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Mint
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Planner: 5 events to check out to recharge and reset
The Indian Cartoon Gallery Bengaluru is set to host a special exhibition on the legendary cartoonist R.K. Laxman. Titled Through the Eyes of RK Laxman, the exhibition features 78 caricatures done by the cartoonist over his decades-long career and includes everyone from Jawaharlal Nehru to Carnatic musician M.S. Subbulakshmi and filmmaker Satyajit Ray. The caricatures, the press note states, 'reflect his brilliant ability to distil the essence of a personality into a few strokes—always exaggerated, yet never unkind. From politicians and film stars to writers, thinkers..., each portrait tells a story…' At Indian Cartoon Gallery, 1 Midford House, Bengaluru, 7-28 June, 10am-6pm (Sundays closed). Entry is free. A poster of 'Toofan Mail 8 Down' Alliance Française Mumbai in partnership with Wench Film Festival (an Indian horror, sci-fi and fantasy film festival) will be screening Toofan Mail 8 Down as part of its monthly Cinéma de l'Étrange film screening of horror/sci-fi/fantasy films. Directed by Akriti Singh, the indie film (2021) features Singh as the protagonist. It is an 'almost-heist based on believe-it-or-not true events from the 1970s at the New Delhi Railway Station with nawabs from Awadh, reporters from BBC, the station master, a rickshaw puller, and a queen.' At AF Bombay Auditorium, Churchgate, 12 June, 6.30pm. For details and registration, visit This weekend, engage in some creative calligraphy. Freedom Tree Design Studio in Bengaluru is hosting a 'Tea & Calligraphy Workshop' this weekend. The two hours-long workshop invites guests to pause, create, and connect through the slow-living rituals of mindful tea appreciation and creative modern calligraphy. The tea appreciation session will be led by Susmita Ghosh, tea curator and founder of Tea With Sus. Next, modern calligraphy artist and educator Risna Febin will guide participants through a session of warm-ups, lettering, and creative styling. At Freedom Tree Design Studio, Indiranagar, Bengaluru, 8 June, 3 pm-5.30pm. International Archives Day is celebrated annually on 9 June. To mark International Archives Day on 9 June, India Foundation for the Arts is hosting a week of public engagements aimed to stimulate interest among the public about archives and invite them to explore the rich archive of over 850+ projects that IFA's supported over three decades. On the schedule are four curated experiences where interested audiences can drop-in to explore the space and browse materials, meet the archivists and take a guided tour of the IFA archive, attend the 'Archiving the Personal' workshop, or attend screenings of selected films from their repository. The event is free and open to all. At India Foundation for the Arts, Apurva' Ground Floor, RMV 2nd Stage, Sanjay Nagar, Bengaluru, 9-13 June, 11am-5.30pm. For details, visit Calm your nerves with healing music. The St. Regis Spa, Mumbai is collaborating with SRMD Yoga for a wellness programme this month that invites guests to relax and reset. To be held on four Saturdays, this curated programme includes a 'Floating Sound Immersion' session where you can float in stillness on water to healing music; a 'Tai Chi yoga and Gong Meditation' session; a yoga session that is designed to help you align with your doshas; and music therapy called 'Raga Resonance' that uses Indian classical ragas to calm the nervous system. At St. Regis Spa, The St Regis Mumbai, Phoenix Palladium, Mumbai, every Saturday starting from 7 June, 9am. For details, call 70451 22174.
