Friday, December 5, 2008

Artist responses to 1Shanthi Road


Illustration by Malavika P.C



a work by Lodypop

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Subtlety from the ordinary - review by Martha Jakimowicz for Deccan Herald

It is primarily from the tactile matter of mundane materials and things that art has to construct evocations of intangible sensations, recognitions and reflections. As a result of art-making, the concrete and singular transforms into the abstracted and generalised "defying gravity", Sofie Haesaerts's exhibition at 1 Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (November 7 to 14), indeed, was a visual metaphor and lyrical suggestion of this phenomenon along with its processes.

The Belgian artist, who spent a month of residency at the studio, conjured a sculptural environment using ordinary, locally sourced objects of utility as her basis, mostly furniture or its parts, which at the same time retained some of their original character while turning into images-indications-expressions of Haesaesrts's comment.


On entering the space, one faced a photograph of an Indian woman's eyes by the side of three wooden reapers that, leg-like, rose from the ground to rest on the wall. Initially one may have found it difficult to understand without explanation that Haesaerts was contrasting and linking the horizontal foundation of habituated perception to the verticality of art that sublimates and uplifts it. Nevertheless, the art works together added to a varied accent on movement upwards from the ground or suspension above as well as transposition.
Whole and fragmented pieces of tables and such were often brightly painted and placed in ways contrary to their functions, multiplied and fragmented, so becoming something else.

The apparently simple, playfully aesthetic effect acquired certain rudimentary seriousness, as the employment of traditional Channapatna lacquering craft provided a bridge between the industrial and the artistic.

A table placed upside down with large, rectangular volumes of different heights, slender, tall towers piled from little, smooth elements and a miniature arrangement of jutting out pencils created abstract, carefully studied compositions. A chain of red, bangle-like rings in mid air and a vertical sequence of bindis, too, suggested rising and hovering in an abstract manner.

On the other hand, identifiable objects, like clothes stands, were handled so as to hint at a nearly organic, arching transformation of the vertical and horizontal.

The concreteness of this state in the happening was again made general or essential in the piece shaped of glistening steel tubes which, avoiding reference to a utilitarian role, demonstrated a dynamic mediation diagonally between the horizontal and the vertical.

The impact of unassuming lightness that combined minimalist-wise formulated, basic, rough qualities with formal elegance was a desired trait here, sometimes bringing poetic evocations of thought about art processes but sometimes perhaps remaining a little literal.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Deceptive glamour - Review by Martha Jakimowicz for Deccan Herald 22 September, 2008


Deceptive glamour

Akshay Rajpurkar, a young artists from Mumbai, after his residency at the Bangalore Artists Centre, displayed the work done there at 1, Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (September 15 to 17). Titled Visually Arresting/Harassing, it was an installation around a number of largish canvases. The paintings base on and enhance the form and content of street advertising imagery. The seductiveness of commercial messages has been absorbed with all its brightness, the smooth allure of domestic objects on sale and a host of delighted young people — boys at a games console, a swimmer and pretty girls or a couple with ice-cream. The artist over-stresses the aggressive, electronically generated glamour and the tight crowding of pictures and spaces, while the broad smiles turn artificial. The whole then becomes quite tense and oppressive.

If one could sympathise with Rajpurkar’s stand and his ability to evoke a merger of real grace and aspirations with dreamy fantasy, the fact that he relies a lot on familiar ways with pixellated forms made the idiom fairly predictable within the painter's consummate hold on his technique.


An effective element of the exhibition was the ironic background in the form of an installation on the floor using stencilled commercial slogans whose promise of instant bliss was undermined by their evident, self-inherent hypocrisy.

The two short videos translated a similar material from urban street-life, posters, billboards and TV advertising onto a jerkily dynamic blur of dizzy visual simultaneity that denied the existence of a boundary in how we perceive reality and its glamourised images.

Technology as live vibrance - Martha Jakimowicz for Deccan Herald 5 May, 2008

ART REVIEW

Marta Jakimowicz



The multi-media event by Kevin Kelly (1 Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery, April 26 to 29) let one can hope again that exotic India is becoming obsolete.This mid-generation artist and assistant professor of art from Canada responded whole-heartedly to the reality of the country dominated by communication technology.

Technology as live vibrance

The multi-media event by Kevin Kelly (1 Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery, April 26 to 29) let one can hope again that exotic India is becoming obsolete.This mid-generation artist and assistant professor of art from Canada responded whole-heartedly to the reality of the country dominated by communication technology. His ‘Airsell’ exhibition took off from the omnipresence of mobile telephonic towers in and around the city. At first glance, the works seemed to act more in terms of a humorous as well as warm gesture of understanding and empathy rather than offer a profound experience. Still, they left a quite holistic and pervasive after-effect underscored by perceptive links with the wider ethos of the place on the grass-roots plane.

The most entertaining and spectacular component here was the racy, amusing video in which hosts of metallic tower grids with their antennas, receivers and such jutted out and jerkily shuttled between the ground and space to the accompaniment of raunchy film music. Somewhere on the edge of the camera real and animation, from the literal and the loud it drew a rough fantasy and poetry, while traces of popular cinema and TV commercials, like in life, coexisted with a sense of vibrant vitality. A connection with human bodies and sensations came through also from the partial graphic blur and rhythm of the computer-manipulated silhouettes.

The works that spoke about softly observing new technology against the changing modest-level traditional existence were the pieces done in collaboration with crafts people _ the black cloth hanging with motifs of towers boldly block-printed on them and the purple silk one embroidered in a more feminine manner with such designs threaded of small, shiny beads.


The most convincing aesthetically were the large, coarse-tender sketches of transmission machinery elements. As though tentative, they played on unfinished charcoal lines, sometimes replaced by shaped made from transparent cello-tape or torn strips of white paper. Through the residues of the realistic and of the nervous hand, there emerged a raw liveliness with an intuition of a forceful but chaotic, perhaps shabbily handled technology as being permeated by the humble yet spirited human condition.

Perilous urban glamour - Martha Jakimowicz, Deccan Herald dtd 28 July, 2008















The collaboration by two artists at Khoj@1Shanthiroad focussed on the glamour and dangers of our globalising, commercially driven urban landscape. The two works done by Sarath Kumarasiri of Sri Lanka and Bangalore's Shamala Nandesh (July 20 to 24) quite successfully connected and complemented each other using large-scale, plastic forms and referring to popular city visuals as well as to the disrupted, separate layers of its condition. Sarath Kumarasiri's ‘Stratification’ had a three-piece, architectural but also ‘archeological’ human head consisting of an ancient soil-face, a core structured like a high-rise of glass and a back soldered of digital hardware.

Each part standing at a distance from the others, the whole emphasised the incongruous simultaneity of the realities we live in. The sculpture was effective in its message, both grave and warm, if perhaps somewhat literal. The element of street culture dormant in it came to the fore and dazzled in Shamala Nendesh's ‘Celestial Clock’. An enormous fish with an open mouth covered in shiny paper and blinking festive lights, it was suspended from the ceiling, its equally illuminated tail to be found only in the room behind.

The blueness of the creature in the air let one think both of terrestrial water and rain. If the work did create the kind of enchantment associated with extravagant public celebrations, the ominous voracity intended in the metaphor was not exactly self-expressive. In fact, to understand it one had to learn that the inspiration had come from a poem by Nareyanappa and its character — the fish that had drank all the life-sustaining water. Even though not as weighty as they may have been, the sculptures were serious and spectacular enough, while doing justice to the project that was conceived as a joint venture.

