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EDITORIAL
It's
Show Time
The importance of Vajpayee in America is atmospherical
 True,
it won't be the great oriental road show in America, a page-one pageant
with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the enchanter-in-chief. No,
it won't be a Vajpayee festival to match the earlier Clinton festival
in India. It's a show nevertheless, the ongoing Vajpayee journey in the
United States. And it should not be taken too seriously. But professional
harrumphers are at work. What is he doing there now? Isn't it the wrong
time-also the wrong man? Point well taken. Americans are in the middle
of an engrossing domestic show dominated by presidential candidates Al
Gore and George W. Bush. Also, at this moment, the outgoing President
Bill Clinton won't be of much use. Then there are questions like: will
there be a bilateral breakthrough, or, will there be something big on
the CTBT? All misplaced questions, sorry.
The importance
of the Vajpayee visit is purely atmospherical. In terms of the currently
forward-looking Indo-US relations, Vajpayee in America is the natural
extension of Clinton in India, no matter however lame-duck the present
occupant of the White House is. For, it may not be Hindi-Yankee bhai bhai,
but ruling Delhi no longer sees Washington through the cataract of anti-Americanism.
It is no small achievement in national confidence. And the credit belongs
to the BJP-led Government in Delhi. After all, it took almost a decade
for India to define national interest in a new set of vocabulary. The
Clinton visit was the high point of the brand-new Indian engagement with
the US. It was a blockbuster, particularly in the context of the initial
Pokhran isolation and the Kargil restraint. A new mood was in the making.
Nations too should have some party-time to make the going easy. That is
why Vajpayee in America matters. Take it for what it is.
State
and Taste
Bureaucrats
can't be the arbiters of aesthetics
 It
was not a work of art begging for a controversy to survive. The Vadodara-based
artist Surendran Nair's An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of
Icarus has achieved off-canvas fame, courtesy a silly controversy authored
by a bureaucrat. The director of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA)
found the painting unfit to be exhibited. The reason: Nair's depiction
of the Ashoka pillar on the canvas is an insult to the national emblem.
This is some national responsibility, really, that too from a bureaucrat.
Unfortunately, this happens to be a misplaced sense of responsibility.
For, India as a nation is not fragile enough to collapse under the weight
of a framed canvas. It is Indians like this bureaucrat who paint India
in cultural stereotypes-intolerant and insecure. Not artists like Nair,
whose "offending" work can be offensive only to the culturally
paranoid. The paranoia of the government-owned NGMA has brought a bit
of Khomeini's Teheran to Delhi.
Still, it
is not a textbook case of the freedom of art versus the tyranny of the
state. Generally speaking, India is not a canvas-burning nation, and free
expression in India is not a one-way ticket to prison. What has happened
in NGMA is a raw display of the "official" state of art-management.
Why can't the NGMA be run by professionals, like the way the Museum of
Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London are? Why should India's
premier space for modern art be managed by a bureaucrat on deputation?
It is time for the Government to leave the affairs of art to people who
have something to do with art. Otherwise, the Government-and the country-will
be the recipient of labels it doesn't deserve. The aesthetic of the NGMA
director can be an immediate motivation-for the sake of art as well as
the state.
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The
Government should encash at least a part of its stake in LIC and GIC before
its too late, suggests INDIA TODAY associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar
in 
