The Artist & the Forger

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                                                  The Artist & the Forger

 ‘Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden’, the most haunting painting of the 20^th century, hangs in the Baroque Belvedere Palace in Vienna. The same title film by Austrian director Dieter Berner was one of the art films at IFFI this year. The other art film ‘A Real Vermeer’ directed by the Dutch filmmaker Rudolf van den Berg was a biographical film of art forger Han van Meegeren.

The former depicts the life of avant garde Viennese artist Egon Schiele who proclaims, “I shall endure for art.” And endure he does, in dark times through the love and staunch support of his sister Gerti and lover Wally. His bohemian lifestyle and relationship with muse Wally in provincial Austria get him in trouble with the authorities. Being the most provocative artist of his times, he steadfastly stands by his art in court, declaring that his paintings of female child artists are highbrow art-“This is art and not pornography!”

The painting from which the film derives its title depicts two lovers clinging to each other seemingly on the edge of an abyss. It is moving, disturbing and disruptive beyond belief. It hints at the end of a relationship and also the end of the world. “Clasp me as if it is the last time you will do so,” says Egon to Wally before painting the piece. He personifies himself in the painting as Death/Dracula holding his love in a vice-like grip– an antithesis to love.  One of the most self-obsessed artists, he painted this work at a turning point of his life, when he was abandoning his first great love and was about to be swept away by the First World War.

“It’s no coincidence that ‘Ego’ is the beginning of Egon Schiele’s name. He was a narcissist, who was very interested in the visceral experiences of his life. He was obsessed by sex and death in equal measure,” say art critics.

His self-portraits exude a wild energy. ‘Self-portrait with Physalis’ from 1912 is his best known one. Dutch genius Rembrandt executed 40 self-portraits during his artistic career and he was obsessed with the aging image of himself. Van Gogh, one of the greatest self-portraitist of the 19^th century in his ‘Self-portrait with the Bandaged Ear’ is depicting his emotional and physical decline. But Schiele’s works are imbued with an incessant rebellious strain, a brutal honesty about human body and sexuality. He seems to have internalized Freud and his ‘Theory of Sexuality.’ 

Studies on Egon Schiele state, “His work is often described as pornographic, grotesque, even disturbing and too explicit, and today it simply represents one of the finest examples of modern art, created by a remarkable artist who was able to capture the essence of the human existence in an unprecedented and inimitable manner.”

On the other hand, in the second art film ‘The Real Vermeer’, the story of Meegeren, the master forger, is played out in Netherlands during the Second World War.  Mysteriously, unknown biblical paintings of the 17^th century Dutch artist Vermeer start reappearing in the late 1930s in Amsterdam. They cause quite a sensation and are hailed by the art world. The famous art historian Dr. Abraham Bredius examines the forgery ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ in September, 1937 and says, “This is a genuine Vermeer masterpiece, using the ultramarine blues and yellows preferred by Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch Golden Age painters.” The confirmation precipitates in the forged paintings being sold at very high prices.

Meergen makes a fortune and buys a lot of property, jewellery and works of art to augment his luxurious lifestyle. He tells the interviewer, Marie Louise Doudart de la Grée, “I own 52 houses,15 country houses around Laren, among them ‘grachtenhuizen’, beautiful mansions along the famous Amsterdam canals.”

One of Meergen’s Vermeer forgery ‘Christ with the Adulteress’ is discovered by the Allies in an Austrian salt mine after the end of the war, along with  6,750 other pieces of artwork looted by the Nazis. The painting is traced back to Meergen. Now, he has to choose between being sentenced to death for being a Nazi collaborator or exposing himself as a forger.

Rudolf van den Berg, the director of the film made the original story his own and then retold it in the film by digressing from it, bringing in a romantic angle. In real life, Meergen never parted from his wife and children. His siblings too regarded him as an affectionate and warm person. But his art at counterfeiting had excelled to a point where he was able to turn the court proceedings in his favor. He came out a Dutch hero who had fooled the Nazis by selling them forgeries, accruing great wealth in return.  Van Meegeren remains one of the most ingenious art counterfeiters of the 20th century.  After his trial, however, he declared, "My triumph as a counterfeiter was my defeat as a creative artist.”

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A cocktail of suspense, art, history and theft makes the viewing highly entertaining!

Language as Syncopated Music

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/mainpage.aspx?pdate=2016-12-18

              Language as Syncopated Music

A writer for whom cadences of the Hindi language and its silences are paramount to a story, not as a vehicle for recounting the tale but the story itself. “For me, language is not just the craft; language is itself the story, the statement, the action.”  This is Geetanjali Shree, whose second name is her mother’s first name, substituting ‘Pandey’, her family name.

Geetanjali is a writer and an equally proficient playwright.  A Ph.D. in history, she has written four novels – ‘Mai’, ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’, ‘Tirohit’ and ‘Khali Jagah’.  She has penned several short stories and a non- fiction book, ‘Between Two Worlds’ - an Intellectual biography of Premchand.  Her plays have been performed to wide acclaim at NSD and other theatre groups in India and abroad. Her books have been translated into many languages.

Geetanjali has adapted Tagore’s ‘Ghare Bhaire’ and ‘Gora’ for the stage. One of her most successful scripts is an adaptation of Hadi Ruswa’s 19^th century Urdu classic, ‘Umrao Jan Ada’, to which she gave a radical feminist reading. She has also written the script for ‘Sundari’ and adapted Lao Jiu: The Ninth Born, a Chinese play by Kao Pao Kun, into Hindi, titled ‘Navlakha.’

Her first novel ‘Mai’ depicts a mother who is bent double performing the ceaseless chores of a teeming household. A woman who is a mere shadow, gliding noiselessly around rooms, meeting the vociferous demands of her family. Her bent spine and fragile countenance hides a rock-like core, which endures and holds her up inside. The secrets that she harbours in her psychological mindscape intrigue her children, who want to dismantle the enigma of their mother and know her better. The second novel ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’ is set loosely after the incidents of Babri Masjid demolition.  

