The Art Brick

Back after a long break with a piece I love so much, it hurts! :P On a serious note, this one's from a friend who is one of my most favorite people on the planet. Someone I can completely be myself with and not be frowned at  uncomfortably (trust me, I get that a lot :D). Someone I've known only for a while but identify with so much that it feels like forever. It's not easy to get out of your comfort zone, a "settled" life, as they call it and start from square one, and really go get what you want. But this guy here is doing it :) He's living his dream and for that, Mr. Shastri Akella, I'm bloody proud of you!  Here it is, the beginning of his beautiful journey, and the beginning of its beginning :)

A month after I first moved from my rented apartment to the house I purchased, the art objects I had accumulated in over five years were delivered by a pickup van, packed in brown boxes and left on the sidewalk outside my house. I had handpicked these works of art from bazaars, artisan villages, museums, emporiums, and garage sales; I had touched them, watched them a hundred times, smelled their marble, bone, and clay surfaces–my senses had known them intimately. But I had not seen them in a while now, and I was curious to see how this distance would inform my perspective, how my thoughts would interact with them after a break.

Box-after-box, I unpacked them: clay pots, palm leaf manuscripts, camels carved of dogwood, marble elephants with raised trunks and hand-painted howdahs, and miniature paintings, one of which captured my attention. I turned open the window blinds. A veil of light was drawn on the bone surface, illuminating the figures of dancing courtesans in flowing gowns of lapis lazuli, their heads cocked, their hands raised above their head, clutching at brass glasses, tilted just enough to allow a tantalizing drop of wine to brim over. They were watched by a pasha in a white turban and flowing green kaftan, smug eyes, smug smile, leaning over a bolster.

I had spent two months of my salary on this painting, no bigger than the screen of my laptop. When I explained to my parents that the figures were painted with a single squirrel’s hair, and that the artist, using a magnifying glass, took sixty days to commit the images to the bone, they looked at it again. I could–retroactively, of course, too baffled as I was back then by the unappreciative dullness of their gaze–see the struggle in their eyes, their desire to appreciate such an accomplished work and my own appreciation of such art, conflicting with the practical approach to life that belonging to a middle-class in India almost always indoctrinates you into.

Holding the sunlit bone painting I articulated for myself the question that flickered in their eyes. How had I made buying art a habit when I had not inherited it from a family of art aficionados? What was I trying to objectify? I organized my art objects in a chronological order of acquisition and mapped each piece to the time in my life when I procured it.

My first handicraft was a wooden sculpture of a celestial dancer, purchased with the second salary of my first job. I had invested most of my money on it, leaving just enough to pay the rent and utility bills. I was living in a hostel then, my room a microcosm of a working men’s dorm: strewn with hastily cast-off blankets, shoes with day-old socks sticking out of their mouth, empty pizza boxes sitting around for a week, the bed littered with bread crumbs and creased clothes. Out of my desire to create a respectful space for the work of the art sprang my decision to address this chaos: old food trashed, shoes polished and put away, clothes laundered and put in the cupboard, floor mopped, teacups washed and towel-dried. I waited for the weekend to unpack the dancer so I can afford the time to give the simple event the quality of a ritual. I took out my best bed sheet, spread it on the table and taking the dancer out of her Styrofoam-and-bubble-wrap cage, put her on the makeshift altar. I did not question the peculiarity of my actions, perceiving it as an exotic distraction from what I did for a living. I was a Java programmer. Even when I was doing an MS in computer science, I had this dull foreboding that I would not do well in the field, and yet, my culture, upbringing, and the successful lives of my siblings led me to believe that I must study to get placed in a “safe” job. So I pressed on, did fairly well at college, interviewed for and to my surprise, got a job in a big software firm. It is not easy, spending twelve hours of your day six days a week, on a job that is an exercise in drudgery. I would see friends, loving their jobs, freed from the watchful eyes of parents and financially independent, getting into a relationship and basking in its warmth. I now realize my subconscious, that decided for me on fixing the ugliness I felt in my life–chockfull work life, empty personal life, the absence of a life goal–by hankering after beauty I could acquire, possess, and call mine, led me to the crafts bazaar where I got this sculpted dancer: the female form at its most perfect, ready to stand for good in my room. Thereafter, the need to adorn my space to compensate for the lack of beauty I felt within became an addiction. I moved to a bigger rented apartment to give my art objects ample room and air. Friends who visited said in awe that a home is an extension of the personality. The beauty around me came to symbolize my inner beauty.

