Living for the last two years masked behind a sanitized cloth; with a social distancing even from our loved ones, yet in the same home; sleeping alone in our rooms with our soft pillows as our only bedside companions; not being able to share our tea with our gossiping greying cacophonous neighbour; or even not being able to lend our inner stories to our restless dreams; we are constantly today, creating an artificial world.  In this excessive superficiality will we forget we are alive? Do we have voices? Do we have real living pain and words that can be penned?  My answer is NO.  We as humans are never created with a loss of memory and total negligence to ourselves.  We are created instead of choosing to forget, choosing to see our lives as three eased dots…

I see these moments of the easing gentle pauses, the “life moments of truth”.  For we as artists, as creators, those little dots are seconds of life, where we can shape and spawn, grow words into lines, lines into paragraphs – of stories, love songs, and poetry of yearnings and being alive in protests. 

These small breaths, to many, are simply just hyperboles of grammar, however, to the artist, these are intensely alive, strong, emphatic forceful portions of feelings, of coming to belong to what he only knows is the only truth…his art form.

Let us not even once, then, discount these as mere undecorated flecks, but as gigantic astronomical atoms, that pinpoint to the immense creativity and churning in the human mind.  If just one of these little mites gets charged, we create a gigantic reaction in our minds.  That chemical reaction is sure to explode, not to destroy but to give birth to a new vision. Despite, us being confined sometimes only to our bed, our Dunlop spring jail does not cause us fatigue or despondency, but becomes a renewed vigour to explore maybe a new set of chord structures; a grand opening line of a play; a brilliant myriad vision of the landscape; or the shy yellow golden sun waiting to be captured in your mobile phone. 

So, the point here is to urge one to carefully mark these seconds of the speckles in your life, and turn it around to something beyond our sight, even more, farfetched than we can imagine.  I see this applying to all, not only to the artsy right-sided brainers but also to the privileged, analytical, left-sided companions.  For we all, need those little moments where we can break into a song, rush and jump to paint, stroking colours green hues or act out each intense dialogue we only wish to hear again and again.  Come let’s join in the dainty dance of the hyperbolic few!     

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   Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr./WUSTL

DIRTY CHAI, a hip hop Bollywood musical, is a colorful & crazy dramedy, full of heart!

Chaya Chandrika Gopi, or “Chai” as she likes to be called, is a rebellious Indian-American bride-to-be. Chai’s parents have promised her to a nice Indian boy and the wedding is in ten days. With her back against the wall, not yet ready to give in to this assault on her freedoms, Chai leaves home but unexpectedly falls in love with a charming & mysterious stranger, making a powder keg out of an already complicated situation. Chai finds forbidden love with a fearless American girl, Ronnie, and is trapped between upholding her family’s traditions or following her heart, which goes against everything she’s been taught.

Chai is a messy concoction of two very different cultures, two conflicting identities, and two opposing desires, just like the dirty chai she orders each morning- a perfect brew of espresso and chai (tea).

Her Indian father, Mr. Hardik Gopi, is a traditional Hindu man.

Her White American mother, Mrs. Rani Gopi, converted to Hinduism after falling in love.

Filled with excitement and sarcasm, DIRTY CHAI challenges the walls of formality, fear, and judgment that separate people. Every cause has an effect in this intricately interwoven dramedy about human lives, embracing family, and the chaos of falling in love.

P.S. There will be a wedding so, “chai” not to miss it! o.O

Directed by Adam Marcus
Starring Ruchi Kishore as “Chai”
Sponsored by Café Cafe Mobile Coffee

Now Watch the play online on this link:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=194272942628895&id=103549798665628

The trajectory of my art practice takes on a zigzag path sometimes; and at other times a circuitous one or a U-turn that I didn’t expect to take.

The work “The General” is one such. I started off with figure sculptures and then went on to study life drawing at Boston University.

After returning to Tokyo, where I started my art practice, instead of going forward on the path of figurative works, I veered off into abstraction and minimalist expression – the Torii gateway being the most significant of them all.

Once I had done a body of work using that very simple form of a Torii as a sculpture, as drawings, in installations etc. using a range of medium and materials, I yet again changed direction and returned to figure drawing.

Here is an example of a drawing that came to me after a not very straightforward journey.

The Torii form is only alluded to in this work. Why the image of a General though?

The Context

One of the most magnificent set of Toriis in Japan is in the heart of Tokyo, all of those Toriis leading to the famous Yasukuni Jinja (a Shinto Shrine) founded by the Meiji emperor in June 1869. The shrine commemorates the death of Japanese soldiers and members of public in a number of wars starting from the civil war also known as the Japanese Revolution of the late 1860s through to the First Indo-China war.  

The shrine also commemorates over a thousand convicted Japanese war criminals from World War II.

In any war, whether you consider the dead soldiers as war heroes or war criminals there is always a General. It is this figure of a General that is depicted in the drawing.

The Torii represents a boundary. Wars are waged to gain control over territories that lie beyond a nation’s boundary.

For more information on the Yasukuni Jinja follow the Wikipedia link provided below.