Two Lyricism - review by Martha Jakimowicz for Deccan Herald dtd 11 August, 2008

ART APPRAISAL

Marta Jakimowicz

Two lyricisms

The exhibition called ‘Open’ at Khoj@1Shanthiroad (August 1 to 3) presented the work done by its two latest residents. Although differing in their approaches, themes and mediums, both artists touched on things personal and poetic. The temporary environment-installation by Nanaiah Chettira had three gallery walls studded with little stars painted in a simple, bright red whose loose rhythm converged towards the centre. The clear design-like motifs developed a slightly organic character, while the whole imbued its domesticity with vastness. The conceptual premise became intimate and emotive, as the artist alluded to the absence of and longing for someone dear. His handling of the obviousness contained in the comic strip reference combined with sparing words of poetry gained then a subdued lyricism and a sense of purity. A somewhat similar sensation arose from the photographs by Sohail Abdullah of Pakistan who has shot disembodied shirts, chairs and dried lotus flowers. Mediating muted darkness and hints at hue, the prints relied on modulated light for the effect of blurred translucence and permeating, shadowy glow in their suggestion of human presence and feelings. Technically consummate and very subtle when restrained, they however remained surface-bound elsewhere.

A meeting of minds under the badaam tree -Published by Deccan Herald - 28 Sep, 2008

A meeting of minds under the badaam tree



Suresh Jayaram talks to Yamini Vijayan about a space for art, and his concerns on Bangalore.


The doors to Suresh Jayaram’s house are almost never shut. After having converted the terrace he had inherited from his parents into an innovatively designed space for art, Suresh decided to use it for purposes beyond his own. That’s how #1, Shanti Road became an interactive space that encouraged conversations between people, providing an accessible platform for people to break out of their rigid identities, shed their inhibitions and experiment freely with art, without the fear of being judged. Bang in the middle of the city stood this house, wrapped around a 50-year-old Badaam tree, where horns blared and there was hardly a moment of silence. But somehow, people managed to find peace here and so did I.

Having taught art history at Chitra Kala Parishat for 12 years and eventually resigning as principal, Suresh decided to quit teaching to find time to do what he really wanted to do. The result was #1, Shanti Road, where he collaborated with Khoj, an international organisation for artists’ interaction. Suresh’s idea of developing a cultural artistic space such as this was mainly for artists to have an interactive space and also for people to come and experience art, hoping to free art from being seen as something ‘museumised’. But his connection with teaching hasn’t quite snapped, he tells me. “Some of my students are doing some very interesting work and that’s definitely a matter of pride for me,” he says, breaking into a sincere smile.

Having seen Suresh participate actively in initiatives and projects around the city, I asked him if he believes that art can change society. “If art could have changed society, then society would changed with Picasso’s Guernica,” he replied. An artist in the contemporary world must ideally be someone who can communicate on different levels and dimensions, he tells me, citing K G Subramaniam as an example. Although Suresh wasn’t his direct student, his admiration for this artist who made toys for children, wrote books for adults, painted murals and did much more, is clearly evident.


‘Nature in an urban context’ is a recurring theme in many of Suresh’s art-forms and also happens to be a subject that he speaks of, with genuine concern. Referring to himself as a complete Bangalore boy, he shares with me his experiences of taking organised heritage walks in Bangalore along with 75 other people, through the old and new parts of the city, observing how the sacred and the secular go together, how the traditional and modern have learnt to co-exist.

“Bangalore is the quintessential urban city. But it is important for us to realise that all this development didn’t happen in a day and we certainly shouldn’t be erasing the history of Bangalore for its future generations. I mean, what are they going to look at, glass facades? Bangalore is like a child that has quickly become an adult, skipping the entire teenage phase. If you want to transform Bangalore into a Singapore, then may god help you,” says this artist, who hopes for heritage restrictions to be imposed on the city. We must ensure that some of the beautiful buildings in this city are preserved,” he adds, leaving me wondering what ‘beautiful’ meant anymore.
Attributing his major strength to his association with the local artists’ community, he lends his studio space to local artists for shows, free of cost, and also helps them in promoting their art by getting them in touch with galleries and curators.

“I’m hoping that the government would use the metro stations also to foster local art and cultural activity, creating a kind of public interactive space where you could buy craft, have street plays and so on,” Suresh says, “although there would be no streets,” he adds, as an after-thought.

Discussing the recent curbs on dancing and singing in restaurants, he tells me that if this kind of cultural dadagiri persists, his hopes of local arts and crafts being promoted by the government are highly unlikely. “I mean, with this city turning into some sort of a Cinderella Raj, I only hope that the spirit of this city doesn’t burn out,” he echoes. While he dreams of a city that continues to live up to its undying spirit, he does not allow it to dampen the mood at #1, Shanti Road.

Artists continue to create, experiment, perform and interact there, often cooking food together, screening films of independent documentary film makers, playing live music and giving more reasons for artists to stick together, for the love of art.

A Space to Alter Alternative Practice



Bangalore’s 1Shanti Road has become a famous adda for artists, art lovers and connoisseurs who would like to see and practice art radically different from what one sees generally in the galleries. Abhiram Poduval sheds lights on the activities of this magnetic art junction.


‘Do not touch the art works’, a sign board on the gallery door says. Sofie Haesaerts, a sculptor from Belgium who has been working as a resident artist here is giving her final touch to her exhibition ‘Defying Gravity’. Her vertical sculptures of fabricated materials and found objects are geared up to attract the visitors. Sadanand Menon, a distinguished cultural critic, writer, journalist and curator is on his way to this place to show a film and talk on the esteemed dancer Chandralekha. The house is getting all set for the party after the opening. Visitors are driving in to get the glance of the exhibition and the film. I am eager for further actions and dialogue. It all happens in a fine dusk of November at 1shanthiroad studio/gallery, an informal /alternative space for the visual arts, creative collaborations, and new-media experimentation which is administered by an organization named Visual Art Collective.

What is an informal space? I am sure it isn’t an obscure space where anybody enters and swiftly changes him or herself into some casual cloths or behaviors. It is neither a space where you go with a grounding to pretend as relaxed as possible. What does it take for a place to be named as informal? 1shanthiroad is a paradigm for this. It is run by Suresh Jayaram, and a host of other young artists and curators working in the visual fields. Suresh has studied and headed an art institution-Chitra Kala Parishad, Bangalore (CKP).

“1SHANTHIROAD resulted from the frustration of the current model of how much of art and culture is presented by galleries, institutions, and other organizations in the city,” says Suresh Jayaram. For the first time, I came across an architecture which completely deconstructs the concept of private and public spaces. A senior student from CKP once sat here and made a call to her friend to meet her in some cafĂ©. But the friend said she would come to 1shanthiroad only so that she can smoke a cigarette here. Union Health Minister’s act of ban on smoking in public spaces provoked smokers to ponder differently about the notion of private and public spaces. So the girl from CKP conceptualized 1shanthiroad as a private space. Ask Suresh Jayaram, he might say it is not his private property anymore. Anyway, this is how ‘hypothetically’ 1shanthiroad wrestles between the notion of private and public spaces. This may mislead the argument about informal space. But it very much supplies to the debate by providing the reader with a small introduction to 1shanthiroad.

