It is strange to be writing about Manjit Bawa in his death for as a policy I did not write on him and his art. I have always felt that I would not have a discerning perspective when it came to his art because I was so close to him, for Manjit Bawa was my uncle, my father’s younger and very dear brother.

We grew up in a joint family where he usually ate his dinner with us, and played games in the evening when we, that is my sister and I, were young. Later, he grew famous and successful and took on a larger than life persona. But for us, he always had a bit of hero because my grandmother made up for her inadequacy as a story teller by relating a serial on the Exploits and Adventures of Manjit at bed time. In all these he was engaged in acts of valour, strength and downright foolhardiness that froze my grandmother’s blood even years later. He never outgrew these traits and almost everyone reminisces about his great mental and physical strength. Perhaps that is the reason why we all clung to hope of his coming out of coma even after three years of the fateful stroke that struck him down on 17^th December 2005. To see him lying comatose came as a great shock to me personally because my principal grouse was that he just could not be still and sit or stay in one place, except when he was playing chess or cards, games which I have known to last for days with very little sleep.

This restlessness however is rarely seen in work of his mature phase. There is a great deal of serenity and depth in his art. Often labeled a Sufi painter, he was that and much more. There is inclusiveness in his art derived from streams Indian tradition and philosophy which were decried by so-called avante garde artists and critics as being revivalist and pretty. He was inspired in part by the miniature tradition, especially the Pahari miniatures, but also by contemporary artists such as Krishan Khanna and J. Swaminathan.

He painted Krishna surrounded by cows but also dogs, because cherished divine melody could not be confined only to cows but is accessible to all. He painted acrobats and birds, and Lakshmi standing on a lotus in pink. He painted Ravi, his son, in a pensive mood. And he painted Narasimha killing the demon who was the primeval man himself. He painted his own personal and collective anguish against the devouring mobs of 1984 riots. He painted his Bharata with a lion and also Krishna and also the Devi. This iconographic eclecticism reflected the inclusiveness of his philosophy for his Krishna was his Ranjha.

Manjit Bawa was born in Dhuri in Punjab, probably in late summer of 1941 in a place known as the Goshala. His parents moved to Delhi soon after where he was to stay for most of his life. Here his elder brother, marking his entire lack of interest in studies and inordinate love for playing pranks started taking him to art lessons at Abani Sen’s studio with him. It is here that he developed a love for the arts and went onto study art at Delhi College of Art. At college he developed a strong friendship with Jagdish De, Umesh Verma and Gokul Deambi with whom, often under his brother’s guidance and company, he traveled all over north India. He and his elder brother took up a hotel in Dalhousie to be near the mountains and to have a running business while they pursued painting and writing. Much of his work was done in Dalhousie where he went to get away from the brouhaha of the art world.

For us he was an uncle full of laughter and mischief who flashed in and out of our lives. He sang at weddings and family get togethers. He hated my cooking and taught me how to cook a few things so that he could eat in my house. As children he would make clay toys with us and paint them in bright colours and take us to the Yamuna on his very ramshackle blue scooter. He was always good for a tenner for an extra horse ride in Dalhousie. He was an artistic genius for the world. For us he was a beloved uncle with whom we could and did argue, fight and pummel. We will all miss him for many reasons. May his soul find what it was searching for in life.

One of the challenges most of my clients face at some point in their life is the challenge of trying to reignite their careers – especially when business is slow or they’re not getting auditions. When that happens, I take them through a Three-Step Jumpstart Process to get them back on the road to success.

If you feel like you need to stir up your own career, then here’s how to get started:

1. Get a Clear Vision
   The most important thing you can do, in jumpstarting your career, is to get a very clear vision of your end goal.When Barack Obama started working in politics, he created a very clear vision for himself, and his life, and he knew he wanted to accomplish something BIG.

   Eight years ago, however, his road to success was paved with complete and utter humiliation. With an empty bank account; his credit card rejected by the rental car company and no political clout (having just lost a congressional primary in his hometown of Chicago), Mr. Obama also failed to get a floor pass at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, and ended up watching the proceedings on a big screen TV in a car park, before flying home with his tail between his legs.

   Eight years later, in Denver, Colorado, Barack Obama WAS the Democratic Convention, and five months after that, Mr. Obama was elected to the highest office in this country: President of the United States.
   

