A date with art at College of Art!

It was an SMS from Megha Madan, which prompted me to visit the exhibition put up by students of College of Art on its campus on Tilak Marg. It was partly out of curiosity in which environment the budding artist , whom I had once seen paint in my courtyard, was about to graduate. The curtain fall on the week-long show was to synchronise with a farewell function for the finalists both a Grad & PG levels. I invited my close friend, O.P. Dutta, formerly of Delhi Doordarshan, to join me with a promise of a cup of coffee later.

College of Art, established in 1942, is a leading art college for advanced training in Creative and Applied Art, under the Faculty of Music & Fine Art, University of Delhi, and is run by Government of Delhi. It boasts of the likes of Ramendranath Chakravarty, B.C. Sanyal, Biswanath Mukherjee, and O.P.Sharma as its former faculty members and an auditorium designed by ace architect, Satish Gujaral, which was added in 2008.

It offers training in Applied Art, Art History, Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture and Visual Communication. Anupam Sud, D.B.Seth, Manjit Bawa, Paresh Maity & Sonia Khurana are among its notable alumni.

Located in the heart of capital, it nurtures talent from all over the country, much of which was on display during the last week. The first thing we noticed was the festive atmosphere all around. Barring a few Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students who were determined to stick around & show their work even to the last visitors like us, most youngsters looked relaxed, radiant and raring to go. So we went round in solitude and were amazed by the variety of exhibits and the abundant creativity on canvases all around us. The pictures of a few of them, which caught our eye, have been added to this post but it evidently cannot do justice to the range.

The one whose memory is unlikely to fade away was a query scrawled in the left-hand box: ‘Hey, Why can’t I wear a spaghetti top and skirt to Chandni Chowk?’ Considering that Chandni Chowk’s only a couple of kms away, it seemed even art could not erase some social & cultural divides.

All the best to the debutants!

With Swami Sukhbodhananda again!

When I drove into Siri Fort’s parking, I noticed a serpentine queue outside the gate. It was curious! Did all these people overcome the desire to watch India-Ireland match in the ICC World Cup to hear the Swamiji? If they did, his discourse on Gita the previous evening must have done wonders. It also gave rise to a disconcerting feeling that there may not be place for me and my friend, whom I had persuaded to join me. I was to be proved wrong on both the counts. The long queue was for a live show of gazal-king, Jagjit Singh while Swami Sukhbodhananda’s discourse had already begun by the time we found seats in the right auditorium. He was deriding those who saw things only superficially and impatiently demanded ‘what next?’ Seeing things with sensitivity (not sentimentality) is needed to make them a part of our experience’, he opined. More often we refuse to accept things as they are, focussing on what we wish them to be. ‘Experience the experience without the experiencer’, he added while the audience looked lost in the verbal onslaught. ‘You don’t look at your wife as she is but as you would want her to be’, he tried to explain the thought through a mundane analogy and brought in the other gender too as an after-thought. Love your spouses as he or she is rather than as you wish them to be. If you feel unhappy with the present and hope that happiness will come sometime in future, you are mistaken for, neither past nor the future but only the present-here and now- is real. The future too shall become present at that point of time. Future is an illusion and to link your happiness with what you may get in it, only a delusion.

Swamiji highlighted the importance of silence, which, unlike space or light, was limitless and facilitated communion with the divine. He asked the audience to shut their eyes to experience the power of silence. Inexplicably, there were sounds of shuffling of seats as if one needed to change one’s posture to close eyelids and the odd ringtones emanated from mobiles to produce a discordant note in that symphony of silence. The audience awoke to a reminder that we should not try to escape from what is-if you are hurt, feel the hurt. Perhaps more than an escape, what the Swami meant was to be in a state of denial-refusing to accept the real. This leads to conflicts since we are constantly trying to chase an illusory happiness. Act out of happiness & not for happiness; he said alluding to peace & understanding that acceptance of reality leads to. Quoting intermittently from Kabir, Buddha & the Holy Vedas, he exhorted the audience to give up egos and the arrogance associated with it. Advocating detachment from worldly goals, he revealed, ‘Don’t worry about the world; it will go on very well without you. It is you who will be reduced to a photograph hung on a wall.’ I visualized my own, albeit with a sandal-wood garland thrown round the neck. ‘It might be dug up later from a basement and dusted for the benefit of your grandson’, he added while I comforted myself that my single-storied home has none. As a long queue built up for the prasadam, I was reminded of the one witnessed outside the gate. We made a hasty exit through the side door. Even spirituality gets a short-shrift sometimes!