The Hindu
27-05-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Mapping places where women hung out in Bengaluru's Cantonment area
It was while reading historian and writer Janaki Nair's book, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century, that Nikhita Thomas first encountered an interesting expression: kineticization, 'a phenomenon in the 80s and early 90s where there was an increased presence of women in the public sphere due to the popularity of the Kinetic Honda.' But the Bengaluru-based writer and teacher, an assistant professor at St. Joseph's University, did not just stumble upon Nair's term serendipitously. 'I was initially reading Mobile Girls Koottam: Working Women Speak by Madhumita Dutta, and was talking to my dean, Dr. Arul Mani, about the book,' she says. 'It was he who suggested I read Janaki Nair.' The growing participation of women in public life got her thinking about how the phenomenon of just hanging out transpires for women, says Nikhita, who, along with Pranav V.S., has embarked on a project to map places where women hung out in the city's Cantonment area between 1984 and 1994. 'The idea was to talk to women who lived, studied and worked in Bengaluru Cantonment during the 80s and the 90s,' she says. 'We picked this specific period because of the 'kineticization' that Janaki Nair talks about and because this was a period of rapid change in the country, including two waves of liberalisation.' This project, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under its Neighbourhood Engagements of Project 560, 'seeks to explore the spatial relationships women have with the cities and neighbourhoods they call home,' states the IFA website, adding that Nikhita's and Pranav's research engages with the following questions: When are women rendered invisible, and when are they on display in the city? How does the purpose of their movement through the city get women tossed between obscurity/safety, and visibility/danger? And how can spaces designated for one kind of interaction be persuaded to house other exchanges, given the spatial practices of women? Origin of the idea Nikhita first applied for an IFA grant in 2023, wanting to look at student migrants in the city and the spaces they occupied, 'specifically to go into their hostel or PG rooms and draw from that,' she says. While she cleared the first round of the grant, she didn't make it to the final round, 'but they encouraged me to apply again.' In July 2024, Pranav, too, joined the English Department at St. Joseph's University. They were in conversation with Dr. Mani, she says, who encouraged them to apply for the grant together this time. 'We were bouncing ideas off each other, with Pranav initially suggesting we do something about the lakes that used to exist in Bengaluru,' she says. Dr. Mani, however, was not enthusiastic about this idea, recalls Nikhita, who, around the same time, was also reading the Janaki Nair book. There was also a movie that both of them liked, Brahman Naman, 'a movie about the quizzing culture in Bangalore with mostly boys who loiter about the city,' she says. 'It is a super movie, but it left us wondering: Where are all the women?' That was the starting question for the project, which involved the duo interviewing about 15 women who had lived, worked or studied in the city between 1984 and 1994 to understand their relationship with the Cantonment. 'A lot of people thought we were looking to hear about famous spots in Bengaluru that no longer exist, but we are actually also curious about pockets of the city that no one's ever heard of,' she says. Memories and more Take, for instance, the memory of a participant who used to go to an all-women's gym. 'At the end of the gym session, the girls would gather outside the Hosur Road Cemetery for a smoke,' she says, pointing out that it wasn't a famous hangout spot but just 'one corner of the road where nobody stared at them.' She also mentions a conversation with someone who had brought her husband, then boyfriend, home to meet her parents. 'The place where they hung out was a swing in her parents' backyard, and that's still there…somewhere in Victoria Layout,' she says. Another participant whose stories enthralled them was the accounts of the journalist and novelist C.K. Meena, who had moved to Bengaluru from Kerala for her master's degree. 'She just owns the city like nobody else I've met. You cannot tell that she has lived anywhere else but here,' says Nikhita, recalling the plethora of experiences that Meena shared with them. These include accounts of working with the City Tab – a weekly Bengaluru newspaper – living alone in the garage of someone's house, which had a makeshift entrance and windows she curtained with an old Mysore silk saree that her editor's wife donated, eating at Hotel Shyamprakash, a restaurant on Infantry Road, which offered cheap food, stale beer and live music and of lugging a typewriter about the city, the way someone today carries a laptop. 'We were very excited about hearing stories like that,' she says. Essay Book All these stories will come together into a co-created art essay book, which will be showcased at 1ShanthiRoad Gallery/Studio on June 14 and 15. 'The idea was for us to create a sort of heritage walk through this book,' says Pranav. Elaborating on the nature of the final product, which will consist of illustrations and anecdotes running through the text, they say, 'When you read this, it should feel like you are going through these neighbourhoods.' While Nikhita and Pranav are still finalising the text and illustrations that will go into this book, they have also been actively engaging with the community, part of the mandate of Project 560, through a series of quizzes. 'Both of us are quizzers who have been part of the college quiz club,' says Pranav. 'So, we thought this was one of our strengths, and we can work from there.' So far, they have conducted three quizzes in the city, all within the Cantonment area and specifically focusing on it, with the questions drawn from 'all the books that we had read and combed through all our conversations to find nice little fundas about the Bengaluru Cantonment.' Pranav adds that many women come to quizzes even though they are traditionally seen as masculine spaces among women. 'So we were very, very happy about that.' Deeper relationship Another impact of the project, says Nikhita, is that it has led to a deeper relationship with the city, one that began for them as college students. 'Our relationship with the Cantonment began in college because St. Joseph's, where we studied, is right on the border of it,' she says. One of the assignments she had to do, as a journalism student, was to look at how neighbourhoods in the Cantonment and the pete area outside of it got their names. 'To me, till then, Bengaluru was Bengaluru. This concept of Cantonment and pete did not exist for me,' she says. 'I started grasping all of this only in college.' According to her, encountering the neighbourhood this way, unearthing streets and discovering why they are named the way they are, changed how she looked at her city. 'All these things which, in some ways, would be boring history if you read it from a textbook suddenly become superbly interesting because you pass these streets every day,' she says, listing some of the reading material that helped them on the journey, including Roopa Pai's columns, Kirtana Kumar's Bangalore Blues' and Multiple City: Writings on Bangalore, edited by Aditi De. 'Personally, the project has made me feel great affection towards my city. Previously, it was just a city where I lived, where everyone is always complaining about the traffic.' The duo also thinks of the project as a way of archiving the city, capturing stories of places that no longer exist or have never been written about before, and a physical way of holding onto the spirit of the city that Bengaluru used to be. 'I know it is romantic, but I can't help but miss that time,' says Pranav. 'It seems to have been a much kinder city than it is now.'