‘Tirohit’ her second novel translated in English as “The Roof Beneath their Feet’ means hidden. The subtle, hidden secretive lives of women repressed, controlled and monitored in Indian societies. Geetanjali says, “Also, so much is lost to the procrustean ‘male gaze’ (if I may flog the much flogged horse!) which without realizing what it is doing , keeps fitting into its habitual cognitive modes even things that are completely at variance.”  She enumerates instances in the book where two women are together, but the conditioned gaze of the viewer (even children) only synthesizes the male and the female sexual connotations between them. The calamitous confrontation with death and thereafter forms the core of her fourth book ‘Khali Jagah’.

The past is a great presence in her work. It weaves in and out of the present trajectories of her characters. She says, “If ‘Hamara Shahar Us Baras’ has a historical past, the past in ‘Mai’ is a personal memory. The past in ‘Khali Jagah’ is wild, imagined, mad past and in ‘Tirohit’, it is doing other things.”

Geetanjali is much occupied with the interior monologues of her characters, that subtle exchange of meanings and dialogue between two characters. Stream of consciousness is a pervasive element of her writing. The staccato eruptions, dissect the narrative into fragmentary prose. Linearity is not her style. On the contrary, disjointedness and going back and forth become her hallmark technique. The craft depicts life in flux, tangled in episodes, thoughts and actions. Reading between the lines through the non-linear text, the reader is engaged in an adventure of piecing together the lives of the characters.

The metaphor is central to her stories. The subtlety with which she frames and embeds the metaphor in her story, is indeed admirable. Behind each metaphor a set of stories, behind each a parable. The bent-over back of the mother in ‘Mai’ itself throws up a collage of images and texts, hitting home, cutting through our defenses as a society. The bent back says it all – subservience, stamina, low self-esteem, inconsequential and yet enduring. The round shape offers no resistance and therefore, perseverance becomes its core, which lends its strength and spirit. The extended roof in ‘Tirohit’ becomes a playfield where hidden desires acquire a life of their own. With the roof beneath their feet and the open sky above them, the women across neighboring households meet and breathe free air and sunshine dabbling in that which is taboo within the confines of their homes below.

Geetanjali is bilingual. Her eloquent Hindi and English idiom reflects a comfort zone in both languages which then becomes her strength. Her first story ‘Bel Patra’ appeared in ‘Hans’ a literary magazine (started by Premchand and later revived by Rajendra Yadav). ‘Anugoonj’ an anthology of short stories brought her recognition and the English translation of ‘Mai’ catapulted her into fame. However, her connect with Hindi language is binding, “English has given me some new access but so far it is Hindi which has got me fame. A notable contrast was the interest other languages across the world, such as German, French, Russian, Korean, Italian, Polish have shown in my work. And mind you – again I wish to underscore this – they have reached me through Hindi, not English! I have been taught in some of these languages and translated too, from Hindi, not English. My writing continues to be routed through Hindi.” She adds, “Besides I want to write a great novel measuring up as great literature. That’s success, more than being propagated geographically. I want my work to be translated into different languages and reach more and more people, but my supreme judge is literature and that is where I must measure well.”

No doubt Geetanjali’s pervasive preoccupation with human nature and feminine spaces is laudatory, but it’s her stylistic literary technique which makes her literature sui generis. Her prose is sing – song, has a rhythm and a beat to it. It adapts very well to audio readings, mesmerizing the listener with its tonality and a magnetic quality. Invariably the syncopated musical quality of her language breaks the structure, sounding trills and quadrilles, in every other line. And that’s the mark of artistic craft! Kudos!

It was a pleasure talking to Geetanjali Shree over lunch on the last day of the Goa Art Lit festival.  

The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

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                      The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

Faisal Devji is here in Goa for the Goa Art /Lit Festival. The acclaimed author of ‘Landscapes of the Jihad’ and ‘The Terrorist In Search of Humanity’ now presents a polemical study of Gandhi in his latest book called ‘The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence.’ Digressing from the hagiographic text, the clichéd arguments like ‘a spiritual man in a breech-clout’ or aspects of his personal life, Devji dwells on ‘missed paths and hidden possibilities’ of the lethal political thinker of the twentieth century. 

He begins the text with the provocative words of the labour activist, Kanji Dwarkadas, “Gandhiji appealed to the imagination of the world as a little, scrawny, half-starved, self-denying man, a wizened monkey defying the terrible British lion, a reincarnation of Hanuman, the monkey-god”. But Devji fleshes him out as a radical force, completely enmeshed with world politics of his times. He examines the thought behind his potent legacy of non-violence that he bequeathed to the world. He directs the attention of the reader to Gandhi’s psycho-analytic theory of transmuting or redirecting violence through the use of non-violence. He writes, “Gandhi, the active proponent of non-violence or the ‘sovereign method’, wanted not to escape violence but to tempt and convert violence by engaging with it. He thought violence and non-violence were so intimately linked that one could be transformed into the other, since evil too requires goodness to sustain itself.”  

Gandhi’s “fantastic, almost crack-brained schemes” were a series of political experiments carried out in the strife-torn soil of South Africa and colonial India - an arena seeped in conflict, injustice and violence where a moral compass could transform human energies and liberate them not only from imperialism, but render to the world, a model of freedom from violence. Therefore, his agenda was not merely nationalistic, argues Devji. He wanted to set a precedent for human force at large in the face of political-ills of his times. His principle of non-violence was a moral agency and would lead to the spiritualization of politics. “Real suffering bravely borne melts even a heart of stone. Such is the potency of suffering or tapa. And, there lies the key to Satyagraha.” 

Quoting from Gandhi’s writings, Devji clearly indicates that ‘Bhagawad Gita’ was a way of life for Gandhi.  He steadfastly emulated the teachings in his own life and then fed it to the masses through various political non-violent protests spearheaded during the freedom struggle of India. “He was as hard-hearted as Hitler,” says Devji and would not think much about the sufferings and lives of people sacrificed in the face of non-violent fights as long as the moral remained untainted and won liberation for the larger good of man and posterity. Gandhi often said, “Have not our saints and sages taught us that one who is a worshipper of ahimsa should be softer than a flower and harder than a stone?”  Non-violent sacrificial offerings and moral acts went hand in hand against violence.

