No water, no life. No blue, no green
No water, no life. No blue, no green
Mentally prepared for the Chennai weather, I
stepped on the soil of the city. ‘Hot, hotter and hottest’ is how everyone
expresses it. Yet, I was in for a pleasant surprise. It was cool, no obviously
not as cool as it in the hills, but bearable and one could sit under a fan and
not sweat or curse.
I lived in Chennai for only a year and a half.
What to talk of reading or writing, I cannot even pretend to understand Tamil.
It is Japanese and Chinese to me. I do not know the city, I cannot handle either
the climate or the food for long, yet the city has a certain pull. It gives one
a sense of freedom. And it is only in Chennai that you can see a woman dressed
in a sari in traditional vibrant colours, her hair decorated with a gajra (a
string of flowers) and driving an auto-rickshaw.
The business I had gone for, over, Mani and I
went to InKo Centre in the evening for a treat to our senses. A month-long art
exhibition Chennai- Waterless, Watermore was being inaugurated
there which displayed the works of six very dear artist friends.
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| Water The Beginning by Kavitha Prasad |
Water has had a love-hate relation with Chennai, with the city suffering both the extremes which is a grim matter. In the hot summer months,
Chennai faces a drought-like situation while the following months see it inundated
with gushing waters.
Each of the artists had in their own distinct
style, brought out through mixed media on canvas, how they felt about water in their home
city.
Artists do not emote in words or actions. They bare their heart through their art, whether music, painting, sculpture or dance etc. No wonder there were no speeches on the importance of water in our lives, percentage of this elixir in our bodies, the statistics related to its availability or even ritualistic connections with one of the five elements that our scriptures say the whole world is made of.
The vibrant images of agony and ecstasy over
water might stay in my mind for a long, long time. In our daily lives, we take
water for granted. It is only when nature gives us too little or too much of it
that we raise a hue and cry about conservation and harvesting of water. An
annual feature in some parts of our country, floods shake the lives of people.
Some steps are of course taken to reduce the suffering of those affected, but why
haven’t we found any permanent solution to this problem even 75 years after the
day we succeeding in taking the management of Bharat Varsh in our own hands?
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| Liquid Gold by Thejomayee Menon |
Big decisions are to be made by bigger, wiser people. So, let me stick to the limits of my own intelligence and share about the exhibition.
Most of Thejomayee Menon’s works are related to nature. “Tap and water are close to my heart. Somebody had warned me years ago- Don’t do plastic pots. They do not look good. But the presence and sight of plastic pots is what is typical of Chennai. As if compelled, I keep going back to them,” she said of her two mixed-media works.
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| Seeking by Thejomayee Menon |
Seeking shows feet and pots, a constant
struggle for most of the Chennaites for the past several years. Yet, “despite
the shortage of water, there is greenery and foliage within the city which
brings with it a feeling of hope,” was her positive thought.
Mild-mannered Kavitha Prasad has images of lotus and ponds as the symbols of water, settled in her head which she presents in different versions. “When I see water in my mind, I connect it with fish, and lotus flowers and leaves. I find them very meditative. And their colours and shadows draw me. They seem to have a story of their own.”
The crocodile, traditionally associated with
water, however, holds no symbolic value here, she clarified to my uneducated
mind.
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| Water The End by Kavitha Prasad |
Her other painting presented the contrast. When
there is no water, hands and feet burn; thirsty and parched, one feels as if he/she
is on fire. The dominance of red - the colour of fire and heat in the triangle
which represents fire, the leaping flames, the animal head, red flowers tell us
of the high temperatures and the dry cracked earth yearning for water.
In the same way her ceramic works- one
nurturing, green and fresh, expresses the beginning while the other without
water is cracked, blistered and broken shows the end.
Recalling his childhood, Jacob Jebraj said he would climb the hills and hillocks in the suburbs of Chennai and enjoy the sight of ponds, lakes and water bodies around. “Now I feel as if water is shrinking due to the pace of development and lakhs of people everywhere.”
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| Water Way by Jacob Jebraj |
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| The Choice is Ours: Asma Menon |
Asma Menon’s work, recognized by the meticulously painted flora and fauna on the stretch of canvas from one end to the other in jewel like colours, brought out her concern in the form of a lone fish.
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| Water for Life by Gita Hudson |
The theme compelled two artists to break away
from their earlier style of work. Gita Hudson deviated from her trademark crimson,
reds and pinks and brought out the grimness of the situation in stark black and
white.