The informality of this space begins from Suresh himself. “It would have been difficult for me to carry along such a space if I had a nagging wife and screaming children in my house,” says Suresh. He had built this space on an existing terrace of his mother’s house and keeps talking about the struggling period when he had to convince his family about his intention of building such a space. It turned out to be like this, where there is every time something or the other keep happening at this place. Everything becomes discursive here. For young students and art practitioners, this space becomes an abode which critiques and analyzes their practices in terms of fundamental and conceptual levels. Accessibility becomes the prime element of this space thanks to this. In Indian contemporary art practice such discursive palettes have to develop parallel to art schools because almost all art schools still fumble around the authoritarian politics and personnel discrepancy of teachers.’1shanthiroad’ has been actively supporting alternative programs and art residencies collaboratively with Khoj International Artists Association and many other international art agencies. It has successfully contributed to make the visual art scene in Bangalore what it is today. But the current crisis is the need to sustain this space, provide basic infrastructure and salaries to working staff etc.

1shanthiroad is located in the almost at the centre of the city, near the historic Lalbagh garden off Double road. The yellow name board for Shanthi Road is almost attached to the gates of house No.1. The spiral stair leads to the space where the Bangalore art finds its repose. This is not a white cube but is almost a maze. The street has a very close attachment with the building since it stands touched to the road. When you are walking down on Shanthi Road, be alert, you might just step inside ‘1shanthiroad’. This space is a discovery of open and built spaces.

The renowned architect Meeta Jain, who had apparently won wide acclaims for this construction, constructed this multidimensional scheme of architectural formation. The building is a maze which moves through interconnected courtyards leading to different quarters of the house and you end up reaching where you actually started. Luminous use of natural light, the presence of a Badam tree which is the prominent element in the whole architecture and the found doors and windows from demolished old buildings; all these are major elements of innovative architectural construction. It interlaces various ingredients without a monitor and manipulates its utility into varied prospects in order to make the space more than just ‘a space’. It doesn’t have to alter its utility every now and then according to our interventions. It remains as it is. We change when we happen to be there. Simultaneity is the prime factor with which diverse activities can happen in different niches and planes. It provides a sense of discovery when you voyage through the alternating closed and open spaces. It has got its conscious reference of multiple spaces from the Mughal miniature paintings.

The mission of 1 shanthiroad is to engage people to collaborate and work in the space, and to develop and various other gatherings to build momentum as a group of people. It is already a well known space among artists who think of alternative ways of practicing with their body of works and also among those who do not think like that. The concept of an adda or sarai works here as many artists, writers, performers and many others make it a point to visit 1shanthiroad when they are in Bangalore. Dasharat Patel, B V Doshi, Sadanand Menon, Abhay Sardesai are some of those names who had visited this space the previous months. Others who have passed by are Vivan Sundaram, JohnyML and local prominent artists like N S Harsha, M. S. Umesh, Babu Eshwar Prasad, Surekha, Sheela Gowda,Pushpamala Shanthamani, Shyamala, Nandesh etc. Local artists and connoisseurs, friends and pals of Suresh, the neighbors to see the architecture; all find some instance to twitter in. They just wish to pop in so that they can get a glimpse of what is happening here as there is something or the other keeps happening here, not because they heard from somebody that there is always a ‘meals ready’ board hanging in the kitchen.

Eric Winer’s well known book named ‘Geography of Bliss’ talks about 1shanthiroad, “Shanti, it turns out, is a Sanskrit word that means ‘inner peace’. Maybe One Shanti isn’t the anti-ashram after all. Maybe it’s just another kind of ashram.” When art and artists face thier decisive existential crisis in terms of market, 1shanthiroad still says “MEALS READY”. Within lot of logistic and financial constraints, 1shanthi road attempt to promote dialogues within alternative art practices. This becomes an informal space where we can experiment and most importantly there is a liberty to be failed which the ‘formal spaces for art’ doesn’t promote. When everybody want the totality and its profit, 1shanthiroad promotes the process of art making and the aspect of participation rather than contemplation.


Originally published for www.artconcerns.com

All About Copyright Cloning

Dan and Domnique, Sydney based sisters and artists-duo recently presented their remix film ‘Pixel Pirate II- The Attach of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ at 1Shanti Road, Bangalore. Abhiram Poduval writes about the strategies that this artists sisters use in their work to debate the issue of copyright and cloning.

Our cinema experiences are practically very much related to not only our persistence of vision, but also persistence of mind. When we watch a film we cart with us the history behind it. The viewing experience of cinema becomes inclusive only when we are able to trace the past which made way for such a creation. The process of identifying certain characters, music, sound, dialogues everything depends upon our knowledge related to these which are occupied in our world of perception throughout our own history of perceiving. Cinema is time traveling machines which breaks all the notions of time and space and create a world of illusions and merchandise the dreams.

Soda_Jerk seems to be taking this concept a little further by complicating the idea of time in our viewing experience. The ground-breaking idea of piracy and the dominating ‘copy right commandants’ run into in war zone in a remix film titled ‘PIXEL PIRATE II The Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ done by SODA_JERK and SAM SMITH. The remix contains no original audio or video footage. Think of it as a sci-fi / biblical epic/ action movie with a subplot of troubled romance. It stars Elvis Presley, Moses, The Hulk, Monkey, Batman & Robin, Michael Jackson and The Ghostbusters. It is an hour long narrative remix video constructed from samples pirated from over 300 film and music sources.

“Our video remix practice is a technique of time travel that involves the creation of new video works by recombining samples from existing films, TV shows, music tracks and video games”, says Dan and Domenique the two Sydney based sisters working collaboratively as artists in the areas of video, photo-collages and installations. They work exclusively with found materials, recombining fragments of film footages, audio samples and image to create a new visual culture which deals with the intricate issues of copy rights. They think of video as a technology of traveling through the time which carries accounts of imageries which had individual existences in their own time and bring them all in a single frame in order to recreate a new time which has several other timely existences. “More than any other medium, video conveys the sense of a fragment of time teleported into the now”. The synopsis of their ‘PIXEL PIRATE II The Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ goes like this;

‘The year is 3001 and the ancient art of remix is being oppressed by the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Meanwhile, in a secret base-camp on the moon a team of Pixel Pirates plot to overthrow Moses by their latest scientific discovery: video cloning. Their plan: travel back to 1955, abduct Elvis and bring him back to the future. They then clone Elvis and send the video clone back to 2015 to assassinate Moses, altering the course of VHS history. But first the Elvis Clone must face-off against the Copyright Cops and every action hero that MGM can throw his way’.

It gives you all the fun of a popular Hollywood flick where there is an evil who dreams of spreading the power and pedals the world and a protector who saves the subjects form the evil. Here the evils are copy right commandants lead by Moses and the Xavier is cloned version of Elvis Persly who eventually after his death resurrect again into the world and asks his followers to fight the copy right giants. The thematic come form the biblical, and the characters form popular flicks. Soda_jerk, throughout their practices in video art addresses many aspects including the copy right law, the revolutionary VHS tapes, the history of hip hop music in the America, the African music and so on. Sode_jerk has been extensively exhibited in Australia and abroad including the 16th video Brazil Festival, The Hart Centre for Art Beijing, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney. They also work together as curators and art writers.

Soda_ jerk are currently working as resident artists at 1shanthiroad and initiating their next project around Indian Cinema which they find incredible as far as the thematic and the imageries are concerned.


