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METROSCAPE
Rest In Rubble
Grieving visages,
trapped bodies, high-rise rubble-it would be easy for a photo exhibition
on the Gujarat earthquake to teeter on the edge of melodrama. Fortunately,
photojournalist Jayanta Saha's exhibition "The Splendours and Ruins
of Bhuj" at Mumbai's Centre for Performing Arts' Piramal Gallery
doesn't. The first part records Saha's shock on seeing Bhuj chhatris (memorial
monuments) razed to the ground in Fateful 59 Seconds. Saha had gone to
Bhuj seven years back and had shot the palace and the spectacular 18th
century Maharaoshri Lakhpatijis Chhatri. The post-quake devastation was
captured a week afterwards.
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| FRAME OF MIND: Saha with Tina Ambani at the
inauguration |
Progressively shock yields to irony-a pair of
birds engraved on a segment of debris is titled Till quake do us part
and a picture of a greeting card in the ruins of a house is Season's Greetings
and a Cataclysmic New Year. In the end, the irony shapes into existential
philosophy as two farmers on the side of a road wonder what lies ahead
and an old woman peers gloomily through her thick Boss glasses.
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| HALL OF
SHAME: The Maharaoshri Lakhpatijis Chhatri at Bhuj now (top) and before
the earthquake |
-Natasha
Israni
Metro Minutes
 Hollywood's
combat king and animal rights activist Steven Seagal has now written to
all Indian MPs to amend the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960.
Seagal says that the act "imposes only minimal fines even for most
heinous crimes" and is peeved about the "unlawful" treatment
of cattle during transport to slaughter. Not likely that the opposition
will stage a walkout over this in the current session.
 Though
Naseeruddin Shah has almost bid a farewell to Hindi films, embarrassing
misdeeds from the past have a knack of popping up. His return from the
US after acting in Peter Brooks' Hamlet was marked with the screenings
of the B-grade slapstick Mujhe Meri Biwi Se Bachao. Shah is pretending
to be unfazed and continuing with his performances of Ismat Chughtai's
play Ismat Apa Ke Naam in Mumbai, also featuring his wife Ratna and daughter
Heeba. "Rather than moan about the lack of good scripts, I took up
writing that presented acute character studies of people and situations,"
says Shah. This was in reference to the play, not the film.
 This
sandstone globule (right) with the staircase crevice is a stunning stupa-like
representation of the sanctum sanctorum, the belly of all iconic worship.
One of them also had a miniature temple on top, surrounded by a moat of
presumably holy water. But artist Amresh Kumar, 29, who made the sculptures
in Varanasi, is a bit unhappy-he thinks that they could have been better
crafted. Prospective buyers also looked downcast while returning from
the exhibition at Delhi's Lalit Kala Akademi last week-the foot-high shrines
were priced at Rs 75,000 each. Sure, if he doesn't want to part with them.
 So
what if she couldn't become Miss Universe. Celina Jaitley's taking the
pageant pledges contestants mouth off, quite seriously. Last week she
showed up at Kolkata's red-light district, Sonagacchi, to help NGO Institute
for International Social Development kick off their AIDS/HIV prevention
programme. Jaitley handed out condoms to sex workers who had no idea who
she was. "It doesn't matter if they don't know me," Jaitley
declared, flashing that trademark smile, "as long as I can help them."
The crown be damned!
Heritage Moves
 Some
arrivals take a long time coming. And sometimes the oldest come first
too. Emerging from the Koothambalams (temple theatres) of Kerala, Kutiyattam,
the 2,000-year-old form of Sanskrit theatre, is now set to storm the world
stage.
Thanks to the passionate advocacy of filmmaker
Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Sudha Gopalakrishnan of Margi, a Thiruvananthapuram
institute, UNESCO declared it a "masterpiece of oral and intangible
heritage of humanity" in a high profile ceremony in Delhi last week.
Kutiyattam is the first art form in the world to be so recognised. While
what this actually translates to on the ground level is yet to be seen,
bickering has broken out among the small Brahmin community of Chakyars,
the traditional practitioners of this art.
Ammanoor Madhava Chakyar, Kutiyattam's senior
most practitioner, complains of neglect. But Gopalakrishnan points out
the recognition is for the "form as a whole and not to any one particular
group individually".
Do marginalised forms necessarily have to be
marked by marginal politics too? Or are they better off preserved as museum
objects in tight, secure and controlled environments? Questions to ponder
upon.
-S. Kalidas
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METRO TODAY
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