2. Commit to Your Vision
   Once you have your vision, the next step on the road to success is to commit to it completely.Walt Disney loved animation and spent three years working on the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

   Unfortunately, his $500,000 budget for the film was beyond comprehension at that time (1930’s). Additionally, during filming Mr. Disney ran way over budget and needed another $500,000 to finish the project, creating a final budget of $1,000,000 at a time when the budget for the average cartoon was $10,000.

   However, Walt Disney was completely committed to finishing Snow White, and in order to get the additional financing he needed, he ended up presenting his project (including acting out the entire story) to a tough-minded banker, and got his loan.

   The result of his commitment was a classic film, for people of all ages, which grossed $8,000,000 at a time when the price for going to the movies was 25 cents for adults and 10 cents for kids. And that was only the beginning.

3. Take Action on Your Vision
   The third step on your road to success is to take action on your vision, because a vision without action is only a dream.One of Britain’s most well known entrepreneurs is Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin group of companies. His road to success started after he dropped out of school at age 15. Diagnosed with dyslexia, at age 16 Mr. Branson embarked upon his first entrepreneurial venture by publishing a student magazine, entitled Student.
   In December of 1999, Richard Branson became Sir Richard Branson when he was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, in the Queen’s Millennium Honors List, for “services to entrepreneurship”.

   Since that time, Richard Branson has expanded the Virgin brand to now include more than 200 entertainment, media and travel companies, thereby creating one of the most recognizable companies around the world

For Whom Nobel’s Toll

Harold Pinter passed away on 24 December 2008. He was 78 and had been undergoing treatment for liver cancer. Like most Nobel prizes for Literature, the choice of the British playwright Harold Pinter has also had its share of detractors. There have been all kinds of murmurings against Pinter getting the big prize, ranging from doubts about his literary worth to snide remarks about extraneous considerations having played a role in the selection. The prize for the slyest reaction – assuming that it wasn’t the ghastly mistake it was made out to be – goes of course to the Sky Television newscaster who assumed that the breaking news about Pinter must have been to announce his demise (Pinter had taken a bad fall some days earlier) and therefore led off with an announcement that Pinter had died, before hesitating and then correcting herself to say that he had been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature instead.

Well, to be honest, I’m not sure the word ‘instead’ was actually used, but given the bad grace with which his award has been received in some quarters, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. It’s not difficult to figure out why Pinter’s selection has been met with churlishness. On the one hand, a body of mainstream taste has tended to deride Pinter’s theatre as just so much fluff. Pinter’s departures from staple theatrical modes have often been seen as a thinning out of the fundamentals of theatre, and even as evidence of his inability to get the basics right — much in the manner of the standard joke that Picasso’s cubism springs from his lack of talent at drawing like everyone else. Pinter’s technique of conjuring up dramatic tension and menace out of thin air, so to speak, has often provoked the incredulous suspicion that is bestowed upon all innovations and departures from the mainstream.

In recent years, Pinter’s political activism has provoked another kind of ire. The ill-tempered outburst of John Simon, an old Pinter baiter, on learning of Pinter’s Nobel prize, is interesting for the disarmingly guileless manner in which it reveals the prejudice that feeds its indignation. When Simon says, “I would have gladly accorded him the Nobel for Arrogance, the Nobel for Self-Promotion, or the Nobel for Hypocrisy – spewing venom at the United States while basking in our dollars – if such Nobels existed. But the Nobel for Literature? I think not”, he exposes the burr that’s actually prickling his behind.

Evidently, what has got Simon’s goat is not Pinter’s literary worthlessness, but the fact that the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to someone who has indefatigably campaigned against American and British adventurism in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and has therefore shown himself to be of the ‘enemy camp’. Evidently, Simon’s tirade typifies the brand of opinion which wants artists to confine themselves to their work and desist from engaging in any form of activism, especially that which pits them against the weight of majoritarian opinion. (Perhaps this is why Arundhati Roy continues to raise the hackles of professional dabblers in that hallowed literary form, the Letters to the Editor.) And, evidently, Simon believes that he who pays pipers has the moral, nay spiritual, sanction to call the shots along with the tunes.

Nah, I shouldn’t trash letters to editors. For, how else could I have gleaned that lovely nugget of information, contributed by a reader to the Guardian, concerning “the sullen, deafening silence from Downing Street about the new British Nobel Laureate, Harold Pinter?” The British government’s wariness in celebrating the achievement of a countryman simply because of his vocal (and forgivably intemperate) criticism of state policy is just the kind of silence that would be familiar to Pinter, given the evocative treatment of silence in his plays. Of a piece with such silencing is an article lauding Pinter’s Nobel achievement that has been carried in the latest issue of Britain Today, a news magazine produced by the British High Commission in India. Unsurprisingly, it makes absolutely no mention of Pinter’s outspoken criticism of British foreign policy, a criticism that he has stuck to despite constant mockery and ridicule. How else can one read the title of that article, “Master of Silence”, except as a desperate act of wish-fulfilment!