Originally published for www.artconcerns.com

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Source : Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 9 Friday, November 14, 2008

Suresh Jayaram, former dean of Chitrakala Parishath (he quit in 2007), is quite the literary sort. A former journalist, he’s always got mouthfuls of erudite statements to make about the art scene that he’s watched grow around him in the city, and about the works of artists who breeze in and out of his home, 1 Shanthi Road. His words often make for chosen notes in catalogues and concept notes of shows. “He’s extremely well-connected, and plugged in,” said Abhiram Poduval, a 23-year-old curator, set to live in and work out of the 43-year-old Jayaram’s home till sometime in early 2009. The picture Poduval would have you conjure is of the former dean strapped in a skull mask with cables sprouting out of the spuds on his head leading into every fissure of the art world. “From young students to the elite, he knows them all,” added Poduval.
When Jayaram’s grandmother let him take over the terrace of her home, he decided to build an open house. “Nobody asks me how I made this place,” he exclaimed. “I mortgaged my mother’s house.” At first, one architect (unnamed) suggested he stock up on doors and windows. So Jayaram cruised around demolition sites, picking up throwaway pillars and discarded furniture. Soon he’d amassed a collection of turquoise doorways and panes, a lot of them from old colonial homes, when “the architect just disappeared”. That’s when he called in Meeta Jain.
“The brief was simple,” said Jayaram, the tufts of hair on his scalp a little ruffled. “I wanted this space to be open, and organic.” What Jain did was work around a badam tree in the courtyard (“It’s about 45 years old,” said Jayaram). And almost every room in the home – including the gallery hall that’s open to artists in residence – has windows or ventilators peeking outwards at this tree. “You know, there’s no fixed place for me to sleep in my own home,” said the former student of arts from MS University in Baroda. “That’s how I want it. I can sleep anywhere here.” If he did decide on one fixed place where he’d have to sprawl out in every night, that would ruin the scheme of things, he explained. “Also, the doors are always open.”
Since 2003, when he opened up his new home, Jayaram’s had about 20 artists residing and working out of here. Today, it’s a place where artists gather to bounce off ideas, seek critiques, and work in seclusion if they need to.
There are requests, like a recent one from a dance troupe, said Jayaram, who were looking to rehearse in the gallery hall. “I don’t want to stop them, I just tell them what they have to work with, and who knows what will happen.” Eric Weiner, a writer who spent a few days at Jayaram’s home called it “a sort of revolving salon” in his book The Geography of Bliss. “Everyone passes through One Shanti Road.” At any given point, there can be up to three artists in here, and very often, the house is bustling with people – for exhibitions, screenings, performances and impromptu parties. “This one time, I woke up at 11.45pm, and there was a bunch of people partying outside on the courtyard. They didn’t know I was home apparently, and I ended up joining them.” Rarely ever are these people charged.
There is a rate for people looking to move in – to take up the studio space, and use the bunker beds – though that’s completely negotiable, added Jayaram (the prices up on the website www.1shanthiroad.com can be beaten down). “There are some people who’re supposed to be friends of mine, and we formed this trust called Visual Arts Collective [the trust comprising four people and an advisory board of six artists keep the place going, suggesting ideas for shows and bringing in artists to work and display works],” he explained. “It would take at least Rs 30,000 every month to sustain this place. It’s always open for people, but I don’t like to charge. That’s until I have to rent this out to some ad agency, perhaps.”
1, Shanthi Road (98802-27706). Daily 10am-7pm.

Source : Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 9 Friday, November 14, 2008

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Behind the menu.

MEALS READY?Behind the menu.



The food cooked at 1shanthiroad is by Devi and supported by Mona. We wish to inform friends that it is largely very Vegetarian and very healthy. But there is fish and chicken at times. I generally shop and write down the menu for the day. I end up cooking at night, stir up a soup or a stir fry. This has been called a soup kitchen, railway station, art ashram, satsang, home for the lost souls and hungry stomachs.

My recent concern is the budget and the rising prices. According to the accounts this is what we spend per month.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Vegetables-2000/-

Rice, wheat, oil-2000/-

Gas-400/-

Milk, tea, coffee, -1000/-

Devi-1300/-

Mona-1500/-

MISC-800/-

Chicken and fish cost more!

Total-8000/-

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Additional cost-

Water1000/+

Electricity-1500/+

Gardeners-1100/-

T. V-300/-

Internet-1000/-

Total-8000/-

Roughly 8 to 10 people eat here every day. Many drop by for Tea, coffee and snacks. There are many more on openings and special parties. We have the honor to have fed 120 creatures at one party! We enjoy people. Food is a great leveler and brings us together.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Grand Total-16000/-per month.

Contributions are very welcome to support these rising costs and to retain this unique character of this place.

It is tough. But this is an open house as long as it lasts, and as long as I can afford it with my minimum resources.

Just a small word of thanks to all the friends who have chipped in to make this happen. This would not have continued without you.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

MEALS READY...CONDITIONS APPLY!!!

Mail Today, New Delhi September19th, 2008 page 23





Bangalore's oasis of free meals and art

by Max Martin

No. 1 Shanthi Road in Bangalore is like a Mughal miniature on a hologram. Many things go on at its corners and it can change colours like a chameleon.

A lot of artists use it as a hop- in studio, a space to display their paintings, installations and to screen films. Some stay on while on tour. Not to mention the addas over coffee or the customary free lunch.

There is even a ' Meals Ready' sign on the kitchen wall.

It is a roadside place that at first looks like any other neat pile of concrete off Bangalore's arterial Double Road. Get in and climb the ' monumentalised' staircase and you begin to get this feeling of getting away from it all. The front courtyard on the first floor is under the canopy of a huge almond tree.

With the tree as the starting point, architect Meeta Jain built this space on the terrace of visual artist Suresh Jayaram's parent's house in 2003. It is still morphing.

She wanted this place to reflect Jayaram's personality, a young former principal of the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath art school here.

Jayaram is the kind of person you can buttonhole in the middle of nowhere and start talking about art trends or what his mother thinks about him. " He's an oasis," says Jain. So she built one for him.

The initial project had two open courtyards, a studio and a living space with kitchen. Recently, Jayaram added two more separate living spaces. It is somewhat like clustering a set of boxes with empty spaces. But the place gives a sense of surprise at each level. It has five different types of staircases, for instance.

An ongoing exchange programme with Sri Lankan and Pakistani artists organised by Khoj — an artists' working group – will bring a lot of buzz here.

Abhiram Poduval, a budding art historian from Baroda art school and Khoj associate, came to 1 Shanti Road this week to be trained as a curator. He instantly liked the place as it has no definition.

He is looking at possibilities like showing more films.

Jayaram's former student Sandhya A has some plans too. Maybe a restaurant... Jayaram is game. " I don't want to make it an institution," he says.

max.martin@mailtoday.inM

A meeting of minds under the badaam tree ...

Deccan Herald » Fine Art / Culture » Detailed Story
A meeting of minds under the badaam tree
Suresh Jayaram talks to Yamini Vijayan about a space for art, and his concerns on Bangalore.


The doors to Suresh Jayaram’s house are almost never shut. After having converted the terrace he had inherited from his parents into an innovatively designed space for art, Suresh decided to use it for purposes beyond his own. That’s how #1, Shanti Road became an interactive space that encouraged conversations between people, providing an accessible platform for people to break out of their rigid identities, shed their inhibitions and experiment freely with art, without the fear of being judged. Bang in the middle of the city stood this house, wrapped around a 50-year-old Badaam tree, where horns blared and there was hardly a moment of silence. But somehow, people managed to find peace here and so did I.

