Arty farty

(Published in First City magazine, January 2013.)

Well hello new year; hello Dilli ki sardi. Hello to the season when I stay warm with a rant on my lips, ‘cuz ya see, ‘tis the season for culture-wulture in Dilli, this great make-believe called ‘good weather’ in our climate-bipolar capital. It’s when nothing grows in the city, except the mysterious mushrooming of al fresco verandahs and park pavilions to stage a lil bit of culture; the rain-drenched bone-chilling winds and brain-numbing dipping January temperatures merely incidental, just mis en scene, dahling. Under the stars, and wrapped up in near-Siberian winds, dancers dance with well-practiced smiles, musicians’ notes quiver just about; the almost backless blouses in the audience don’t feel the slightest shiver because they’re looking so pretty. Kohl-eyed aunties jazz up gloomy Habitat and IIC auditoria, decked up in their big bindis, airing their shiniest silks and Monte Carlo cardigans, flaunting fresh flowers in ornate hair-buns, shooting me snooty looks that say my overcoat-muffler-monkeycap look is just cheap theatre. Hitherto unresearched numbers show that by spring, the city’s hospitals are stuffed to the roof with exhausted, overworked curators because there’s just so much bloody art to sell.

And that’s how it goes, this warped tale of Dilli the city culture-waalon ki. An irony so complete, so symmetrical: the city everybody loves to mourn as the most uncouth, is one that is touted as the ‘art capital’ - popping on the itinerary of art fairs, fattening the pages of art and culture magazines, guzzling art grants like midnight beer on border thekas. There couldn’t have been a city more ‘artful’ than Dilli I concur, where the infamous lack of homogenous ‘audience culture’ is precisely what allows for various kinds of artistic expression. The whole ‘Delhi art scene’ has my wannabe writerly self suitably enamoured, itching to create Post-Post-Modern montages that clip together high-ceilinged glass and concrete galleries, moustache-doodled Sheila Dikshit posters and walls-scrawls at underpasses. Like its amorphous citizen, Dilli’s art too is made of fascinating contradiction; it has both spontaneity and self-consciousness.

In my almost-previous life as journo for this gorgeous art and culture magazine you read, I tried hard to understand what the ‘Delhi art scene’ is. I suffered the innards of many a white box galleries, whipping my brain into finding some little pop of enjoyment in the mess on the walls. I yawned through a zillion dance performances. I frowned hard at a lot of experimental art, until my eyebrows threatened to get tangled forever. I talked art with all kinds of artists: genuine, famous, coquettish, vain, savvy, bored, unconvinced. I quit my job, gathered my pennies, went back to school, and studied phoo-phoo subjects like ‘Arts and Aesthetics’. I got no answers; all I got was pissed. I decided I wanted nothing to do with goddamn art in my city ‘cuz I didn’t know where the hell it was.  

And in a story-twist - ironically enough, the kind that occurs in art - I found it when I gave up. It all dawned on me when I quietened down, when I began to look out of the window without expecting epiphanies. It popped up in the cityscape, surprised me; I loved what I saw; I felt random joy; I thought, ‘what is this, but art?’ On the daily traffic light wait at Aurangzeb Road, I saw an electricity meter box transformed into canvas, stencilled over with the delicate sketch of a face, blooming from a green stem. It was Sharmila Irom, stunningly rendered neo-iconic in chin-up Che Guevera style. Under it, her name, and nothing else; no plea, no anger, no resentment, no threats. Just a silent reminder of another person, and the enormity of her life, slipped into my daily mundane drive to work. On other days, it wasn’t all that quiet; it was clever, manipulative, and puzzlingly anonymous. Strung on astoundingly high rungs of electricity towers, on the messiest point of the Akshardham-Noida Morh traffic bottleneck, were two words typed in letters as neat and symmetrical as the traffic was haphazard and chaotic: ‘radhey radhey’. Not injunction, not advertisement; just an unsigned greeting - exasperatingly calm, if you will - inserted exactly midpoint on your gaze’s journey from vehicular mess to the heavens above.  