Is one over-emphasising Pinter’s political stance as a factor in his getting the award and in the reactions to it? I don’t think so – and not simply because others have commented that the Swedish Nobel committee may have been inclined to favour a writer who has voiced his anti-war sentiments in no uncertain terms (Pinter has famously denounced Bush as a “mass murderer” and dismissed Blair as “that deluded idiot”), given the fact that the Swedish people too were extremely vocal in their anti-Iraq war protests. If this sounds like a slur on the literary credentials of Harold Pinter, it is interesting to see him make the same connection, albeit in a less whining tone: “Why they’ve given me this prize I don’t know. … But I suspect that they must have taken my political activities into consideration since my political engagement is very much part of my work. It’s interwoven into many of my plays.” That this is a man speaking with a modesty characteristic of the greatest writers is par for the course. But, it is unusual to find a writer who values his political conscience as much if not more than his writing, especially as even readers are often uncomfortable with such privileging.

It’s not as if Pinter needed the sympathy of political fraction. His credentials as a writer are justification enough for the Nobel award. He isn’t the writer of whom no one’s heard, as some previous Nobel awardees have been. Not when his plays are widely translated and performed in other languages; not when they pop up regularly in drama syllabi of Literature Departments; and certainly not when ‘Pinteresque’ is now staple lit-crit jargon for a patented blend of mundane but oblique dialogue, brooding silences and ineffable unease, all floating gingerly on a bed of sudden incongruity. (Anyway, what does the label “unheard-of author” mean? Surely, nothing more than the writer’s works having not been translated (yet) into English, and therefore being unfamiliar to the international publishing scene….)

Pinter is now 75 years old, with a long writing and performance career of considerable range and distinction. He has acted on stage, film, television and radio. He has written nearly thirty plays since 1957, and has innumerable drama sketches, poems and prose published in several volumes. He has directed over 25 productions of his own and others’ plays, adapted novels for the stage (notably Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) and for film (for instance, Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Kafka’s The Trial), adapted his plays for radio and television, written over 20 screenplays (The Servant and The Go-Between, both directed by Joseph Losey, being two delightful instances), and is now so immersed in speaking out on political matters that earlier this year he spoke of not writing any more plays in order to focus his energy on such issues.

Initially, things didn’t look promising; Pinter didn’t burst in on the scene in the manner of other path-breaking dramatists. The 1956 commercial and critical success of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, notwithstanding its combative indecorum, had suggested that British audiences were tiring of conventional fare, but Pinter’s first plays in 1957-58 (The Room, The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party) were received with bewilderment and hostility. (That this could happen despite the praise showered on the English premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 is curious, given the several affinities that have subsequently been noted between Beckett’s and Pinter’s theatrical worlds.) It wasn’t until 1960 that Pinter had his first success with The Caretaker. From then on, plays such as The Homecoming (1964),Landscape and Silence (1967 & 1968), No Man’s Land (1974) and Betrayal (1978)established Pinter’s reputation as a unique voice in contemporary theatre. To such an extent that The Dumb Waiter, along with Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, soon became an absolute must-do for budding thespians in college theatre societies.

Pinter’s plays revolve typically around contestations for territory. Conflicts, sparked off by intrusions into a closed space by an outside force, are conducted with a strange mix of ferocity and dulled detachment. His characters and their dialogues are rarely explicated through conventional excavations of motivation and memory, and often viciousness and pain lurk submerged beneath an evasive surface composed of guilt, uncertainty, everyday phrases and restless silences. The ‘facts’ on which these contestations are pegged are usually unreliable, for there is little that is either ‘true or false’ in Pinteresque space.

The unnamed tension of these plays are located in such a claustrophobic, inter-personal space that Pinter’s writing has been criticized for turning its back upon the political, an impression that was confirmed when Martin Esslin included Pinter in his seminal study, The Theatre of the Absurd. However, the later plays – such as One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language(1988) and Ashes to Ashes (1996) – are more distinctly political. But, here too authoritarian structures of repression and torture are evoked rather than articulated, and filter through spare exchanges between oppressor and victim, and the slippages of memory and knowledge. Perhaps, this phase of Pinter’s writing is less a ‘shift’ from his early work than an extension of earlier preoccupations into a wider territory.

