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| ARTS TRIBUNE | Friday, July 14, 2000, Chandigarh, India |
A versatile choreographer
Film on dollar dreams |
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Shaping nature’s art work NATURE is indisputably the greatest artist and driftwood pieces are its most original sculptures. Chiselled by time and tide of swift mountain rivers, these marvellous pieces of art present the nature’s creative skill at its best. However, it takes the imagination and insight of a man with an artistic bent of mind like D.S. Kamal to spot and highlight forms in driftwood. A commercial painter by profession, Kamal has perhaps the richest and biggest collection of driftwood and jungle wood pieces in the region. Over the past 15 years he has collected over 1000 pieces, about 800 of which adorn his Unique Art Gallery at Mundaghat on the Kufri-Chail road near Shimla. The exhibits range from 6-inch pieces resembling small birds to huge sculptures weighing more than two quintals. Each piece has its own charm which captivates the viewer. Indeed, when a man lends an artistic touch to the creations of nature, the results are astounding and for every one to see at the gallery managed by the Saraswati Art Group. “The most striking feature of driftwood art is that it can’t be replicated. It is a mesmerising combination of nature’s mysticism and man’s artistry,” says Kamal, adding, “While working on driftwood pieces I don’t tinker with the original shape”. Explaining the process he says after assigning a shape to the piece, the unwanted portions are removed. In certain cases it is done by chiselling. Earlier, he retained the natural texture of timber. He used to clean and smoothen the piece. However, of late he has started polishing and painting the piece on the demand of the art collectors. While most of the pieces have been polished using wax and varnish to lend a natural colour to the wood, others are given a coat of copper paint with a tinge of gold or silver to give them the look of antiques. The alpine forests of Himachal Pradesh are a treasure house of driftwood and jungle wood pieces. The exposed roots of fallen trees, the termite-eaten hollow trunks and the wood brought down by the fast-flowing rivers and nullahs provide ample raw material for the artist, Kamal observes. Wandering in forests as a child, the queer shapes of jungle wood often attracted his attention and the artists in him grew along with him and he started appreciating nature’s creation by the time he completed his diploma in art. Occasionally, he brought home a piece or two with him while returning after trekking in the forests of Upper Shimla district. However, it was around 1985 that he seriously thought of having a driftwood collection of his own. In the next three years his small house was packed with over 300 pieces which, he says, were literally dumped. With no place for properly storing the pieces, some of which were indeed very bulky, he decided to discard a major portion of the collection. Timely suggestion by a friend for setting up an art gallery saved the rest of the collection. However, to raise money for the gallery he had to take a painful decision of selling off some of his best pieces. Since then he has been selectively disposing of piece to raise the resources to keep his hobby going. “Wild Flower”, a deodar piece with fungus intact, and the one entitled “Vulture” have been among his most appreciated exhibits. There are dozens of other pieces like “Dancing Lady”, “Dancing Bear”, “Lord Ganesh” numerous birds and of course a host of queer objects which could be used as bases for the centre table, flower pots, wall hanging or just show pieces in the drawing room. Kamal has over the past decade organised seven exhibitions, six in Delhi and one in Shimla. His ultimate aim is to set up a spacious modern art gallery where his rich collection can be properly displayed. For this he needs about Rs 10 lakh which is not easy to raise even if he keeps selling off his pieces which are moderately priced. While smaller pieces cost around Rs 200, the bigger ones are up to Rs 10,000. He hopes that the government will some day recognise his art and lend a helping hand in fulfilling his dream. |
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versatile choreographer SHAKTI BHATNAGAR ROBERTS, a versatile choreographer and Kathak dancer, is a name to reckon with. She is a woman of substance. Born in a family where appreciation for art was imbibed right from an early age, her penchant for dance received the attention of her parents. She started receiving formal dance lessons at home at the early age of four. She considers it to be an advantage to start early. “It is at an early age that you can develop a sense of form,” she asserts. She staged her first performance at the tender age of five in Delhi. After graduating from St. Thomas College in Delhi, she was nurtured by the renowned choreographer and exponent of Kathak, Maya Rao. She has a great admiration for Maya Rao