 I began wondering if these objects I encountered randomly were beautiful accidents or careful expression. They weren’t artefacts; they were each a story snuck into a riddle. They weren’t wispy concepts; they were the embodiment of emotion, intent, memory, they were half-spoken lines asking for completion. Who drew that beautiful Sharmila Irom rose, who cast it in a metal stencil? Why didn’t she say more? Who climbed that insanely high tower to put up those two words? Did he spend much time in the same traffic snarl as me, to want to do such a thing? Why did he speak with such enviable economy of words? I drew thought-doodles of these imagined people; lights turned green, winter-tedium flew off, the traffic wasn’t all that bad in the company of these friends of mine, strange and strangers both.

It was then that I realised that perhaps I was asking the wrong questions throughout; perhaps it would be better to not ask ‘where is art?’, but ‘when is art?’ Someone had felt the need to speak, and I was listening - perhaps art is when this connection occurs, when time and space get telescoped in this way. Perhaps art is not a mysterious object on a wall in a gallery, but that wonderful rare moment we experience when we find ourselves totally alone, even from our thoughts. A mood, a thought come alive, an emotion saturated. And if it is just that, it is everywhere: In that nondescript sentence of a book, whereon my chattering inner voiceover begins reading silently. Fluttering with the last luscious pink-mouthed blossom left on a high branch on the Cassia tree in March. Layered, wrapped, juxtaposed like a sea of motif, shade, fabric in the ladies coach of the Delhi Metro.

The power of art in this city isn’t a swift answer, a lofty cloud, a vantage point that’ll pull me above Dilli’s reviling mess, its frustrating contradictions, its unending cruelty. Perhaps its ‘meaning’ shall unravel when I learn to be fearlessly vulnerable; not hide behind opinion. Maybe what it wants to give me is not steely insight, but an excuse to make intimate contact with strangers. Maybe Dilli art is just an affirmation against the odds: an ephemeral moment that untethers the daily strife, and makes it seem possible that the Dilliwali can speak intimately with a stranger, a Dilliwala even - without preludes, without introductions, without having to answer the standard classifying question, ‘so where are you originally from?’

So that’s what Dilliwali prescribes when you ask her about the ‘Delhi art scene’. It’s what she looks forward to: some arty-farty self-citation in her city. Epiphanous moments that remind this writer of what words feellike, and not merely what they mean. Moments that shine on that thin, glinting, spider-silk thread that connects her to you; you to her city; the city to her.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

This cold, grey, wet January? Mainly her arsenal of tea. When the window-view looks like late evening allday, and all days in the month look pretty identical, the Dilliwali’s kettle works overtime to keep the ‘warm and fuzzy’ feelings flowing. ‘Tis all a bit like Britain during the Wars; Drama Queen Dilliwali tells herself, battling winter and sipping her various emotion-coded teas: Lime and Orange for slump-after-lunch moments, Organic Elaichi for shake-me-up-baby mornings, Himalayan Infusion for I’m-feeling-dandy hours, Mango Vanilla for working-late-into-the-night mojo. 

Dilmah Lime and Orange Tea (dainty, doily-reminiscent, lady-like flavour to your Ceylon black tea, Rs. 250 for a pack of 20 bags); Mango Vanilla Tea by Fabindia (teabag-equivalent of the fantasy hero: lip-smacking, natural, dark, lasts two rounds, Rs. 160 for a pack of 25 bags); Himalayan Herbal Infusion by SOS Organics (a mix of nettle, mint, buraansh, rosehip, desi lemongrass that can jiggy the olfactory part of you like no patchouli can! Rs. 90 for a box of 10 tea bags); Organica Elaichi Tea (Gourmet Dhaba chai, this one; best to go half-and-half with regular chai-patti for the authentic roadside-pavement-feel in your own home, Rs. 134 for a 100 gms tin). The first two available at the respective branded stores; the latter two available atwww.thealtitudestore.com

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).