“History of suffering was preferable to one of victimization,” says Devji, of Gandhi’s thoughts and politics. If non-violent struggle was impossible, then the evil of violence was better than the glorification of victimization which Gandhi identified with cowardice. Between violence and cowardly flight, he preferred violence. He said that as long as he himself was a coward, he harboured violence and could not practice non-violence, which comes with deliberate conscious effort and thought. He also believed that a human being was a fragile animal but when doors were opened and a path stared you in the face, then strength of word and action came from God who directs you in such times. “Never have I attributed my independent strength to myself,” said Gandhi.

Devji explores the smorgasbord of Gandhi’s political experiments ranging between his early belief in the British Empire, the Pan-Islamic call for upholding the Caliphate, letters to Hitler, advice to the Jews and finally imploring the British to leave India to anarchy and civil war. The chapter titled ‘Bastard History’ situates his political experience and grooming more as a product of western influences from Europe, South Africa and Russia, somuchso that the ‘Gita’ that was to be his guiding light came to him in England through an English translation. His concept of nationality was based on the needs of the minority, for he felt that truth gets corrupted in the hands of the majority (the basic premise because of which he was assassinated).  Gandhi’s policy of non-cooperation, Swadeshi goods and working of a moral relationship between Hindus and Muslims is positioned in the narrative of the warfare and the Mutiny of 1857.

Devji outlines how the Mutiny provided a basis for Hindus and Muslims to understand each other’s faith and beliefs of purity and pollution and unite to oppose the British hegemony that was maligning their caste and religious sentiments. This brotherhood was appropriated by Gandhi when he established ashrams where each Indian followed his own religion and marriage alliances, yet they lived together and waged the non-violent movement under his aegis. 

It further led him to support the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate and the Pan-Islamic call of Muslims worldwide and in India.

Gandhi called the Jews ‘The Untouchables of Christianity’ and through his letters sent them a clarion call for sovereign movement of non-violence in the face of every atrocity by the Nazis. If they had died as protestors rather than victims, maybe the holocaust may not have become such a dark inerasable line in the history of mankind. He also implored them not to take on Palestine under the protection of British bayonets and to seek a settlement with the Arabs. Lastly, the final political undoing that Devji highlights is Gandhi’s call in 1946 to the British to leave India to anarchy and civil war. That partition was imperative was clear but Gandhi argued that if the Indians were left to sort out their own differences, there was still hope of brotherhood between Hindus and Muslims. “If the British were not here, we would still go through the fire, no doubt, but the fire would purify us.” 

After independence, he was apalled when the army was called out in the Kashmir agitation.  He wanted the non-violent cult to continue unabated whenever violent strife raised its ugly head.

Finally, Gandhi upheld that the right to live stems from a duty to be a citizen of the world. Devji highlights the paradox of life and death that Gandhi had clarified in his late writings: “The great importance that western medicine attached to human life, prolonging its earthly existence by drugging/injecting only to lose it carelessly in numbers on battlefields. Only by giving up the thirst for life, the excessive desire to live that was represented in modern war and western medicine alike, could the urge to kill be tamed, and the art of throwing away my life for a noble cause be mastered”.

The book presents an intensive read and the reader must be prepared to devote time and energy to follow Devji’s argument of Gandhi’s impossible feat as a human being. The juxtaposition of Gandhi’s own writings and thoughts continuously alternate with his own expositions in the book and engage readers all through the text.   

We have to give it to Devji; he has very successfully rendered to us the Mahatma as a ‘philosophical anarchist’. He not only cut the cord between the state and the sovereign, but also showed that freedom and sovereignty was every citizen’s natural possession as long as one was fearless to suffer by withdrawing one’s cooperation (non-violently) from an unjust order.

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Landeg White: The Global Poet

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                                                        Landeg White: The Global Poet

In the cool confines of a room on the upper storey of Fundacao Oriente, I met Landeg White. A citizen of the world, he has taught in three continents and turned out a prodigious number of books of prose and poetry. He is in Goa presently to talk to audiences about his work and preoccupations of the last 50 years. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Let’s begin with your translation and concerns about Portugal’s legendary poet Luis de Camões and his epic poem ‘The Lusiad’  

My first encounter with Camões was in July, 1970 in Beira, Mocambique through my wife, Alice, when I bought ‘Os Lusiadas’ and she, Jane Austen’s ‘Orgulho e Proconcerto’.  Camões was the most widely travelled of all the Renaissance poets. He travelled to East Africa when he was very young and then on to the Far East, including India and Macau. ‘The Lusiads’ is his epic account of Vasco da Gama’s pioneer voyage to India. He was loved for his lyric poems that I have translated as well. These were not known outside his home country. In my compilation ‘Translating Camões: a Personal Record’, I have recounted my concerns about ‘The Lusiad’.  Vasco da Gama, the hero of ‘The Lusiads’ was not by a long chance an epic hero but a working hero, whose voice became the voice of his nation. In retrospect, my translation has divested the poem of its imperialistic, nationalistic and colonial intention by playing down the multiple adjectives and finding alternative narratives for nouns and verbs in the poem. Along with religious sentiment, it equally conveys scientific revolution and discoveries of its times.

The book cover of your translated volume ‘The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis De Camões, depicts a colorful painting. How does it connect Camões to Goa?

Camões (1524-1580) was the first European artist to cross into the southern hemisphere and his poetry bears the mark of near two decades spent in North and East Africa, the Persian Gulf, India and Macau. From an elegy set in Morocco to a hymn written at Cape Guardafui on the northern tip of Somalia and through the modern European love poems for a non-European woman, these lyrics reflect Camões's encounters with radically unfamiliar peoples and places. I have arranged the poems to follow the order of Camões's travels, making the book read like a journey. The work of one of the first European cosmopolitans, these poems demonstrate that Camões deserves his place among the great poets. The colorful painting on the cover was, most probably, the artwork accomplished in Goa, depicting Camões in a jail cell, working on his epic poem.

Do you agree with George Monteiro’s book ‘Presence of Camões in America, English and South African poetry’? Is there evidence that Camões works inspired poets after him?

Camões influence is seen in the works of many poets of the last centuries. Elizabeth Bishop, Melville and South African poets like Prince and Campbell echo his poetics in their works.

our multicultural commitments in the Caribbean, West Africa and Portugal led to a plethora of writings rooted in the people and histories of these lands. You started with ‘V.S Naipaul: A Critical Introduction’ and followed up with twenty more books. Shed some light on your writings in ‘Studying to be Singular: John Gabriel Stedman, 1744- 1797’, and the more recent ‘Singing Bass’ and ‘Arab Work’.

