Why I like art ~

I like art because I like reading. I am sure of it now. 

Reading is the stuff of stories, imagination, getting into the mind of characters and places and having adventures, inside or outside, and always always finding bits of oneself strewn all over the pages. 

I remember Vikram Chandra in the Lit Fest this year saying that when we go to the theatre and react to emotions, it's our emotions which are the ones which come out. For example in a play whose emotions are we feeling - the actors? They might be hating each other in a love scene. The playwright's? He is probably dead  for years. It's the bliss of our own consciousness that we taste. It's us, our resident feelings which are coming out when we react to something. Art only helps in bringing it all to the fore. And we suddenly discover ourselves right in front of us - as a poem, as a raga, as a painting.

As I see Satish Gujral use rams and horses as symbols of power in poignant ways to convey how humans misuse power; or I see a large canvas of a Google map of Bombay with roads crisscrossing all over, and birds flying and finding themselves trapped beneath those roads; as I see a painting with the hand of a clock turning into a finger sealing the lips of a woman; as I see an installation of a directory with a head lying on it - until one realizes that the head is also made of a directory; as I see Reena Kallat's wall-installation of a cobweb - made entirely of rubber-stamps; as I see Kehna Patel's painting called 'Fragile India, handle with care', a kaleidoscopic burst of color based on Foucault's theory of Heterotopia (nothing is original and we swim, even wallow, in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change, forever legitimizing our expressions by references to the past); as I stand in front of Pedro Ruiz's anguished face screaming out of the delectable petals of a poppy or gaze transfixed at J Swaminathan's exquisitely minimalist 'Bird, Tree and Mountain', balanced like a Zen mind; as I see a naked child skipping, as a hawk in mid-flight looks on, almost waiting for the child to join in - as I see these and many more, I see tercets, short stories, sonnets, haikus, all around. Terse, poignant tales captured in transient strokes of colour. Stories which grab you, even as they set your mind free. 

But art is much more than stories. Art is colours. And shapes. And strokes. And where the strokes lead, as the choice of paint reveals choice and character. And under the artist's hand, a whole universe of meaning evolves. And as the artist grows with every story he breaks his back and heart on, so does the viewer as he views each work, and finds himself shimmering under the palette of colors.

And so I come out of each show, as through an emotional wringer, just the way I put aside a book which has moved me, as a film which makes me not speak to anyone for hours, I walk my head brimming with bloodied lessons and tragedies and views and tears and intimations of innocence and cynicism and a sense of hopelessness and hope. 

And I get back to life ready to live again.