Having taught art history at Chitra Kala Parishat for 12 years and eventually resigning as principal, Suresh decided to quit teaching to find time to do what he really wanted to do. The result was #1, Shanti Road, where he collaborated with Khoj, an international organisation for artists’ interaction. Suresh’s idea of developing a cultural artistic space such as this was mainly for artists to have an interactive space and also for people to come and experience art, hoping to free art from being seen as something ‘museumised’. But his connection with teaching hasn’t quite snapped, he tells me. “Some of my students are doing some very interesting work and that’s definitely a matter of pride for me,” he says, breaking into a sincere smile.

Having seen Suresh participate actively in initiatives and projects around the city, I asked him if he believes that art can change society. “If art could have changed society, then society would changed with Picasso’s Guernica,” he replied. An artist in the contemporary world must ideally be someone who can communicate on different levels and dimensions, he tells me, citing K G Subramaniam as an example. Although Suresh wasn’t his direct student, his admiration for this artist who made toys for children, wrote books for adults, painted murals and did much more, is clearly evident.

‘Nature in an urban context’ is a recurring theme in many of Suresh’s art-forms and also happens to be a subject that he speaks of, with genuine concern. Referring to himself as a complete Bangalore boy, he shares with me his experiences of taking organised heritage walks in Bangalore along with 75 other people, through the old and new parts of the city, observing how the sacred and the secular go together, how the traditional and modern have learnt to co-exist.

“Bangalore is the quintessential urban city. But it is important for us to realise that all this development didn’t happen in a day and we certainly shouldn’t be erasing the history of Bangalore for its future generations. I mean, what are they going to look at, glass facades? Bangalore is like a child that has quickly become an adult, skipping the entire teenage phase. If you want to transform Bangalore into a Singapore, then may god help you,” says this artist, who hopes for heritage restrictions to be imposed on the city. We must ensure that some of the beautiful buildings in this city are preserved,” he adds, leaving me wondering what ‘beautiful’ meant anymore.
Attributing his major strength to his association with the local artists’ community, he lends his studio space to local artists for shows, free of cost, and also helps them in promoting their art by getting them in touch with galleries and curators.

“I’m hoping that the government would use the metro stations also to foster local art and cultural activity, creating a kind of public interactive space where you could buy craft, have street plays and so on,” Suresh says, “although there would be no streets,” he adds, as an after-thought.

Discussing the recent curbs on dancing and singing in restaurants, he tells me that if this kind of cultural dadagiri persists, his hopes of local arts and crafts being promoted by the government are highly unlikely. “I mean, with this city turning into some sort of a Cinderella Raj, I only hope that the spirit of this city doesn’t burn out,” he echoes. While he dreams of a city that continues to live up to its undying spirit, he does not allow it to dampen the mood at #1, Shanti Road.

Artists continue to create, experiment, perform and interact there, often cooking food together, screening films of independent documentary film makers, playing live music and giving more reasons for artists to stick together, for the love of art.