whom she looks upon as her mentor and guru. Her guru instilled confidence in her to adopt the more adroit field of choreography. There was a perfect rapport between the teacher and the student. With the teacher determined to exploit the complete gamut of her talent and the student avidly contributing her efforts, the result was an articulation of expertise and perfection. “Choreography develops an artiste’s over-all personality,” she remarks. She learned music from the famed Anil Biswas. Presently engaged in teaching dance to children in Lawrence School, Sanawar, she tries to imbibe the roots of the rich Indian culture in these youngsters. Composing ballets in the Kathak style for schoolchildren every year is her most passionate and enterprising endeavour. This includes “Rani Roop Mati”, “Amarpali”, “Charu Lata”, “Kamayani”, etc. She was chosen to go to Fiji and later to Moscow by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. She taught Kathak to enthusiasts there and won appreciation for her work, both as a performer and a teacher. She recalls that foreigners are very hard-working, dedicated and go to any length to attain perfection. She considers her stay abroad as the golden period of her life. It gave her ample opportunities to develop and grow as an artiste. Her job as a dance teacher is satisfying and enjoyable. She believes, “It is a teacher’s responsibility to develop a child’s taste for art. It requires discipline and consistent effort both by the teacher and the student.” Persistent encouragement and support from her family, particularly her father and her husband Roberts, also a teacher in Lawrence School, Sanawar, is her pillar of strength. She believes, “Practice alone does not lead to
success unless ample stamina is built up”. Her close association with sports helped her build up the much-needed stamina. She had represented Delhi University in basket ball and was adjusted the best sportswoman of her college. She was awarded the much-coveted Shringar Mani in 1978. She believes in maintaining the pristinity of Kathak and abstains from mixing and experimenting it with other dance forms. People’s interest in classical Indian dance is decreasing and it is here she feels that some appreciation for this art can be instilled in schoolchildren. The beauty of Kathak lies in its simple gestures and costumes together with the facial expression which depict the natural life. Herein lies the beauty of Kathak which is therefore difficult to master and requires strenuous practice, she adds. After spending about 35 years in this field, she still yearns to achieve more. She proposes to conduct workshops for school and college-going students to imbibe love for this art, which she believes is dwindling from modern society. |
Sight & Sound WHEN I watch TV nowadays, I feel alternately sick and frustrated. It is difficult for a serious TV buff to find anything worth watching at a convenient hour. As a young (and serious) TV watcher remarked to me last week: “It is all money, money, money”. And how right he is. The worst offenders are the Indian or India-based channels. I don’t mean only Kaun Banega Crorepati, which is squandering money which could have been spent on better causes in a poor country, but still going places over our dead bodies. Everyone is in the money race regardless of social purpose, which can team very well with intelligent entertainment. Eking out mindless serials, the eternal filmi song-and-dance programme, list of ratings presented by the same fast-spoken, shrieking, flimsily clad females. Most attempts at serious coverage of cinema or the arts in general are superficial quickies. The channels repeat the same chat shows, mostly political, by the same anchors who grill the same politicians, one anchor doing this on four channels. Then there are channels specialising in sex and violence. They come into their own late at night. I found five channels showing gory violence, shoot-outs, attacks on women and children at the same time and switched off in disgust. I could not go to sleep after seeing a woman brutally assaulted with the kind of realism that our tomato ketchup violence mercifully never achieves. The monotonous serials showing the modern woman walking out of a marriage are small compensation, because they also are misleading in most Indian contexts. It was almost refreshing to find a revival of Rajani, with Priya Tendulkar shining as a housewife in ordinary clothes exposing everyday social evils. I think she achieved much more with Rajni than the Priya Tendulkar Show. Which leads me to the main point, that the serious foreign channels are doing much better than the Indian ones. It is always soothing to watch National Geographic, not only for its animals, but also for its travelogues, its social and country-wise documentaries on different peoples, including India. Both channels have done admirable programmes on Indian historical figures Discovery Channel goes to such rare areas as modern forensic medicine in Medical Detectives. Then we have programmes