My long interest in John Gabriel Stedman began with the brief account, first read in Trinidad, of 'the idyll between Stedman and his brown Joanna' in Charles Kingsley's ‘At Last’, an exuberant naturalist's description of a Christmas spent there in 1870. My book is a double biography. First of Stedman as an idiosyncratic artist and soldier (1744-1797) and second of the book he wrote about his five years' campaign in Suriname. Within the book are dozens of illustrations, including the engravings by William Blake - based on Stedman's sketches of scenes from the Suriname planter-slave society. It celebrates Stedman’s Suriname colony and his non-European dark love. My first book of poems ‘For Captain Stedman’, the title poem is dedicated to Stedman.

‘Singing Bass’ and more so ‘Arab Work’ reveals what it means to settle and age in a foreign country. The collection explores Portugal, where I have been for the last 20 years now, through the eyes of a Welsh poet.  It is a celebration of Portuguese culture.

I am wondering that if the book is about celebrating Portugal, why you titled it ‘Arab Work’?

The answer lies in one of the poems in the book. Alice was designing a water garden around our plot of land, in Mafra, Portugal, when we came across the stone trough, the square stone culvert that tunneled our plot to the arched exit. This was Arab work, a well-watered platform raised a thousand years back at the valley’s head.

Landeg finds the poem in the book and passes it to me. I read the last stanza aloud:

and my unfolding luck’s to have/purchase where the husbandry/of a millennium still holds./The olive trees are archives,/the soil clinging to my shoes/has been turned so many centuries/by tools that have kept their/shape and muscle. My sudden/ prayer is serious: to be worthy.

The impact is tremendous. I repeat the last two lines savoring each syllable.

All through your work you have hailed the oral poetry tradition of indigenous societies. Please expound on this.

Oral genres are maps of experience that open up the intellectual, emotional and moral life of societies more clearly and dramatically than any other source. Poetry becomes an investigation to understand the subtle and the obscure in cultures which would otherwise not be so easily understood. I was teaching ‘Dickens’ to my students in the African landscape when for the first time, through the open window, I heard a chorus of singing voices. Thus began a journey of understanding ethnographic history from non-literate social contexts.

Name the books that have set you free as a human being.

Derek Walcott’s first book of poems ‘In a Green Night’ and everything he wrote after that has inspired me. The pastoral rendering, with such great affection, in small villages is heartening for the soul.

Our long conversation lasted two hours, wherein the poet distilled his life and works. I got a peek- a- boo into a rich multifarious life, but the soul thirsts for more such enlightening encounters. Landeg White is here for the Goa Art Lit Fest from 8^th to 11^th Dec, 2016.

   

  

Lapata - Daisy Rockwell

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=14204&date=2016-11-20&pageid=1

                                                                     Lapata in Goa

Daisy Rockwell is coming back again! Her love affair with India, especially the Hindi literary cannon is well known. Her translations of Upendranath Ashk’s works have garnered a good following. She not only resurrected Ashkh for the English speaking ‘junta’ of India, but also other eminent writers like Arun Prakash and Shrilal Shukla. Lately her translation of Shubham Shree’s poems caused a stir in the traditionalist Hindi heartland. Here is the translation of Shree’s heart-felt meditation on how reading the feminist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex “ruined” her “purity”:

What have you done to me, Simone?/I was walking along /perfectly steady/on that path/where/goddess-worthy/“Purity”/awaited me/What you did was wrong…/you shoved me right in the middle of the path/to be “used”/such a dirty word/Tell me, Simone, why’d you do a thing like that?

Shree’s story is yet another case of ‘saved in translation.’ When the Hindu heteropatriarchy rejected Shree outright for her experimental poetry, ironically, Daisy’s English slang in translation restored Shree’s integrity and she was accepted back into the fold. 

Every regional culture of India takes immense pride in their writers. For instance, Bengalis grow up on songs of Tagore and savor writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Satyajit Ray. But that is not the case for the Hindi speaking belt. Beyond Premchand, no one enjoys eminence in the Hindi literary cannon. Daisy’s work has brought to light many obscure, neglected classical writers, such as Ashkh and Yashpal, who are now being compared to Proust and Tolstoy. Found in translation and hailed globally, the Hindi writers and their readers owe an enormous debt to Daisy’s work. A non sequitur line of thought follows - A time will come when we will be proud of our multilingual status as Indians.

 In her introduction to ‘Hats and Doctors’ (original text by Upendranath. A), Daisy writes, “Perhaps a translator should hope that her readers will develop a taste for the author’s works in English, so that she can bring out more of the author’s works in translation in the future. My hope, however, is the opposite: that some of these stories will induce a few readers — even just one or two will do — to turn their feet towards a Hindi bookshop one day.”

She goes on to ask herself - ‘‘Why translate?’’. Considering meagre compensation, poor recognition and solitary nature of the vocation, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Sometimes the name of the translator is not even mentioned on the book cover, she says. The stronghold of ownership ‘the author and the book’, disallows the establishment of any other way of belonging or shared authority. But her obsession with linguistic detail has a strong hold on her mind and she finds herself compulsively translating even when she reads for pleasure. 

She has numerous thoughts on every single word and its connotations in a sentence. In one of her articles she expounded on her translating technique, by enumerating multiple sentences for one situation. Readers can’t ask for better translation than this consuming effort for multiplicity that reaches for perfection. She writes, “I struggled mightily to find a phrase which captured the actual condition that a ‘kānā’ (Hindi word denoting blind in one eye) suffers from. ‘A man with only one good eye is much more wounded by taunts of his condition than a man with two eyes would ever be.’ Because this is the nature of translation. ‘If you’re blind in one eye, won’t you feel more hurt by being called ‘the one-eyed guy’ than if you have two good eyes?’ A translation is just never finished. ‘If people shout ‘Hey, one-eye!’ after a man with two good eyes, will he feel half the pain that he would if he were half-blind?’ Even when you see your work in print. ‘He who is blind in one eye feels keenly hurt by taunts of his condition; not so the man with two good eyes.’ It’s never perfect. ‘He who is half blind feels the greater injury from taunts of blindness than the man with perfect vision.’  There’s always some way to improve it. Taunts like, ‘What’s the matter, lost an eye?’ hurt the half-blind man more than the one with perfect vision.’ And it’s always possible I’ll change my mind about one-eyed men and stop thinking of them as Cyclopses. ‘The half-blind man is pained by taunts of blindness; not so the man with two good eyes.’ But probably not.”