Though the Nobel citation – Pinter’s plays “uncover the precipice under everyday prattle andforce entry into oppression’s closed rooms” (my italics) – celebrates the dramatist as much as it does the political activist, the writer himself draws sufficient distinction between his preoccupations as an artist and as a “political intelligence” to not let the achievements of one absolve him of the responsibility enjoined upon the other. He recently had this to say of the road he’s travelled: “In 1958, I wrote, ‘there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal…. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ I believe that these assertions  . . . do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”

In an interview some years ago, Pinter had rued the bane of British intellectual life being the mockery directed at artists who take a stand on political issues, and had warned, “Well, I don’t intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.” What lovelier spectacle can there be than this — of a dramatist, who goes on to win the Nobel Prize, acknowledging that conscientious citizenship is a more urgent cry than any artistic calling?

This article was published earlier in FIRST CITY (Dec 2006) after Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

An electric performance of Kalaripayattu by Sree Narayana Guru Smaraka Vallabhatta Kalari Sangam (Chavakkad-Kerla, Bangalore and Brussels) initiated the celebration of a decade of Environment Support Group’s work advancing environmental and social justice initiatives. Soon this was to be followed by a scintillating recital of Odissi by danseuse Diya Sen. On a calm winter evening, when most of Bangalore was unusually quiet with most vehicles resting without fuel to run (given the week long fuel strike), folks who braved the skeletal public transport enthusiastically greeted the artistes’ repertoire with gusto.

The crisp, energetic, robust and daring movements of the Kalari troupe, interspersed with many organic body movements (including one that revealed the body can be massaged with a sword) demonstrated years of discipline and practice produces such extravagant martial arts – a fitting tribute, as it were, to the spirit of upholding the wider public interest. It was akin to the effort demanded for setting afire the imagination of people in advancing public interest – tireless effort and perseverance are uncontested ingredients.

Prof. B. K. Chandrashekar, former Chairman of the Karnataka Legislative Council graced the occasion to release the Decadal Report of Environment Support Group. His argument for regarding and supporting such work as ESG’s was involved in, was precise and persuasive. He narrated his experience in fighting for years to protect a public space in one of Bangalore’s neighbourhoods, against a variety of powerful interests. Despite all the influence he could muster, it took him years and a Public Interest Litigation in the High Court, to ensure that the public space will be a park and nothing less. Considering that scale of effort was involved in saving but one neighbourhood park, the work of ESG, in comparison, was quite remarkable he argued. He did wonder why perceptions were so negative against NGOs when, the work that was advanced was so clearly in the wider public interest. Divergence of opinion is but a healthy process – that should not be the basis for conflict, instead efforts must be in converging different view points and perceptions to advance public interest for the benefit of this generation and generations to come.

Diya Sen greeted this message with grace, fluidity and a temperament that was characteristic of Lord Krishna’s voyeurs pleasing his angry lover Radha. Purna Chandra Majhi vocalised the concern accompanied as he was ably by Gandhi Mallik on the Pakhawaj. The tempo was set, and the romance of the evening reached a crescendo with Sunil Kant Saxena on Sitar offering soulful companionship. Sujit with the lilting sounds of his flute lifted the human spirit to dimensions unconquerable in mere words

The Celebration of the human spirit was complete. Acknowledgements flowed in plenty, and the warm and supportive audience gathered to congratulate the performers and each one of the team members of Environment Support Group for advancing past a decade in work that was challenging and often shyed away from. Every day we engage with issues of conflict. Every day we look on the other side of development and worry for those who don’t get any of it. Every day we look for solutions to problems that are extremely complex – and more often than not considered not even problems. Simply because they cannot be factored in financially and economically and have a word now – externalities. In such a world where real issues are not issues, where financial scams galore crash the edifice, structure and innards of the capitalist world that has brought us teetering on the edge of climatic disaster, celebration of the deep and greater human spirit is in order.

ESG is 10 and we are happy to celebrate. We are grateful to our dear families and friends for being with us every step of the way and helping us go on and on…. There is plenty to be done still. With your help and support we can do much much more. Thank you for coming. Thank you for writing to us with your warmest good wishes. Thank you for calling us and rewarding us with your words of support. Thank you for contributing to our collective cause, financially. Thank you for volunteering. Thank you for buying our publications and films and calendars and helping us get stronger. There are many more reasons for us to thank you…… Once more, warmest wishes for the New Year.