Excerpts from The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

The problem with an Indian ashram is that once the ashram part is over you’re back in India. My taxi is stuck in traffic. My throat burns from the exhaust. My eyes sting. The roads seem even more chaotic than just a few days ago, or maybe my mind, serene and caffeine-free, is more attuned to the heat and dust and noise around me. I’ve always been especially sensitive to noise, a proven detriment to happiness, what essayist Ambrose Bierce called “a stench in the ear.”
Finally, we arrive at a plain-looking two-story building in a bustling part of town. One Shanti Road. It’s owned by an artist named Suresh. I had heard that he rents out spare rooms and that his house is a sort of revolving salon. Everyone passes through One Shanti Road. It seemed like a good way to recover, if that’s the right word, from my ashram experience, and get to know Bangalore at the same time.
Suresh designed One Shanti Road himself. He built the house around a large badam tree. He loves that tree so much his friends joke that he’s married to it.
I stumble up a circular staircase with my bags. The living room at One Shanti Road is chock-a-bloc with paintings and books and Hindu bric-a-brac. Dishes are piled high in the kitchen sink. Flies hover over the mango rinds and coffee grounds like a fleet of attack helicopters. “The maid didn’t show up today,” explains Suresh. Everyone in India has a maid, even struggling artists.
It’s still early in the morning but Suresh’s salon is already hopping. People are sitting around, lounging, smoking cigarettes and drinking copious amounts of coffee, reducing their pranha to dangerously low levels and not giving a damn. The air is thick with smoke and irony. I inhale deeply.
“Welcome to the anti-ashram,” someone says. I’m introduced to Harsha, whose name means happiness, and Vikram and Arjun and others whose names I can’t keep straight.
I’ve walked into the middle of an Indian bitch session. They’re complaining about Bangalore’s exponential growth and what it’s doing to their beloved city. My arrival, fresh from the ashram, has diverted the conversation from traffic jams to spirituality. It’s a sharp turn but one this group handles with ease.
“This is a country based on the God syndrome,” says Vikram, or Viki as his friends call him. He has a gold earring in one ear and is wearing a saffron shirt and is openly gay in a country that is not so open about such things. “People need crutches,” says Viki, “and the gurus are crutches.”
I feel compelled to defend the gurus, mine in particular, an impulse that surprises me. I tell them about the breathing technique I learned and my latent relaxation that resulted.
“Someone develops a breathing technique and then you want all the answers from him,” says a beefy sculptor named Vivek. “You’re increasing the oxygen flow to the brain. You get a high from that,” says Roy, who is a doctor and should know. Roy treats many patients but he’s never met one of them. He reads X-rays for a hospital in the U.S.
Okay, so there is a medical explanation for that giddiness I experienced. Does that make it less real?
“It’s a spiritual pedicure,” chimes someone else. “You feel better for a while but nothing has really changed.”
“Holy people must renounce,” says Viki. “Ultimately, it’s about denial and renunciation.”
I relay to this group of skeptics how Guru-ji accurately forecasted a lush green ashram, when the ground was rocky and barren and the experts said nothing could grow.
Classic guru mythology, says someone. They always announce they will build something or grow something even though the experts say it can’t be done. These revelations are always in retrospect, though. They are articles of faith, there’s no record of them, so they can’t be proved or disproved.
“Why can’t people just sit and meditate quietly?” says someone else.
“It’s too boring,” says Viki.
“Can you be genuine and a fraud at the same time?” I ask.
“Apparently you can,” says Suresh. “This is India.”
“Everything in India is true and its opposite is true also,” someone else says.
My head is spinning. It feels like it’s going to explode. Suresh, sensing my unease, offers me coffee but I demure. Decaf Me has survived three days already. I want to see how much longer I can last.
The conversation ricochets from the petty to the profound and back again. I’m getting spiritual whiplash. The subject of samsara comes up. That’s the Eastern belief that we are born over and over again, until we achieve enlightenment. Then we are liberated and do not return to this Earth.
“Personally, I don’t mind coming back as a dog or a tree,” says Viki. “I’m in no hurry to get off this planet.”
“Somewhere in the universe, someone has been given a speck of time. We are that person, it is our speck of time,” says Suresh, enigmatically.
Viki’s brief burst of optimism has dissipated and he’s griping again. “Do you know what the best business in this country is? Religion. I’m very cynical,” says Viki, as if there were any doubt. “If I have a problem I go to see my best friend, not a guru. They are making a mint, these gurus. I don’t think there is any such thing as a real sadhu. They’re all fake.”
In India, a man’s home is his castle. It is a porous castle, though, with no moat, and prone to invasion by friend and foe alike. At my apartment in Delhi, a perpetual parade of humanity passed: plumbers, electricians, delivery boys, holy men, government clerks, taxi drivers. It can be awfully annoying; sometimes you just want to putter about in your underwear, unmolested. This endlessly flowing river of humanity, though, also means that you are never alone in India.
At One Shanti Road, the conversation meanders like the Ganges, sloshing from one subject to another with no discernible pattern. One recurring theme, though, is the change taking place in Bangalore.
“We’ve become like owls,” says Viki. “People stay up all night, working or partying. Why is everybody running around in such a hurry? And the traffic is crazy.”
Don’t forget the mobile phones, someone says.
“Everyone has one,” says Viki, in the same tone of voice he might use for “Everyone has tuberculosis.”
“Do you have one, Viki?” I ask.
“Yes, I do,” he says, sheepishly, producing a shiny new model from his pocket. “But I growl and snarl at it. I have the right attitude.” He makes a snarling expression with his face.
“These people, the cyber-coolies, will burn out by 30, 35,” someone says. “They will wake up one day and realize that life has passed them by.”
I’m trying to figure out if these are valid concerns, or merely sour grapes, when Emma arrives.
She bounds up the stairs carrying two huge suitcases. The flight from London was a nightmare. She’s been traveling for 24 hours. No, she doesn’t need sleep, she needs a cigi and coffee, stat, and Suresh promptly produces both.
Emma is a hedonic refugee of the first order. When she was five years old, growing up in London, she would tug at women’s saris in restaurants. One of the first words she ever spoke was “India.”
She finally traveled to India at age 25. She flew into Delhi and hopped into a cab, plunging into the craziness that is an Indian street. Most people find this disconcerting, terrifying, but not Emma. She sat in the back seat of that cab and felt a deep sense of calm wash over her. Maybe she cried, maybe not. She can’t remember. One thing she knew for certain, though: She was home.
Properly caffeinated and nicotined, Emma plops down on a chair and joins the conversation. “What do you love so much about India?” I ask.
“I love the sound of horns tooting, the rickshaws, the women balancing pots on their head, the peanut wallah calling out, the bells at the temples. I love the Indian accent. It’s endless, really. I love everything. ”
I can’t help but notice that most of the things she listed are aural. India is a feast for the ears. Maybe that will change, as India grows richer because, to be honest, there is nothing more deadly dull than the sound of prosperity. The dull hum of an air conditioner or the muffled clicks on a keypad simply can’t compete with the sing-song call of hawkers at an open-air market or the rhythmic clickity-clack of a sweatshop’s sewing machines. Even Third World traffic, with its symphony of honking horns and tinkling bells, beats the monotonous whoosh of a modern freeway.
Emma used to live in Bangalore. That’s how she knows Suresh and the gang. Now she’s back in London but still returns to India often. A round of Indian geography ensues. They talk of people they know, connections, degrees of separation. A billion souls in India and the residents of One Shanti Road seem to know them all. This country is a chain of infinitely intersecting circles.
Emma opens her suitcases and I can hardly believe my eyes. Inside are dozens and dozens of bags, each one neatly wrapped in plastic. Emma is in the bag business. She designs them at her studio in London and has them made in Hong Kong and here in Bangalore. I tell her about my bag addiction and her eyes light up. It is the look of a crack dealer who has just been introduced to a hardcore user.
I ask Emma to analyze my bag addiction. As you recall, I own more bags than most people, including most mental-health professionals, would consider normal. “Hmmm,” she says, like a psychoanalyst who’s been presented with a particularly challenging case. “It’s a safety thing, a security blanket. Plus, you carry things in bags, baggage. So your obsession represents an extension of your emotional baggage. That’s it, you need some place to put your emotional baggage.”
Not bad, not bad at all.
I’m introduced to Chandra, a roly-poly guy who lives in the apartment downstairs. His head is large and bulbous and he’s wearing a green kurta, which hangs down to his knees. He reminds me of a friendly Martian. In fact, Chandra is a cultural geographer, which is a perfect thing to be, as far as I’m concerned. He lived in the U.S. for 18 years, in places like Waco, Texas, and Fargo, North Dakota. To this day, mere mention of the word Fargo is enough to make him shiver. He’s also developed an affinity for Seinfeld reruns and an unnerving feeling every morning that he needs to be somewhere, anywhere, by 8:30 a.m. “And it’s only in the past year, that I could take an afternoon nap and not feel guilty,” he adds.
Someone once told me that if you want to know India, just stand on a street corner, any street corner, and spin around 360 degrees. You will see it all. The best and worst of humanity. The ridiculous and the sublime. The profane and the profound. Here at One Shanti Road you don’t even need to spin around. From the terrace, I can see it all. In one direction is a shanty town. A jumble of tin-roofed shacks that, at first glance, looks like a garbage dump. Only when you look more closely do you realize that people live there. Look in another direction and you a shiny glass building, an office for Cisco Systems.
As I said, in India everything is a sign, especially the signs. Like the one across the street for a company called Sublime Solutions. I have no idea what the company does, probably some sort of software firm, but I love the name.
I step back inside and rejoin the conversation, mid-stream.
“It’s all true. And all false,” someone is saying, and everyone concurs.
Emma is on her fifth cup of coffee and seventh cigarette. He eyes have grown big and she is talking very fast now. Suddenly, the lights go out and the ceiling fans glide to a halt. I start to sweat almost instantly. No one misses a beat, though.
“Bangalore is the capital of power outages,” someone says.
“What about the high-tech companies?” I ask. “How do they do business with all of these power cuts?”
“Oh come on,” says Viki, as if I were terribly naĂŻve, which of course I am. “They have super generators, triple redundancy. They’re on a separate grid, their own grid.”
“The entire IT world is on separate grid,” says Chandra, and he’s clearly not talking only about electricity. The high-tech workers, those who have made it big, live in gated communities with names like “Dollar Colony.” They shop in malls, which also have their own generators. They worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and Shani, the goddess of aspiration.
Every old building in Bangalore that is torn down is replaced with an office park or a shopping complex. When the term shopping complex is translated into the local language, it emerges as, literally, “shopping complicated.”
“Yes,” says Chandra. “It certainly can be.”
I ask Emma for her happiness number.
“I’m a five, no a four. I think, maybe a 3.5.”
She’s dropping rapidly the more she thinks about it, which, as any Thai will tell you, is precisely her problem.
“I should be happier, but fear has wormed its way inside of me and my confidence is gone. When I was a painter, when I was younger and had nothing, I was happy.”
Researchers have found that happiness forms a U-shaped curve over the course of a lifetime. We’re happiest in youth and old age. Emma is at the bottom of the curve, an emotional trough. I don’t have the heart to tell her this, though. I fear it might push her happiness score even lower.
Emma tells me that the energy is better here than it is in London. There’s that word again, but this time I don’t cringe. Spoken here, by a chain-smoking bag-making hedonic refugee, it somehow rings true.