Let’s shift the focus to her art and inflections of intellectual thought in it. This is a direct outcome of interaction with her works ‘Odalisque’at Patto, Panjim in 2014. The exhibition invoked the famous Odalisque paintings of Ingres and Manet in the viewer’s mind eye. But the collection was completely disrupted by what Rockwell had on display. The series represented Odalisque as fully participative subjects who chose their pose and manner of depiction consciously in the paintings. The artist and the subject seemed to have become co-creators in the process; a long digression from the19th century reclining female figure, often nude or semi-clad in shawls or loose robes, meant to invoke Oriental decadence and opulence. Viewing Rockwell’s work, it felt that the Odalisque had truly arrived at the gates of a conscious sexual freedom! 

‘The Little Book on Terror’, comprising essays and artistic portraits, invokes the US global war on terror. Her representation of Asian immigrants in mundane everyday poses, questions the straitjacketed mug shots of Asians in the media that are often labelled as terrorists. Her latest art piece on Facebook ‘What is Allepo’ completely nails her artistic quest in place. The war-torn city of Allepo in Syria was much in news due to refugee massacre but drew blank responses from Gary Johnson and Hillary Clinton - the Presidential candidates in the race up to the White House.  ‘What is Allepo’ indicts the power structures in place for their nonchalant attitudes. In face of this indifference and power, Daisy’s artistic quest gets compounded when she signs her art with her alias Lapata (meaning missing).

Daisy Rockwell, or Lapata, is a regular contributor to Chapati Mystery  and has written for The Byword, Bookslut, The Caravan and The Sunday Guardian. Her writing is largely oriental in its themes. We eagerly look forward to having her for the Goa Art/lit festival from 8^th - 11^th Dec, 2016. Kya pata bhulae bisaroo ko pata batadae yeh Lapata! 

Arshia Sattar

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/epaperarchive.aspx?pdate=2016-11-13

The Inimitable Arshia Sattar

Retellings of Ramayana are ceaseless activity in the Indian cultural context. These appear in diverse forms such as books, sculptures, films and art. Every Ramayana is different, as it is relayed from a different perspective. The many Ramayanas shift the gaze to altered positions and facilitate a new look. The Buddhist Ramayana is different from a Kannada or a Telugu Ramayana. Amongst the classical texts, Ramcharitmanas by Tulsidas is divergent from the Valmiki Ramayana. The former is a patriarchal take where Rama is God, the ultimate ‘maryada purshottam’, whereas the latter views Rama as an erring human being and provides space for Sita to be a questioning intelligent wife.

Arshia Sattar, the writer/scholar in Indian classical literature from the University of Chicago, is an academic voice who translated the Sanskrit text (Valmiki Ramayana) into English 20 years back. She has persisted with her endeavours with books such as ‘Lost Loves: Exploring Rama's Anguish’, ‘Uttara’ and ‘Adventures with Hanuman’. Her latest work is ‘Ramayana for Children’. She says that whenever there is talk of Ramayana, everyone professes to know the story from sources like translations, media, comics, theatre; but no one has read the Sanskrit texts, essentially the Valmiki Ramayana which was written circa 300BC.

‘Valmiki Ramayana’ is an extant text, a reference point from where all translations originated.  Every subjective retelling adapted it to a different context and imbued it with variations. Popular episodes in the story like ‘Shabari ke ber’ and ‘Lakshaman Rekha’ are recreations, which are not part of the ‘Valmiki  Ramayana.’ These sub-plots were woven in with contextual hierarchical societal changes and the position of women in it. The original text in fact portrays Sita as intelligent, argumentative and wise woman who, in her own dignified way, refuses to tide by every dictum thrown at her. Pushing the argument further, Arshia says that Rama’s character is questionable due to his sly act of killing Vali and  his banishment of Sita without any substantial evidence against her.

“If there is one thing I would like to change about the story is the banishment of Sita”, said a ten-year-old boy to Arshia during one of her readings of ‘Ramayana for Children’. There are both fun uncomfortable parts in the book.  But Arshia has handled the tricky parts well and skilfully told the story straight with her pared-down vocabulary. No lies, she says emphatically.  She is well aware that children can record, analyse and work out the binaries of good/evil and light/dark in their own precocious manner.

Another brilliant factor on which the ‘Ramayan for Children’ rides high is the evocative illustration in the book.  Fine arts and photography artist Sonali Zohra (who goes by the alias, Dangercat ) has rendered beautiful and eloquent graphics. The colour palette and line drawings deliver figures and designs of each frame vividly. The artist’s inimitable style stands apart from previous illustrations in print/visual media. Arshia credits the editors of Juggernaut for facilitating the process between the writer and artist and producing excellent results.

Arshia’s unflagging work on the Ramayana indicates that she regards it as a literary text which can be questioned, judged and reinterpreted in numerous ways. She embraces the many Ramayanas and welcomes continuous endeavours to unravel the text in different ways. She has traced queries to texts like the Jain Ramayana, which frowns upon the existence of flying monkeys and ten-headed monsters. 

She draws our attention to other writings, which raise eyebrows at the hegemony of the State and the role of the Kshatriya kings, at the expense of their households. She highlights comparative studies that make us choose between Lakshmana and Rama. The controversial episodes of the insult of Sarupnakha and the humiliating defeat of mighty Ravana, the great honourable King in many parts of the subcontinent, are an endless source of debates and discussions.

Besides being a scholar and writer, Arshia is also an activist. Sangam House Residency for Indian writers provides access to regional writers in India. Arshia says, “Literatures in many languages flourish in the subcontinent and literary cultures are strong, but it’s impossible for writers to access quiet and supportive spaces in which they can do their work, particularly if they are working in languages other than English.” Therefore, an idea of residency for Indian writers was born. Taking her activist avatar further,  ‘Mixed Bag of Books’ a book-club led by Arshia Sattar and Samhita Arni discussed and debated on Perumal Murugan’s “One Part Woman’ when the book was being torched and banished in India.