That day, in my study of the chronological spread of my alter egos, I noticed that the number of art objects I acquired began diminishing at last around the time when I discovered the thrill of writing fiction. Literary fiction, that I began reading when I attended an art-cum-book festival, brimmed with fine examples of character exposition: character’s failures illuminated, made to seem like natural products of a complex human nature, not an aberration without a source. I was provoked into writing and looking, from the lens of a character’s failure, at not just the broken bolts causing a personal malfunctioning, but also at the impact and source of such vices as religious intolerance and gender biases that I felt passionately for. Ironically, it was by analyzing my failures and the issues that troubled me through the medium of fiction that I started making peace with myself. I discovered a love for creatively employing langue: with metaphors, building a global sweep out of a personal characteristic, creating atmospheric worlds and populating them with complex characters.

Time seems to gather pace in our memories. Entire weeks or even years are collapsed into the single sweep of a sentence. It may seem like the transition from my art obsession to my finding an anchor in writing that calmed the inner storm was quick and crisp. The actual process, from my clamped attempts at writing to the discovery of new styles of expression–that brought my written thought closer to the fullness they possessed in my imagination–was a three-year-long journey, one that occupied my attention, expanding a little at a time, gradually, slowly crowding out my need to walk into an art store to feel fulfilled. My collections did not stop all together: I had learned how to respect the space around because of art, it supported me in my times of spiritual impoverishment. But, discovering my calling liberated my relationship with art, elevating it to a space where art is appreciated not as a substitute of something else, but for extending the beauty of this world.

I have traveled a long distance now, moving for the first time out of India to study writing at the University of Massachusetts. My art objects are back in their boxes, locked away, because I will, I know, live here in a basic apartment where books their only adornment, making my home be an extension of my writerly personality, not a compensation for a missing block of self. This thought gives me the courage to believe that I have gradually begun addressing my inner void instead of building a brick wall of art around it and shutting it out of sight.

Me, music and movies :)

Like every kid I dreamt of what I wanted to be when I grow up - doctor, police inspector, air hostess, etc. And somehow and I don't even remember how or when, they just left my mind, very naturally. And I was left with a desire to do two things in life - music and movies. Again, very naturally, like it was meant to be. 

My dad's a music composer and my grandfather a musician. And so, me turning out to be a singer(I prefer saying someone who loves singing) didn't come as a big surprise to everyone. So somehow my undying, crazy, passionate love for music was lost in all the limelight that my "musical genes" got. "Of course you love music! You're a singer!" was the reaction I got. And I went with it. We usually tend to like the things we can do, more.  We find comfort in them and may be even take them for granted. Or get over-confident, thinking we can do them anytime. Now, coming to acting. Nope, mom's not an actress and if anything my family despises the profession. I hardly ever tried it. One play, but I'd surely not put that up in my list of achievements. I always wondered what made me love acting so much and I came up with a few reasons - I have a pretty face, I can emote at the rate of thousand expressions per minute, I want to be in the creative field, no 9 to 5 jobs for me, etc. But I also knew none of these reasons were actually it. 

And then, today happened. A movie full of life with beautiful music happened. I'm not mentioning which movie this is because this isn't meant to be a movie review. Besides, it's not about this movie, it's about what a movie did for me. To each his own. Anyway, before I entered the theater today, I was angry with life, annoyed with people and was feeling all the colorful neighborly feelings. Just one of those days I thought like we do most times. And then the music played. And I saw these people, on the screen, laugh. Really laugh! I've always loved real laughter in movies. It makes you laugh too. Even if nothing's funny, you just laugh shaking your head thinking "Why's he laughing so much!". Everyone around me was laughing. And then came the sadness with the damn music. Their sadness reached out to me, brought tears in my eyes and made me want to go hug them and tell them it was going to be ok. I looked around and saw everyone fall quiet. And then, the girl on screen kissed the guy and everyone was happy again. So was I. At every point of the movie, I felt what these people felt, these actors who simply enacted all these feelings, some day, some where. I liked them, hated them, cheered them on, laughed with them, fell in love with them. Every time I identified with a character, I smiled to myself and dreamt I was there, in that character's shoes doing what she was doing. I felt the music surround me and form a memory in my head. A memory for me to hold on to and replay in my head whenever I relive that scene, in my own way. 

Everyone who walked into the theater today probably had their own set of problems and happy things. But every time they laughed or cried, they became the people they were watching. They connected. And so I realized. A very simple and clear realization. I never wanted to be a police inspector. I wanted to be the one who makes someone feel they want to be one. To feel that want. It was never my innate singing talent that naturally made me love music. It always was the desire to be a part of the music that plays in your head when you're having the moment of your life. I don't believe inspiration works the way it's portrayed to. I don't think I'm here to inspire anyone, plainly because only you can inspire yourself. I walked out of the theater today wanting to do so many things, be so many different people. And that's what I'm here to do for someone, anyone. Create that one moment to feel the want. With beautiful music in the background, of course. 

