SIGN - an art show

Sign, an art show conducted by a group of fourteen young artists at Indigo and Laburnum art galleries in Cholamandalam Artists Village, Chennai... draws to a close today.

The artists have taken a fresh approach to conveying the signs of conflict in life today. Predominantly influenced by the metro and its intrusion into our minds, the artists have tried to capture in images this very intrusion using new media and mixing techniques.

The tip of a cigarette smokes away in the room corner - an illusion caught on red board and cottonwool.

swimming figures from an installation, a pool with dying fish, fashioned out of a log...

You copied my tree of life! is a painting that causes the viewer to reflect on ownership and possession...

The sculpture of matchsticks reflects on post-retirement blues... a bizarre state of mind heaping on the floor charred matchsticks...

A painter searches for peace within the leaves of a forest tree...

Experience is just baggage - is the visual claim of one artist who displays an installation of a bag laden with bits of coloured paper...

An artist has the role of stirring the minds of a civilization and making them stop in their blind hurtling rush towards development. Sign - has the impact of the artists' effort.

The media is being kept on its toes now. What with the Fukushima disaster just about setting new standards of what can be called a disaster, totally displacing the media from the scams and the election manifestos, walked in Anna Hazare completely captivating media and websites with his fast for the Lok Pal bill. Very soon it is predicted that they will drift towards the cricket fever. Not even the world cup would have been as much fun we are assured, and the IPL sweeps over us, drowning us in a euphoria of challenges and betting and not even the elections are going to detract the media from this fever.
One struggles weakly to grapple with the speed at which events take over from one another. Is the news then really news or is it just another heavy dose of reality TV? Smaller bits of news like Saibaaba's ill health and the demise of yester year star - Sujatha - really failed to hit the headlines but were rather like small players in a world of big business...

Riders in the Storm

Workout in my friend's gym - music playing loud - mixture of rock songs from the 1980s... one song that I have not heard in over ten years goes.. 'Riders on the Storm... There's a Killer on the Road' and the whole mood is that of a traveller driving down a highway in the dark of the night with a swirling rain storm raging...


I was marvelling at how the words conjure up an image of darkness and thrilling chilling suspense, while the music paints in the background of the rain and thunder... Poetry should be like that - combining the mood of the words with the rhythm of the metre... How I wish I could write like that with abandon and passion...


Neruda seems to be a master at this...

Notice these lines from The Wars -

`...Toy of the Asians, doll
scorched by aerial murderers,
show your blank eyes
far from the waist of the child
who fled when you burst into flame
as every wall blazed
and death held the rice-fields...'


There is something inviolate about the Child. However abnormal the situation. We know of many stories where childhood ended at three even. Not just in warlike or other such dramatic conditions, but even in the most ordinary everyday situations like the case of nomadic labourers...

Thinking about Translation and Politics

I collapsed after my attempt at translating the Hollow Men. It was a poem that affected me deeply when I first read it many years ago and I wanted to see how it sounded in Tamil. At first it was a great thrill to form the phrases in Tamil, look for a way to represent the imagery and ask friends for their critical comments, but later it has thrown open a whole branch of thought. Should anyone at all translate into their mother tongue from English?

The question was thrown open by an editor I listen to, 'why translate from other languages into English'?

A fair question since Tamil literature is just now freeing itself from the shackles of authority and the dictates of caste and class forces. It is taking on forms more and more representative of lesser heard voices, suppressed clamour and ignored angles. In every sense, form structure etc there is a climate of experimentation and one does not want to be retro and wean away the audience from this.

But... the fact remains problems that need solutions - from the personal expressions of women and sexual minorities upto global crises of the misappropriation of science and technology and all resources, - still remains a universal need.

The solutions could be micro and perhaps even highly individualistic, but one can't deny that the problems are not new to us. Poems and Art trigger off thoughts that can release one to oneself and it is in that hope that I read "any origin" literature and translate into Tamil in the hope that readers who feel the same may enjoy the same contact sensation