Her abridged translations of the epic Sanskrit text, ‘Kathasaritasagara’, is a heterogeneous collection of Indian folk tales compiled by Somdeva in the 11^th century. Arshia says that she had great fun translating the playful text. The stories live on the Zarathustra concept of an indulgent life, a bawdy and earthly existence lived and recounted by Sufis, Jains, Buddhists in Kashmir. “Here the universe is not weighed down by karma and dharma, and as a result, the text is playful and pokes fun at everyone. I loved translating this,” she reminisces. Another exciting foray was ‘Adventures with Hanuman,’ an original playpen for children with the monkey-god.  

‘Lost Loves’ by Arshia explores Rama’s anguish thus, “I always thought I was human, that I was Rama, the son of Dasaratha. Tell me who I am. Where did I come from? Why am I here?  He ceased and Brahma replied, ‘O’ caste the idle thought aside. Thou art the Lord Narayan, thou the God to whom all creatures bow.’” In her essays, she explores the delicate relation between Rama and Sita, and the trials and tribulations of their separation. The writing is contemporary and constructs the argument in present times by delineating the colliding public and private spheres of a legendary couple.

Arshia’s cool slang and unassumed disposition endears her to readers quickly. Her easy manner against a scholarly bedrock becomes a potent combination few can resist. We look forward to her presence at the Goa Art/Lit Festival from 8-11^th Dec 2016.

 

Museum of Goa

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=13680&date=2016-11-06&pageid=1

                                                   Mog

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.

I have loved hours at sea, gray cities,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour;

The poetic reflections by the seaside from the poems of Sara Teasdale and RL Stevenson conjure up the ephemeral sculptural installations of the Goan international artist Subodh Kerkar which dot the coastline in different parts of the globe.  The installation ‘The Moon and the Tides’ depicts a semi-white circle five metres in diameter made up of thousands of shells. The moon poem serenading the tides was painstakingly created by the artist on the coastline of Goa. Within hours, it got washed away with the turn of the tide, as wave upon wave in slow cadence hugged the moon-blanched shore.  The said installation hangs in a photographic frame in the central hall of the Museum of Goa (MOG), telling the truth but telling it slant – of rising and falling human civilizations along the oceans of the world.

Cultural histories of civilizations form footnotes to the works of Subodh Kerkar, the land and conceptual artist. These mneumonic devices help in remembering  past times. The narrative begins with the dialogue between Indus valley civilization and the Greco-Egyptian period and segues into the Indo-European cultural exchanges of trade and religion from 15^th century onwards. The epicenter is the Goan state along the Konkan coast. All through, the ocean remains his co-creator, sculptor and muse. His language is constructed using alphabets of pebbles, shells, sand, coconut and fibre.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

Derek Walcott

Subodh often reminisces of the long walks he took along the sea sands with his father, and how he learnt to listen to the song of the waves. The whisper, leap, roar, crash, break, murmur and stillness of water spoke to him relaying secrets of conquests, trade, war and gods of people who came and went, leaving signs and symbols that they had ‘been there and done that’.

Beginning with his installation on the myth of Parshurama whose arrow made the Arabian Sea recede and created the Konkon coast, he goes on to mark the voyages of Zheng He, the fifteenth century Chinese admiral whose ships were 127m long (the ships of Columbus, Vasco da Gama and other Dutch and Portuguese explorers paled in comparison). The long wooden boat ‘Ulandi’ at MOG mounted with antique Chinese spoons pays homage to the Hui Court mariner. The other large framed photographs of hundreds of fishermen forming a boat or a fishbone echoes the African concept of ‘Ubuntu’ in the mind of the viewer – ‘I am because we are’ – the feeling of communion with each other and nature.

Antique ceramic plates from China and Europe that are encrusted with oyster shells convey a sea story in one of the rooms at the museum. Cotton and Gulmohar trees are presented as installations and narrate the tales of intrigue by explorers and colonizers who described them as ‘trees with tiny lambs at their tips’ and ’sunset at the wrong time and wrong side of the sky’. If indigo and pepper were weighed in gold in India, Chili was the mainstay of Latin America. The Chilli installation, covered with crochet pieces, tells us of its indigenization in Goa far from the South America coast. ‘Bubblegum God’ installation playfully orchestrates the hybridization of religious practices. The amalgamation can also be seen in installations like ‘Jezu-Krishna’ where Krishna’s crown wears a cross in place of the peacock feather. Moving on, the exhibition rocks with jest in ‘Colonial Rock n Roll’, a tongue-in-cheek take on the appearance of toilet paper rolls in Indian washrooms. The quotidian becomes vested with an artistic sensibility and relays a historical bite.

One of the rooms is completely dedicated to his father, Chandrakant Shankar Kerkar, the teacher artist.  The latter’s evocative paintings present socio-economic commentary of the cultural landscape in Goa in the mid-twentieth century.  Besides this, MOG also houses works of other artists from Goa and abroad. The quintessential ‘Caste Thread’ by Kalidas Mhamal is a visceral artwork articulating conversion, psychological upheaval and remnants of ancestral heritage. On the other hand, in lighter vein, is Santosh Morajkar’s sunny yellow pilot motorcycle, marking a ubiquitous fast taxi of the Goan landscape. On the international front, ‘Expanding Structures’ by Rene Fadinger is a metaphysical take on empty space and its potential to morph into new forms. Sebastian Kusenberg’s ‘Pradakshana around St. Anthoy’s Chapel’ marries the language of colliding religions.

Moving on to the platter of activities at the museum - ‘MOG Sundays’ is a highly successful weekly venture, wherein eminent speakers from home and abroad showcase their journeys and generate alternative ideas and debate. The cozy auditorium has a full house with more wanting to get in and participate in the invigorating proceedings. Soon, this event will shift to a space outside the main building next to the workshop at the back with facility to accommodate 200 people. Music performances, art classes and ethnic Goan spreads are other attractive offers on the calendar. MOG is all set to host a series of talks – ‘Kala Vichar’ in collaboration with Raza Foundation, Delhi in the coming year.

