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METROSCAPE
Indomitable Spirit
This has to be mentioned.
Moulin Rouge, Chamma Chamma number and bejewelled elephants were resurrected
by the inspired team of Meera Jain-Shaimak Davar-Shivjeet Khullar-Kunal
Vijaykar last week at the Mumbai's NCPA for the second coming of Bombay
Times' "Yes-The Spirit of Triumph". The song and dance variety
show had hip-shaking, belly dancing, waltzing kitsch and plenty of impromptu
singing that hit a chord with the city's glam-frat represented by Manisha
Koirala, Neelam and Yash and Avanti Birla. The show will go on to the
next weekend. So the spirit endures ... as does the interest.
—Himanshi Dhawan
Figure It Out
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THE MILKY WAY: Kallat and his Silkworm
(below)
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The J.J. School
of Art in Mumbai has got this long tradition of grooming abstractionists.
But Jitish Kallat, nurtured on the non-representative teachings of Prabhakar
Kolte, eventually turned out to be a discontent schist. At the show in
Delhi's India Habitat Centre (on till September 16) brought by Mumbai's
Gallery Chemould and Kallat fan Czaee Shah, the 27-year-old artist showed
large figural compositions about life, death and sustenance in his typical
screen-print style.
The series was called "Milk Route"
and an eponymous work traced the journey of the "nourishing agent"
from a pair of breasts, across a canvas of human figures to finally form
a knotty lactose delta. Another called Silkworm had the umbilical cord
of a human foetus rolled into a thumb print-like cocoon of a silkworm-the
cocoon that also becomes the creature's coffin. There's price for the
philosophy- an elevated Rs 1.75 lakh for the bigger paintings. The small
ones don't work as well anyway.
—Anshul Avijit
Grass Act
 In
The Flounder ... I'm explaining my broken love for Calcutta," German
writer Gunter Grass once said about his 1977 novel. Maybe it was a statement
to appease the people of Kolkata. Many of them had become ambivalent-even
irked-by the Nobel laureate's arguably derogatory statements about the
city. Last week, many decades later, Kolkatans got a chance to revisit
The Flounder: this time in the form of an exhibition, at the Seagull Media
and Resource Centre, of 25 sketches Grass had done to illustrate his book.
But for a whole generation of youngsters who weren't around when Grass
visited the city (twice, in the late 1960s and the mid-'80s), a far more
compelling display is the one that traces landmarks in Grass' life. Photographs
from the family album, magazine covers, Grass receiving the Nobel and
meeting with others of his ilk (Salman Rushdie pops up in one photo).
 The
Goethe Institut's Munich counterpart first put together the collection
in the 1970s. Now, the new, upgraded version tours the world till 2003.
After Kolkata, where it will stay for a month, it's Bangalore, Chennai,
Mumbai and Delhi till early next year.
—Labonita Ghosh
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