories that can save her life - and those of many others. I'm given to flowery prose and little wordy embellishments; I can load them on to a page until I get SICK in the stomach, and this book was the end of all my excesses. I mean to say that this is a good book for those who like to listen to stories about stories. And two years later, its coming back to me now as a reference book, a manual, on how to speak to dead people, even if they are fictitious dead people. It is also a good reminder that there is no rule that reality has to have any more bearing than imagination.
Currently, I've been commissioned with a dream-like project; to build a narrative around an ancient ruin. They gave me a legendary place of learning, the Nalanda University and a dance form called Bharatanatyam, and said, go, now make something of this, make the two come together. They gave me an office and a magic wand and shut me up in peace to whisk up some sort of potion, that would let the story of one flow into that of the other. Yes, in my mind, its as dramatic as all that.
But in real life, it involved scouring over journals, books, papers and photographs, surveying facts and examining the remaining proof of life, to sketch a story where there was none. It is at once creative and monotonous; it borders between bull-shitting and actually visualizing a space that truly existed. The unravellings of my search have startled me, because the connections are so obvious, I cant believe they havent been noticed before this. Ideas of move from the minds people, on to the bodies of people and start resembling them- as deities, idols, messiahs and incarnations- that are then immortalized on the hard surfaces of rocks. And then, some day, when enough time has passed, the rocks remind people of what their forefathers aspired to be, so they take a cue and restore the idea back into present.
How do I know all this? I don't. There are two ways to substantiate your hunches . One is to look to history and physical evidence. The other is to recreate the scene in a new space and show everyone how it might have been.
But before I close, let me acknowledge the absent person who has, by merely existing in a corner office, rounded up the essence of my quest, through conversations that we've only ever had in my head.
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