The Road goes ever on and on

Super excited to present to you, my first blog entry by a friend who's among the very few people I can share a comfortable silence with. Someone with whom I'd an instant connect though we had very little in common, someone who will be a part of my life for a long long time, someone who's so bloody smart that I really believe that he has a solution for everything in the world :) Siddharth Ramesh - take it away! 

As most of my friends know and as one of my ex-employers said, I am verbose. And therefore there is more than one thing I know and will verbiate about. The first of those things is as follows.

One must travel. No other activity, physical or mental can be substitute for traveling. And this I say after ten days of traveling over 6000 kilometers. Grueling is too small a word for the idea behind it. It doesn't even sound like it feels. But trying as it may sound, the sights and smells (and tastes and colors) of the places I went to those ten days may well have colored my opinions about traveling and colored them well. Colored them the reds, greens, blues, yellows and whites of the sandstones that grow out of the earth like giant potatoes, out of the ancient valleys that are fed by rivers whose very waters echo with the sounds of times much before us; the colors of the shimmering-haze heat that dances always at a distance and creates little sandstorms on the sand-stone-ridden-earth. The blacks and dark greens and dark grays of lighting and storms across miles of fields on which, at a distance stood two men that walked across the field, and the lightning, playing games with our eyes, made them move so slowly, they seemed to be standing still. The yellow-whites of approaching trucks that leapt out of the sheets of water from apparently nowhere, while white fumes of steam rose from the dry and parched earth as it was quenched. Many a time, it seems to me that somebody up there is trying really hard to sell traveling to me. Don't it to you?

The lack of travel shows in a man (read as the race of humans) [I am being politically correct, for those who need spelling out] very discernibly. One needs spend just a few minutes with a less traveled person to know that the person is less traveled. Less-travel is like the nervous tick of winking intermittently that one of my acquaintances had, forcing people to notice it although they strive for holy propriety not to show it. There is no stunting circumstance I would wish less for a growing child than the inability to travel, to see the world without a roof to go back under, to sit on strange dirts and look at themselves as if from a great distance, to see what lies behind the round mirror that is the world.

One could fill books about the moments and memories of faraway lands and even find echoes in the wanderlust of many of you reading this. And the moments that don't have echoes shall be grabbed back and treasured fiercely, like the image of a forgotten hiding place, like an inconsequential piece of paper conspiratorially buried by a child's hands, like a secret tryst on the edge of remembrance. But the verbose epiphanies and pastel colors off all those moments, painted as though by a mysterious hand scrupulously trying to disguise itself, could be completely superseded by that elusive moment of stillness which the mind seems to take such beautiful pictures of, and which will never be found in the mundane vicissitudes of acquiring and preserving, that moment of bright darkness that is only your own. That moment that stands at the edge of the horizon, beckoning, touching invisible visceral strings that create music that speaks of the smells of the earth, the murmured conversations of waves and unseen sands, and the colors of distant skies. The road begs but just one step on it. The earth would roll under your feet if only you stepped out. Travel.

Funda behind the blog ...

I don't think I've ever been a 100% sure of anything in my life. While that could make me sound indecisive and unsure in life, I think it's more to do with my belief that nothing in life is 100% or nothing is perfect..ideal. And now you can add pessimistic to the list :) What I'm trying to say is it's almost always approximation - adding that 1% or 0.01% of something else. With me it's pretty much always been - being 99% sure and 1% wanting to be sure. And that for me, is as ideal as it can get. Not to mention that division varies, depending on various factors involved. And no this isn't a math or physics blog :| So, let's get to the point.

The other day I was watching Oprah interview J K Rowling, and she mentioned that she asks all her guests one thing they know for sure in life. As I listened to J K Rowling answer this question, I realized I was believing in what she said, more than I would if I had said those things myself. I realized that the division between being sure vs. wanting to be sure was narrowing down :) I think it was to do with the fact that, when you listen to people talk about the experiences in their lives and what made them believe in the things they do, you tend to empathize with them. You nod your head and agree with them if you've gone through something similar. Or you just are in awe of them and thank God for not putting you through something similar. Or you debate the thought, if you don't agree. In any case, you give it a better chance than you would if that same thought just happened to cross your mind. At least I did :)

So, here I am. On a slightly selfish mission, to find more things to believe in. My life would not be as colorful, happy, eventful and crazy if not for the people in it - every single one of them, who stuck on, was a part of my life once or just passed by. So, who better to help me with this mission of mine :) Presenting to you, all my people, on my first ever blog "One thing I know for sure ... ".