I lost a dear friend.....

I lost a dear friend. We had been together the same evening that a fatal stroke brought Jyotsna Bhatt's life to an abrupt end, without the slightest warning to allow me time to be more emotionally prepared. She has been my teacher - attempting through her grace and patience to make the clumsy attempts of my enthusiasm as a young student, find coherent shape and form in the clay that she had such personal skill over. Her perceptive insight however allowed students like myself the joy to discover, however ineptly, the confidence to believe that we could create - and to build our skills not in the shadows of her prowess but in the reality of our abilities.

You had merely to meet her gaze to understand her strength of character. Born into a privileged family where she did not need to define her economic independence, Jyotsnaben chose instead to be an artist, training in sculpture and then finding her niche as a renowned ceramicist- carving her identity and life as she determined it for herself. Even within this space of alternative belonging, she completely shunned the world of big and elaborate statements as an artist, and created intimate ceramic works that contributes to the data-base of feminist endeavours by her unapologetic engagement with a world of feminine sensibilities.

I first met Jyotsnaben in the summer of 1976, when I enrolled as seventeen year old undergraduate student to study painting at the faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. The college climate was one that was steeped in heightened post colonial discourses that were fashioning alternative theoretical enquiries and formulating new narratives into the contemporary history of Indian art . In hindsight one can recognise that the art practice of an artist like Jyotsna Bhatt got eclipsed within this intellectual milieu simply because she chose not to prescribe to prevailing trends to fit in. Today in retrospect one realises the folly of such blinkered  perspectives that did not include these feminist histories as significant in those days of recording contemporary art history.  However this was absolutely no deterrent to Jyotsna's own artistic journey of enquiry. She was least concerned about conforming nor seeking sanctioned belonging as an artist. From the folk traditions of Kutch and Saurashtra or from the Japanese and Korean traditions of pottery, she  amassed an eclectic premise of personal belonging within histories that she found empathy with.  She cared little for focus or attention and preferred instead to absorb herself in hours of work at her potters wheel or at her work table, letting her fingers create the vocabulary of discourse with the world.

We were bonded through an empathy as women whose choices in life held quiet resistance and nonconformity. Her dignified presence infused me as a student to hold my courage at all times. I will deeply miss you Jyotsnaben  - your passing away leaves a void in my life that will not be easy to fill my love. 

Tick-tock, who listens to the clock....

The pandemic brought with it something many people of privilege found difficult to cope with - isolation, and the investment of spending time with oneself. I remember growing up on airforce bases with little or no contact with children of my own age, and as I was home schooled till I was seven, I was thrown into the exploration of finding an imaginative world to engage with. This perhaps led me to find methods of discoveries in my life, and most importantly the value of curiosity.

Reading and other frameworks of learning have of course taught me to be receptive to knowing the world, but the key for me in negotiating my reality has been the  process of recognising how to expand a thought process and make it into a larger window of perceptions. 

To commune with oneself is vital. Today unfortunately we have become way too reliant on the press-the-button culture that takes us to an immediate destination of presumed gratification. Knowledge through quick internet information sourcing has erased the process of substantiated learning in many instances. It has taken away for too many people, the real world of experiences and instead implanted a virtual space from where we quick-fix who we want to be perceived as. To find ones own identity requires concentrated focus where we hold ourselves still for personal self scrutiny - where we  attempt to harness the true potential of our energies within a space of deliberate consideration. 

I negotiate the world in many ways (as we all do),  but perhaps it is through painting where I am most alert in holding my deliberation of consciousness. I don't believe we need a buildup of time to find those frameworks of consciousness either. I scuttle around like a chipmunk some days - and have fractured time on many occasions in my studio (where it can even be as little as 15 minutes in-between supervising repair work in my home or attending to pressing office work) - where I pick up my brush and I am immediately stilled. Everyone can find such moments of mediation - however it can be sought only through the desire to acquaint oneself with who we are, without props, camouflage or pretence. Such paring away of oneself does not always present us with the image of ourselves we may be comfortable with  - or of the world as we would expect it to be. But this process of exploration allows one to guide our consciousness to those areas of personal expectation by the endeavour of pursuit.

As I sit late into the night with the silence of the city that engulfs me as I paint in my studio the 9th floor everyday, I gather around me those I want to engage with - those writers and film makers and those nameless women of courage around the world, all drop by to infuse their strength and resonance of philosophy into my mediative space. These amazing interludes with myself have allowed me to live a more comprehended life than if I were to only want answers alone. Time in solitude is not irksome if one has the patience to engage with oneself without fear.

In-between spaces are not necessarily gaps....!

My last blog post was a long while back - May 2017 to be precise, and since then so much has happened in my life. I didn't plan to take a hiatus from writing - it just happened that my studio work and other management areas took over my time, leaving me with very little spill over to fit in anything "extra". I was sleeping only between two to four hours every night during this time - and in-between all of this was also supervising the building and completion of a new residence that we had purchased. I turned sixty in 2018 and we decided to reinvent our lives to suit the next 25 year span - so we moved out of our bungalow and into a large single level flat - which though bigger in square foot area to our older bungalow - allows me to zip about at mad max speeds within my multitasking world of choices. June makes six months since we have moved into 901 Raama Palacio in Gotri Vadodara, and though we are well settled, there still remain a few teething problems that occur from time to time.

I received a number of queries from well wishers asking me to resume my writing and was deeply touched that my "conversations" with the outside world had held areas of connection and value for others. Thank you, those of you who have so faithfully followed my blog over the years, for the embrace of belief.

It seems too obvious to talk about COVID19 and the strange new reality it has bequeathed us. But there is no escape. That it is an experience that connects the entire global population within a single time frame is what perhaps makes it so unique.  What is the greatest pain and sorrow in all of this has been (and continues to be) how the helpless and less fortunate are being mistreated through this surreal phenomenon we are facing. As politicians argue  and put up smoke screens to fudge the truth- the economically less fortunate  are stripped of their livelihood and their dignity, as each day passes. Today as cities like Vadodara attempt to limp back to new semblances of normalcy, our labour force that really is the heart of our survival are uncertain of whether to trust their lives back within our safekeeping any longer. When they needed our help the most, too many of us sadly looked the other way. Today, for many, the safety of their small patches of land and their existences in their quiet villages are more comforting despite the hardships they face, in comparison to the horror of abandonment and disregard that their city employment offered them.

I now live on the 9th floor. Our flat has large glass panels in every room from where I can look out. It is located in a posh part of the city. However that is really only the snobbery of a postal code mapping. In reality hungry street dogs scavenge from the garbage piles along the road side. I watch people drive along this quiet road in very expensive cars, who slow down and callously throw out their garbage and drive on. Who cares? Not many. We are the Indian's whose mantra is "tolerance"! So whether we throw putrefying trash out or drag the corpses of the dead like meat in a slaughter house - we are supposed to practice that Indian mantra of "tolerance". I don't know about you but my threshold is near breaking point these days. I voted  as a responsible citizen for an elected governance at both the state and the centre. Can all the politicians stop playing blame games and take accountability. Wake up! Its time to put actions into play. Placating public speeches are like bad bedtime stories - they don't hold the imagination that allows us to achieve betterment or provide us a landscape of believable probability. It is after all  crisis that allows true leadership to be seen - so far there are no real heroes from any spaces of elected office providing us the answers we need.