Water never flows or runs, it rolls and that is
how it takes all the soil from one year to the next, Sailesh BO brought forth
his perspective.
Not blessed with the vision or imagination to understand art unless it stares at me in simplistic expressions, I asked about the cuts he had made on his work of water colours on paper.
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| More Water Less Water: Sailesh BO |
“After I finished painting, I felt unsatisfied
with my work and thought of ways to express what I felt about water. As an
experiment, I started making cuts. Cutting of paper means destroying it in some
way and it was then that without my knowledge I was able to show floods. This
was not pre-planned.”
On the mention of art, no visit to Chennai is
ever complete without meeting our dear friend Sarla Bannerjee nee Daruwalla
whose parents were trailblazers in the world of marketing art and started one
of the first art galleries in south of India more than 50 years ago. She is an
excellent hostess and ever since I first used the black pepper her husband
grows on their farm in Kodai, I have been shamelessly extending my hand for it,
bringing it and in my (very rare) bouts of generosity, even sharing it with the
people I care for, here in Lucknow.
A short but refreshing break the trip was from
my super-dull, monotonous, daily life! Wouldn’t you say that is why we value friends?
Wonderful article. When I was a child, we would view Chennai's water struggles with shock, since we lived in water-blessed Jharkhand and only visited once in 2 years. Some things never change, inspite of progress.
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting article with spectacular art work!!
DeleteGreat Arts Sir
ReplyDeleteWater is great issue with Chennai over decades and in recent past , it has aggravated. I have Tamilian friend who is born, broughtup and spending retired life shares with his woes but cannot digest any comment against Chennai.
ReplyDeleteAll summmers theŕ unbearable but he says that in the evening, breeze sets in after 5pm but I never experienced as on ehas to sweat all the time if not in AC ACCOMODATION. NICE WRITE UP.
Excellent, thought provoking article. A lovely read!
ReplyDeleteSuperb article. I have lived in Chennai at different stages of my life. Chennai's water woes are largely man made. First, relentless denudation of greenery and mindless construction.
ReplyDeleteThe natural and man made waterways have been ruthlessly blocked.
As a child I have seen boats plying on the Buckingham canal. These dhow type of sail boats used to bring bring fresh produce, coconuts, rice and salt.
At Basin Bridge the boats would transfer their contents to canoes which could pass under the railway lines.
The canal was accessible from nearby roads, and farther down from the backyards of homes.
At the crossing of the Cooum river there was a system of locks manned around the clock by staff who lived in a dedicated colony called "Lock Nagar"
This 442 long canal has been turned into a sinking drain,thanks in part due to the Raid Transit System.
I 1969 Chennai faced a terrible water scarcity.However, the houses which had functioning wells
made a killing with the help of the road tankers. However, sweet water was discovered at Minjur
and that was the beginning of the Tanker Mafia.
My first visit to ICF was in 1960. There was a large reservoir and a filter system(Pareson Filter Beds)
to supply potable water to the railway colonies.
Excees water was led through the Ainsley canal in Ayanavaram and drained into the Otteri Nala.
Tamil is my mother tongue.One reason for quitting Chennai after retirement was my inability to stand the way my mother tongue was being murdered.
Now it is crowded lanes, by-lanes roads and multi-storeyed buildings everywhere. It is not only Tamil, most of the other languages are also suffering the same fate. In fact, English has been the worst victim in all this. Just listen to the way most of the people have assimilated English words into their own languages and distorted them, or the other way round, so they do not even know that they are doing to English what the English did to our country.
DeleteThank you for sharing the photographs of the paintings. Details about the paintings and painters are interesting.
ReplyDelete👍👍👍
ReplyDeleteExcellent, well researched, thought provoking article. Mam it's ur USP that u convert any boring dull complex topic to an interesting read.
ReplyDeleteMadam at her best, as always, no mincing of words, no pretentious. Enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteThe same is true of almost every city or region in India. We simply don't understand the value of water and waste it, or fail to preserve it during monsoons.
ReplyDeleteThe paintings selected and discussed are beautiful and convey the stark messages effectively.
Mindless cutting of trees and urbanisation has added to the woes of all cities
ReplyDeleteWaah
ReplyDeleteWhat a variety of subjects you command.Kahan stored rehta hai ye sab!👍👍🙏