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METROSCAPE
Not For The Squeamish
Gotthard Graubner,
a German artist who made vagabond black and white drawings and also attended
the fifth Indian Triennale in 1981, is making another appearance ... if
you can call it that. Atul Dodiya, the semi-surrealist and wholly figurative
Mumbai artist relentlessly searching for the unused image, took Graubner's
drawings (from a catalogue) as a canvas for his superimposed watercolours.
Not the type of painter who likes to be overshadowed, Dodiya says he was
attracted by the passive, accommodating tones in Graubner's work.
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| MUNDANE PROVOCATIONS: Dodiya; Joy
(left) among the 60 watercolours from the Body/Wash series
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The exhibition, "Body/Wash", at Mumbai's
Chemould Gallery shows provocative pictorials: nude acrobats, intimate
scatological scenes, breast milk mutating into a map of India, erect phalluses
and pointed nipples matching pointing fingers. "The heavy stuff I
was doing earlier tired me ... this was relaxing," explains the 41-year-old
Dodiya. "I wanted to show the normal, mundane life of humans."
Need Graubner's reaction.
-Anshul Avijit
and Natasha Israni
Guess What?
 Well
of all the ... I mean, I'll be ... You'll be speechless too when you hear
that a recent "MTV Sources of Cool" survey conducted among 570
trendsetting 15-24-year-olds in the US, Central and South America, Europe
and Asia (amchi Mumbai too), reveals that:
- In Japan cool means having your own style;
and in India, it means always being the first with new things.
- Young people in India derive their cool from
Hollywood films, music channels and travel; clubbing does it for Brazilian
youngsters.
- Striving for independence is a cool lifestyle
ideal for Indians, but in Mexico it's more about being informed and
making the best of what you've got.
- Local cool means different things in different
countries. While in the Philippines, "American" almost equals
local; in India, local means Indian.
That last bit, admits MTV India MD Alex Kuruvilla,
"is not a revelation for us. We've been celebrating this desi cool
trend on MTV for a long time." As for the rest of you guys: admit
it, you didn't guess any of this, did you?
-Anna M.M.
Vetticad
Musical
Chairs
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DAS ACT: The starlet reads prose and poetry
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WRITER'S RAGA: Chaudhuri sings classical music
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Was it a concert? A book reading? Those who attended
a reading of writer Amit Chaudhuri's works by actors Nandita Das, Dhritiman
Chatterjee and Anusuya Majumdar and professor-critic Ananda Lal in Kolkata
last week, were puzzled. Lal, who put the event together, had offered
just one tantalising line: it was to be a "musical interpretation"
of Chaudhuri's Tale of Two Cities (prose and poems about his life in Kolkata
and Mumbai) by a jazz quartet. Purists might balk, but guests were spellbound.
So was Chaudhuri. It was Jethro Tull for a back-to-school piece, soft
Goan music for a poem entitled The Bandra Medical Store and Chaudhuri
himself singing a snatch from Raag Bhairavi for his Afternoon Raga. Das,
who has never done anything like this, says she was more worried about
getting her reading right. "Amit is sitting there," she said,
"so you want to do justice." Going by reactions, the readers
did more than that.
-Labonita
Ghosh
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