Subodh’s pluralistic idea of ‘Art for the people, art by the people’ - has MOG going full throttle to involve the local populace in initiatives to create artistic context in the cultural climate of Goa. That art heals, invigorates and balances our minds thrusts the argument for such a space as necessary condition to the well-being of society. Art in dialogue with literature, philosophy, music and history further expands the horizon of MOG to a liberal construct – which then becomes the ultimate utopian dream. This week when MOG marks its first anniversary, this dream is already becoming a reality!

How Darjeeling unrest today echoes Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss

http://www.dailyo.in/…/gorkhaland-gjm-we…/story/1/17863.html

Lost Inheritance in the Mountains  

“In 1947, brothers and sisters, the British left granting India her freedom, granting the Muslims Pakistan, granting special provisions for the scheduled castes and tribes, leaving everything taken care of, brothers and sisters -

Except us, EXCEPT US. The Nepalis of India. At that time, in April of 1947, the Communist party of India demanded a Gorkhasthan, but the request was ignored… We are labourers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads, soldiers. We are Gorkhas. We are soldiers. Our loyalty and character has never been in doubt. And have we been rewarded? Can our children learn our language in schools? Have we been given compensation? Are we given respect?

No! They spit on us.”

This excerpt of a speech from the Booker Prize winning novel “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai mirrors the current unrest in Darjeeling led by Bimal Gurung, the leader of Gorkha Janmukti Morcha.

Kiran Desai, who won the Booker Prize (2006) for her novel, portrays the unstable political period in the mountainous region of Kalimpong in the eighties – when Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), led by Subash Ghising - the Guru of Bimal Gurung, demanded a separate Gorkhaland in Kalimpong and neighbouring Darjeeling.  

In a crumbling Scottish mansion named Cho Oyu lives Sai, a seventeen-year-old girl, with her grandfather, a retired civil court Judge. Completing the household are the Judge’s beloved dog, Mutt, and his faithful cook. The very first chapter portrays the liberation army of GNLF, made up of young lads, enter Cho Oyu forcefully – ‘in leather jackets from the Kathmandu black market, khaki pants, bandanas - universal guerrilla fashion. They were looking for anything they could find – kukri sickles, axes, kitchen knives, spades, any kind of firearm.’

The situation is also profiled through the character of Gyan who is however not part of the same class as Sai. He speaks a different primary language and eats more indigenous food. He is Nepali, which is a minority group in India but a majority group in Kalimpong. He tutors Sai and is paid a paltry sum for his time and effort by the judge.  He tells the story of his great grandfather, his great uncles in the British army, “And do you think they got the same pension as the English of equal rank? They fought to death, but did they earn the same salary?”

Slowly it dawns on Gyan why he had no money and no real job came his way, why he couldn’t fly to America and why he was ashamed to let anyone see his home. He and his kin did not enjoy the same rights as the others around him - Anglo Indians, Bengalis, Marwari businessmen, and even Lepcha tribals. Destitute Anglo-Indian students in Dr Graham’s Homes were better off than him. They all belonged here lawfully – whereas his identity was questioned all the time.

The novel deals with the quest for individual identity. It is the struggle for search of one’s root, in a world that has undergone a significant change in the postcolonial era.  The conflicting ethno-racial relationship between people who come from different cultural, historical, religious and social background throws up a playfield of unease. 

For meeting of varied cultures is never harmonious. Often violent, it peters out to a compromise and sometimes subsumes the weaker culture.

Kiran Desai gives a backdrop to the agitation in the book – “When England controlled much of India, they brought in Nepalis to work on the tea plantations, and although colonialism is officially gone, the descendants of these people still live in the border region, but do not have equal rights. During the mid-1980s in the border region of India, including Darjeeling, there were numerous processions, demonstrations, and some violent riots by minority groups who wanted fair treatment.’

GNLF wanted to bring dignity and a sense of belongingness to their people. The biggest insult they often faced was when they registered the utter bewilderment of people who didn’t consider them to be ‘Indian citizens’.  Leading a procession through Kalimpong, 

Gyan’s fellow agitators proclaim loudly, “This is where we were born, where our parents were born, where our grandparents were born. We will defend our own homeland, we will run our own affairs in our own language. If necessary we will wash our bloody kukris in the mother waters of the Teesta, jai Gorkha.”

Conversations between Anglo-Indian residents in the novel bring in further detail of the history of Gorkhas. -  Around the 1800s NepalI people left their villages and migrated to the tea plantations of Northern Bengal, in search for work. They settled in hamlets bordering remote tea estates of Darjeeling-Kalimpong area. By and by along came the imperial army looking for strong soldiers to fight their wars. They were delighted to discover the Gorkhas - able, courageous, obedient, and to top it, loyal to the core. They recruited them in numbers, and the Nepali soldiers fought English wars in World War I and II, besides imperialistic expeditions. 

They brought innumerable victories to the British and were decorated with honours. A Statue of a Gorkha soldier at Westminister is testimony of their valour and the part they played in British wars.

Of course many perished on battlefields fighting alien wars and sometimes against their own brothers in Pakistan, India and South East Asia. Still there are a number of Nepali soldiers in the Malaysian, Singaporean armies today. The Indian army also kept its doors open to recruit Nepalis in its cadre. The Gorkha regiment is the pride of the armed forces in India.

When power suppresses, resistance is born in its interstices. Despite the fact that generations of Gorkhas have lived in the Bhutan-Sikkim-West Bengal sector since the 1800s, this part of India has been a messy map. First the Gorkhas were turned out of Assam and Meghalaya. The King of Bhutan made noises against influx of immigrants to his country. The novel further augments, “A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred: between Nepal, England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling was annexed from Sikkim, Kalimpong plucked from Bhutan.”

The proud Gorkha felt betrayed, “In our own country, the country we fight for, we are treated like slaves. Here we are eighty percent of the population, ninety tea gardens in the district, but is even one Gorkha-owned?  Every day the lorries leave bearing away our forests, sold by foreigners to fill the pockets of foreigners. Everyday our stones are carried from the river bed of the Teesta to build their houses and cities. 

We are labourers working barefoot, in all weather, thin as sticks, as they sit fat in managers’ houses with their fat wives, with their fat bank accounts and their fat children going abroad.”

Their fury flamed over, overflowing into the streets, as they looted shops, burnt lorries and burgled rich Anglo-Indian bungalows.