on air accidents, cars, medical research. Then there is the BBC which has luckily not forsaken its home programmes on BBC World in spite of going desi. It has done depth programmes on the Nazis, it even did one some time ago on the Nehru Dynasty and a book to go with it. It has also been a joy to watch its Great Railway Journeys, including one up to the Khyber Pass with Mark Tully. Has Indian TV offered any thing to match this? Has Indian TV done a single analytical programme on any worthwhile subject in the recent past? Has it started anything like a national TV archive for recording contemporary India for posterity? Instead it has lost or erased the most precious programmes it has carried since its inception and lost them for ever without any qualms or apologies. Sab chalta hai. Which brings me on to the sorry depths to which Indian public broadcasting — I will not say public service broadcasting — has sunk. I was amazed to see a shocking contempt for every professional code under the sun in DD’s News Channel the other day. Suhel Seth, the head honcho of the advertising agency Eques, who should have known better, in his programme Ad-Vantage asked a recently recruited colleague of his own agency: “Why did you join Eques?”. The answer should have been: “Because DD and you will put me on TV”. The advertising profession in India has a professional code of its own. Centuries ago, there used to be a Doordarshan code. Both seem to have been flouted with impunity. The second is DD’s appalling insult to viewers following its reckless and biased sacking of some of its best English newscasters. There is now such a shortage, having been hoist by its own petard, that DD is now getting its Hindi newscasters to read in English, in true Peter Sellers fashion. I believe that the rumour that it will soon force its Tamil, Bengali and Khasi newscasters to read the news in English is not as far-fetched as it seems in their supreme folly, DD’s new experts have forgotten that J.V. Raman started his career as a newscaster in English and will pass into the Guinness Book for volunteering to change over to Hindi. They might try him for a change and spare us the terrible murderers of the English language. |
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Film on dollar dreams THE growing craze among the youth to migrate to the USA finds depiction in an amateur director’s debut film. “Dollar Dreams”, a multi-lingual movie directed by Hyderabad-based Sekhar Kammula, is about a group of youngsters, who make all-out efforts to find a job in USA, only to realise eventually that the one who makes it becomes a misfit in his home country. Premiered at the tinsel city, Mumbai, the 100-minute film promoted by Channel V whose target audience is the trend setting youth, is being distributed by 20th Century Fox. An unusual aspect of the film is that none of the actors had faced the camera before. “The work is inspired by my own experience and by the fact that 66 per cent of the people who move (from India) to the USA belong to Andhra Pradesh,” says 31-year-old director Kammula, a software consultant by profession. The movie, the locale of which forms the cosmopolitan suburbs of Hyderabad, essays the varying degrees of the “go USA” urge among five boys and a girl. One among them, Ravi Raju, who manages to cross the Atlantic, finds himself out of the place on his first vacation back in his hometown, much to the discomfiture of his friends. “Dollar Dreams” has another youth unable to get along well with his parents who pester him to go abroad. The character, Srinu, continues to study for his entrance examinations withstanding all pressures from friends and parents until he reaches a crossroad where he makes his own choice. About such caught-in-the-middle people as well, Kammula has anecdotes: “It is peer pressure. Every man with a moustache in Hyderabad decides for everyone else that the USA is the way and if you do not pick that route you are just not good for anything.” The filmmaker acknowledges lack of opportunities and the corrupt bureaucracy becoming hurdles before the job seekers. He is also sad at “the strong sense of impermanence and detachment” of most of the intelligentsia towards the motherland. A confusion which Kammula developed regarding taking a stance on such aspiring US job-seekers ended one day with an incident. “once a married woman approached my gynaecologist sister requesting an abortion. Asked why, her reply was that the couple was planning to move to the States and wanted to have their baby there only because that can make the child a citizen... “For once my blood boiled. It was the most patriotic moment of my life. I slept saying I have to make a movie on this issue.” There is an unnamed sutradhar-like female character whose on and off presence brings out the conscience of the movie. She continually puzzles the gang, sympathises with them during the hour of need and tries to provide resolution when they are in a dilemma. —
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