My life at One Shanti Road falls into a pleasant routine. I wake up every morning before dawn, a bad habit I picked up at the ashram, and do the kriya breathing exercise. Okay, so it’s just a hit of oxygen and nothing transcendental. I don’t care. It makes me feel good. It gives me energy. (God, now I’m using that word.) And since I’m off coffee I can use all the energy I can get.
Afterwards, I step onto the terrace and watch the sun rise over the shanty town next door. The poor live their lives more publicly than the rest of us. A child is squatting, defecating, a woman is giving a man a bath, pouring buckets of water over his head. Another man has a splinter or something stuck in his foot; and a small crowd has gathered around him and are, I imagine, discussing the best way to remove it. Another man is brushing his teeth. Most of these people have jobs, earning about $3 a day. They are not at the bottom of the ladder in India, far from it. And that is the beauty of life in India, no matter how low your rung, there is always someone beneath you. An infinite ladder.
Next, Suresh and I drive on his motorcycle to one of Bangalore’s parks—Bangalore was known as the Garden City before it was the IT city—and we go for a walk. It’s still early, but the park is crowded with people walking, meditating, defecating, doing yoga, laughing. On the way back, we stop to pick up some idlis and other spongy items that pass for breakfast in southern India.
The rest of my day unfolds lazily. I sit around reading and thinking about coffee. Mostly, though, I just sit. Indians, and Indian men in particular, are great sitters. World class. I can’t compete with them, but I do my best.
At some point, Chandra, the friendly Martian, will suggest we go to Khoshy’s, a coffee shop, and continue our sitting there. Khoshy’s is a Bangalore institution. It’s been around since 1940, seven years before India gained its independence from Britain.
It’s hardly changed since. The walls are mustard yellow and in desperate need of a paint job. Ceiling fans spin but not too quickly. Nothing moves too quickly at Khoshy’s. Not the waiters or the chefs or the customers, and that is precisely its appeal. People spend hours and hours here, meeting friends, sipping the ginger punch, and eating Khoshy’s signature “smileys,” fried potatoes cooked in the shape of smiley faces.
On this day, we’re meeting Chandra’s friend, Meena. She writes a column for a national newspaper. She has short grayish hair and a fierce wit.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Meena says, looking at me in the way she does, head tilted at a slight angle. “Gurus have their uses. They’re just not for me.”
I never thought of it that way before. Gurus have their uses.
Meena once spent six months in the U.S., working for the Baltimore Sun. She couldn’t wait to leave. There’s too much distance between people in the U.S., and by that she means more than physical distance, though that, too. She found the streets eerily quiet. Where are all the people, she wondered?
“Americans are so busy,” she says. “If they’re not busy working, they’re busy relaxing.”
I order a fresh lime soda. Meena does, too, plus the peanut masala, no chili.
“What can Americans learn from India?” I ask Meena.
“You could learn to relax, to live overlapping lives. We are an ad hoc county. We accept a lot of imperfections. You could be more like that.”
If anything, though, it is India that is aping America. Shopping malls, gated communities, fast food. They’re all here now. Meena doesn’t care for India Shining. She prefers India dull, which was never all that dull, actually.
“The Indian middle class is distancing itself from poverty and that is dangerous,” she says. “The old path you took to God was through suffering and renunciation, the way of the sanyasi. That doesn’t appeal to the young crowd. Everyone is into the insta-guru now.”
Chandra agrees. “There is no sacrifice required with these new gurus.”
Chandra offers me a ride back to One Shanti Road on his scooter. We are two men of not insignificant heft, and the underpowered scooter wobbles precariously. The traffic is so close I can feel the hot exhaust from the cars on my shins. The accident I witnessed some days ago has unnerved me. I see signs of pending danger everywhere. An ambulance passes, sirens blaring, and I realize this is the first time I’ve ever seen an ambulance in India. Now, we’re passing a sign for “Brain and Spine Care” Oh God, I think, another sign. We’re going to crash. But a few minutes later Chandra pulls up to One Shanti Road. I’m fine.


That evening, I step onto the terrace. The air is soft and cool. I look at the shanty town—it’s impossible to avoid—and I see a few kids picking through a pile of trash, looking for something they can sell for a few rupees. A few years in India hardens you to such sights. But there’s always something that pierces your armor, no matter how thick it may have grown.
I see a girl, she can’t be more than four years old, picking through the trash with one hand and holding something in her other hand. What is it? I squint and see that it is a stuffed animal, a dirty but otherwise intact little bear. My armor dissolves. This is not happy India. This is the country where, as Mark Twain observed, every life is sacred, except human life. Indians may care deeply about their families and circle of friends, but they don’t even notice anyone outside that circle. That’s why Indian homes are spotless while just a few feet outside the front door the trash is piled high. It’s outside the circle.


Emma has just returned from a visit to her factory. On the floor, she has spread piles of bags. They are everywhere and they are beautiful. I’m tempted to get naked and roll around in the pile, but restrain myself. This is a forgiving place but even the inhabitants of One Shanti Road have their limits.
I walk into the kitchen and notice that the sink is now spotless, the flies have retreated. Suresh’s maid, Mona, must be back.
I hear Mona before I see her. The bangles she wears on her wrists and ankles jangle musically. I had heard that Mona was extremely happy, even though she is dirt poor and lives in one of the shanty towns I see from the terrace. Mona knows only one word of English—super—so I ask Suresh to translate.
“Mona, are you happy?”
“Yes, happy.”
“And what is the key to happiness?
“You should not think too much. You should not have anything in your mind. The more you think, the less happy you will be. Live happily, eat happily, die happily.” And with that she flings her arms into the air with a flourish. Mona and the Thais would get along beautifully.
“But Mona don’t you have problems? Don’t you have money issues?”
She flings her arms again, this time much more forcefully, indicating that I’m thinking too much. Talking too much, too. The conversation is over. She has work to do. She walks away, her bangles jangling in the soft evening air.
I’m not sure what to make of Mona. I’m well aware of the dangerous myth of the happy, noble savage. They have so little but are so happy. Statistically, that’s not true. The poorest countries in the world are also the least happy, and that is certainly true of India. It ranks in the lower end of Ruut Veenhoven’s happiness spectrum.
But Mona is not a statistic. She is a person, and, she claims, a very happy one. Who am I to disagree? Poverty doesn’t guarantee happiness, nor does it deny it.
A few years ago, happiness researcher Robert Biswas-Diener interviewed hundreds of street people in Calcutta, the poorest of the poor, and recorded their happiness levels (again, based on self reports). Then he did the same with a few hundred homeless people in Freemont, California.
Calcutta’s destitute, it turns out, are significantly happier than those in California, even though the Californian homeless had better access to food, shelter and health services. Biswas-Diener attributed the surprising result to the fact that Calcutta’s street people may have little in the way of material wealth but they do have strong social ties. Family. Friends. I would go a step further and say that no one is really homeless in India. House-less perhaps, but not homeless.
There’s another reason, I think, why Calcutta’s poor are happier than America’s. If an Indian person is poor, it is because of fate, the gods, or some negative karma accumulated in a previous lifetime. In other words, they are not to blame. If an American is poor, it is seen as a personal failure, a flawed character.