The current situation in Darjeeling is akin to the political and cultural upheaval discussed in the book. History may never repeat itself but it often rhymes and “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. 

When A Loved One Has A Different Mind

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/epaperarchive.aspx?pdate=2016-10-30

                                              When A Loved One Has A Different Mind

‘Life Flows On’, a feature film dedicated to Global Dementia Challenge and Elderly Care, deals with lives of three dementia patients. Much of the film is shot in Mussorie (Uttarakhand) and it stars Indian actors Tom Alter, Satyabrat Rout, Ganjendra Verma, British actor Allegra Dunn, Norwegian actor Astri Ghosh and French actor Michael Dieter. Directed by Vishaal Nityanand, the film had its world premiere at the Jagran Film Festival in Mumbai earlier this month. It is now being screened at 27 cinema halls across the country.

Besides the delicate issue that the film highlights, it’s Astri Ghosh’s role in the film that caught my attention. Astri is a writer/translator based in Goa. Her Indo-Norwegian background makes her a versatile global citizen. She has translated/written over 15 books as an outcome of her extensive work at the Henrik Ibsen Study Centre at Oslo University, language-teaching assignments at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway and translations of eminent Urdu/Hindi/ Norwegian texts. She also curates the annual Jazz Festival in Delhi, led by Soli Sorabjee. Lately, she has turned to acting, and her repertoire has expanded to include meaningful cinema, the kind we are talking about here. The role in the film was both creative and emotionally painful for Astri whose mother was an Alzheimer’s patient. She says that most of the other actors also had personal stories linked to dementia.

The film evocatively portrays the psychological and emotional journey of Emma (Allegra Dunn) whose mother (Astri Ghosh) is progressively degenerating, with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, after the death of her husband (Tom Alter). The latter appears in a few initial scenes as an environmentalist working in Mussorie. It is after his passing away and the worsening condition of the mother that Emma tries to find a support system at the health services in her town. The complete absence of any facility except diagnosis compels her to head to Delhi, where the doctor (Satyabrat Rout) offers counselling. There is nothing much he can do other than delineate coping mechanisms, progress of the disease and some prescriptions. In the background, a nameless, homeless lunatic (Ganjendra Verma) affected by dementia is shown walking the streets in front of Emma’s house. He is ridiculed and called a madman and one day a lorry picks him up against all his struggles and stows him away to a distant landfill, so that nobody may feel bothered and stressed by his presence. Days later, he is found dead and frozen on a rubbish heap. Simultaneously, Emma’s multiple trips culminate in a no-show as the doctor who was treating her mother has become a dementia patient himself.

In his interviews, the film maker Vishal. N said that his aim was to draw attention to the deplorable infrastructure and support system for the terminally-ill and elderly in India. If the well-to-do in India have no access to dignified medical structure, what of the man on the street? They are left to die like animals. A comparison with the western world then surfaces in the thought process. Yes, there is no doubt that they have a much better support system in place and the weak and differently-challenged people lead a more dignified life. Their emotional needs of companionship with others of their ilk, participation in weekly stimulating activities, and care facilities ensure that they lead more satisfactory lives. The question then arises - with philosophy of spirituality and dharma in India and other countries in the East, why do the old and disabled lead such miserable undignified lives?

After a long meditation, yours truly has arrived at a hypothesis. It’s the karma philosophy – the cause and effect principle – the bedrock of the collective Indian consciousness that makes people treat the widows, disabled and diseased, in the most abhorrent manner. The fact that these so-called unfortunate people have got what they deserved, a divine nemesis, makes others around them shameful and belittled to own them. “These people are cursed and suffering is their destiny” - is the most pernicious paradigm that people in the third world live with. Every deplorable condition and facility (or lack of it) then originates from this mentality. People shrug their shoulders and wash themselves of every guilt and shame in the book of mankind with the quality of ‘PITY’. The follow-up action then can only be charity.

On similar lines, a recently published book ‘The Book of Light’ edited by Jerry Pinto is a compilation of true stories of people who live with differently-challenged relatives. The narrative abounds with accounts of hard struggles with loved-ones of a different mind. The book came about as a follow-up exercise from Jerry’s book ‘Em and the Big Hoom’ (a personal story about his mother who had bipolar disorder). Can we say that the plight of these numerous families would be a different story if the society as a whole thought differently?

Michael Foucault’s thesis which resulted in his book ‘Madness and Civilization - History of insanity in the age of reason’ highlights the control of power structures in societies. Religion, the state and societal control make living a jail, where people are constantly monitored based on beliefs and constructs. Madness and so-called lunacy have, therefore, been viewed through various societal belief–systems in different periods of history.

The book outlines that madness was a part of neighborhoods in the medieval age. Lunatics roamed the streets and people enjoyed light empathetic moments with them and also vested them with some divine epiphanies. At the turn of the 17^th century, tales of darkness, evil, witches, visitations by demons drove fear into the minds of the so-called fortunate and able people and they drove the mad (delirious, delusional, depressed, violent) off their streets.  They confined them or put them into ships (ship of fools) which endlessly sailed the waterways around lands, till the mad died locked in underwater cabins in the ships.

With the dawn of modernism was born an umbrella terminology ‘mental case’ for every differently-abled mind. The state put in place asylums, psychiatric wards, cabinets of medicines, team of doctors and research students to monitor the so-called ill. Foucault terms this arrangement as another form of imprisonment from the prison to a psychiatric ward. At the end of his book, he brings in the idea of ‘art and madness.’ Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, Gerard de Nerval are examples of mad artists who created praiseworthy artistic works. His central argument rests on the idea that modern medicine and psychiatry fail to listen to the voice of unreason and the mad. Neither medicine nor psycho-analysis offers a chance of understanding unreason. To do this, we need to look to the work of "mad" authors such as Nietzsche, Nerval and Artaud. Unreason exists below the surface of modern society, only occasionally breaking through in such works. 

Ship of fools, confinement, pariah treatment, psychiatric wards, indifference, hatred, fear, neglect and shame are not the answer. These societal perceptions only worsen the situation. The story of madness exists, in some form, in every household. The solution, maybe, lies in answering the question – “How do you define normal?” A well-reasoned and holistic treatment of the subject will restore the dignity of the differently-abled people.