One day, I find myself alone at One Shanti Road, a rare occurrence. I’m lounging on the day bed, reading a book and listening to Hindi pop on the radio, when I hear Mona’s distinctive jangle. She’s balancing a bucket of laundry gracefully on one shoulder. And then we have a conversation, even though we don’t share a common language. Not since my pantomimes with Luba in Moldova have I experienced such a thing.
Mona “asks” if I would like some tea. I decline but she persists. You really should have some tea. Should I turn on the ceiling fan? It’s a good idea. It’s hot. Maybe that’s too high a speed; I’ll turn it down. Mona indicates—in her clairvoyant way—that it’s best not to do two things at once. She turns off the radio. A few minutes later, she tells me my tea is getting cold and I really should drink it. She conveys all of this with musical flings of her arms. I decide that, statistics be damned, Mona is happy. Wise, too.


Diwali has arrived. Traditionally, it’s known as the Festival of Light but these days it’s the Festival of Loud and Obnoxious Firecrackers. Every street is converted into a free-fire zone. The dogs are traumatized, as am I. For three solid days, my ears are filled with this awful stench. Pop. Boom. And the smoke! It wafts over the city, which now feels like one giant war zone.
One the terrace, Suresh and Emma are preparing for the holiday. Emma is making a Diwali bowl: candles and flowers floating in a pool of water. We light a few sparklers. Mine won’t stay lit. Suresh tells me his favorite Hindu god is Shiva, the destroyer, “because you must destroy in order to create.”
Emma says she never feels impending doom in India, even though that would be a perfectly rational thing to feel.
“But back in Britain I’m often scared to death.”
Suresh puts together a package of cookies for the neighborhood kids and Mona delivers it in a shopping bag. We’re sitting under the aging badam tree, which hangs over the terrace like a ceiling.
“Suresh, don’t you ever get tired of all these people coming and going constantly? Don’t you want to be alone sometimes?”
“No, even when people are around I can be alone. It’s a technique that I’ve mastered.”


My flight leaves soon. I have time for one more trip to Khoshy’s, where I’ve become a regular. I’ve arranged to meet a professor named Sundar Sarukkai. He wrote an article about happiness that caught my eye. In one short paragraph he managed to capture a paradox that has been nagging me for some time.
“Desire is the root cause of sorrow but desire is also the root cause of action. How do we counter the paralysis of action when there is no desire to motivate us?”
Exactly. Hinduism—indeed, most Eastern religions—tell us that striving, even striving for happiness, is self-defeating. The moment you try to improve yourself, you’ve failed. Game over. Yet just lie there like a zombie and you lose, too. What to do?
Sundar seems like he might have some answers. He has advanced degrees in both philosophy and physics. He has shoulder-length hair and, it turns out, is related to Guru-ji.
We grab a seat in the corner. I like him immediately. He has Guru-ji’s twinkly eyes but not his overt godliness. I’m eager to talk about ambition, the one noun that, more than anything else, has sabotaged my search for happiness. It is the source of my success and my misery. A contradiction that, I figure, only an Indian can wrap his mind around, and not have his head explode.
“Everyone is ambitious. It’s human nature. The question is, what price are we willing to pay for the ambition? Not just an economic price, but a social price.” And, he says, the average American is willing to pay a higher price than the average Indian.
“But don’t Indians want to succeed?”
“Yes, of course we do, but we deal with disappointment differently. Our attitude is, ‘Okay, you’ve done your best, now let the universe decide.’ ”
“What do you mean?”
“What some people call chance we call God. But let’s call it unpredictability. You do the same thing ten times and it doesn’t work. On the eleventh time it works. The entire universe is chance and probability. So we accept everything.”
There it is: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier. Personal failure becomes “as small a cause for concern as playing the role of loser in a summer theater performance,” writes Huston Smith in his book, The World’s Religions. If it’s all theater, it doesn’t matter which role you play, as long as you realize it’s only a role. Or, as Alan Watts said: “A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip.”


We sit there at Khoshy’s and talk for a good hour or two. There is no rush, no agenda. It’s unpredictable, but in a good way. Time feels expansive. This, I realize, is what I love about India. Not the official ashrams but the unofficial ones, like One Shanti Road. The hidden little gems amidst the grubbiness and the squalor and the greed. I am, dare I say, happy.
“One Shanti Road is the happiest place in India,” Emma had said shortly after she arrived. At the time, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Now I do. Shanti, it turns out, is a Sanskrit word that means “inner peace.” Maybe One Shanti isn’t the anti-ashram after all. Maybe it’s just another kind of ashram.
My flight leaves in a few hours. Bangalore is anything but peaceful. Diwali is in full swing. Firecrackers are going off everywhere. The air is thick with acrid smoke. Suresh hurries me out a side exit to a waiting cab. I feel like I’m boarding the last helicopter out of Saigon. I give him a hug, and tell him to be happy. Then the taxi pulls away and One Shanti Road disappears in a cloud of smoke.
I am relieved to be leaving this craziness behind. I want to stay. A contradiction? Yes, but one I can live with, and even learn to enjoy.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Sanctuary for art Nirmala Ravindran

The red spiral staircase is the only indicator of the colour that the insides safeguard. The open verandah-cum-portico is the local adda here, and intently discussing the techniques behind the new show is Suresh Jayaram, art teacher and former Dean at the Chitrakala Parishad, and the guardian of this beautiful abode.Welcome to One Shanthi Road, artists’ refuge and award-winning architectural design, rolled into one. Jayaram has been ardently promoting art in and around One Shanthi Road for the last few years.The current artist-in-residence is Kevin Kelly, professor of art at a Canadian university in Winnipeg. It is artists like Kelly that One Shanthi Road is aimed at. “The residency is for anyone who wants to collaborate and connect with the local artists.
They can use the space for a long-period experiment and create new work, some of which have to be exhibited before they leave,” says Jayaram.Kelly is working on the changing urban landscapes, and he is particularly intrigued by India. What currently keeps him occupied is a series of paintings of transformers and television and telecom towers that dot the landscape.

Jayaram, at his artists’ retreatArtist G. Mahesh, originally from Nanjangud, is currently having his solo show here. Incidentally, this is the same space that Jehangir Jani worked from to create art for one of his curated shows.One Shanti Road was originally the terrace of Jayaram’s mother’s house, which Jayaram converted into a private living space, a studio, and a residency. “It was a barsati, but thanks to my architect we managed to create this,” he says. Meeta Jain, the architect in question, won an award for innovative use of urban space for this project.
The studio, which can be used by both visual artists as well as performers to showcase their work, includes an open courtyard and the residency upstairs, besides Jayaram’s own house. The residency is a selfcontained bedroom, with a mezannine, a work space, bathroom, and an outdoor space. Once a month is open house, and artists of every kind throng the venue. Everyone even knows where the key to the place is hidden. “It’s the best place in the whole world,” says Kelly.Since there is no funding agency or body to sponsor the working of the space, it remains purely artist-driven. The space is given to the artists who need it, and they, in turn, donate whatever they can to the running of the space.

Jayaram, Kelly and Mahesh sharing a joke at One Shanthi RoadThough One Shanthi Road has been working with visual artists so far, Jayaram confides that there have been a few “trespasses by performing artists” and, instead of prosecuting, he intends to make them a part of the deal as well.Jayaram’s plan is also to work and collaborate with artists from Pakistan and Sri Lanka. “It’s not like I don’t realise how fragile the whole thing is. It could pack up tomorrow,” he says about the place that he has poured his life into.As we walk out into an enthusiastic group of aspiring artists mingling with their seniors, sharing the same space and interacting, what comes to mind is Eric Weiner calling One Shanthi Road “one of the most blissful places in the world” in his best seller The Geography of Bliss. Indeed, who needs a better testimony!