New Indian Express
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
A Stitch in Time
Memories, bitter, sweet, or both, have a tendency to become entwined in the places they were formed. And if you were to think of one place that holds most Bengalureans' memories – where children run around on school trips, couples steal a moment alone, and the elderly come for peace and quiet – Cubbon Park comes to mind. It is this interconnectedness between Cubbon Park and the people whose memories are entwined within it, that Bengaluru-based artist Karthika Sakthivel seeks to explore with her project Sonic Picnics – a quilt that tells these stories to anyone with a moment to sit, touch a patch of fabric, and listen. Created with the aid of a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, the installation is set to be open to viewers on Sunday at Cubbon Park. 'We've found some amazing stories. Someone shared a story of finding a dead dog, cremating it and coming back to plant a tree in its memory; another, a sweeper, got street-cast for a movie here; one guy had a first date here that lasted over 12 hours and the couple saw their first sunrise here, with light rushing through the leaves and dew. There was also a man who manages the public restroom who sang for us! It's lovely to see these meaningful connections people make with nature and each other,' she says. Sharing the origins of this project, which started with her work on a jacket that tells oral histories at The British Library, Sakthivel says, 'We were trying to figure out how to get visitors to engage with oral histories. People don't want to put on headphones and stare at a wall, so how do we create an embodied listening experience?' The answer, applied to Cubbon Park, was to collect stories from people and weave them together over a year. 'What we're trying to do here is capture present day experiences and future aspirations that people have for the park by communally weaving together a picnic blanket that is interactive. We got people to come to workshops, listen to the 24 stories we've curated, and start stitching onto the patch. Some, saw us and just joined in!' says Sakthivel. How exactly does the blanket work and make this interactive experience happen? Through the magic of smart fabric, explains Sakthivel. 'I'm using conductive fabric, thread, and an entire circuit is concealed under the fabric so you can't tell it's there. But when you touch a particular story, it plays the audio in the headphones. At any point, five people will be able to sit or lie down on it.' With Cubbon Park being a thriving spot for community events and clubs, bringing people of all classes together, Sakthivel hopes that the project will act as a conduit that encourages a culture of people listening to one another. 'We talk a lot about storytelling but there's not as much of a culture for story-listening. Through this, we want to create a culture where people slow down, sit down, and actually listen. Listening in a group is different from listening alone – you can see how many different stories exist and how many different people use a public space.'
The Hindu
23-04-2025
- General
- The Hindu
The weight of water: Srisailam Dam's tale at Berlinale and MOMA
When artist Kush Badhwar was living in Hyderabad in the early 2010s, his building's caretaker suggested he might be interested in looking at the personal archive of a neighbour who had passed away. Turned out, it belonged to Radha Krishna Sarma, a professor of ancient Indian history at Osmania University. His family was disposing the remains of his academic work stored in the house. This serendipitous event occurred at a time when Badhwar was thinking of various archival material in the context of his research on the Telangana statehood movement on an India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) archival fellowship. In the collection were VHS tapes, notes, books, and about 1,500 35-mm photograph slides. As he began to study them, he discovered the documentary rushes of the Srisailam dam region and several photographs of the famous salvage archaeology project. From the late 1970s to the late 80s, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had taken up the transplantation and reconsecration of more than 100 ancient temples in Telangana that were under threat of submergence. Further research led him to the work of New York-based anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao, whose research focused on the after-effects of the dam construction — on the social, cultural and economic lives of the villagers who were displaced as their homes and lands were submerged. The collaboration that ensued between Badhwar and Rao from 2021 has resulted in an artistic project that was first featured at the Chicago Architecture Biennale in 2023 as Monumental Returns, and recently as Beneath the Placid Lake in the prestigious Forum Expanded section of the 75th Berlinale. Now, the duo has been invited to present at the World Around Summit at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City on April 27. Forced evictions and a visual installation The last of the massive modernisation projects of the Nehruvian era, Srisailam dam was sanctioned in 1960 and it took two decades for the construction to be completed. The state's promise of development and progress demanded the sacrifice of the villagers' lands and livelihoods, even as resources were dedicated to salvaging old temples — considered of prime importance to narratives of nationalist history. Eventually, more than 100 villages were submerged and 1,50,000 people displaced. But this tragic story has not made a mark in the nation's cultural memory. In this context, Badhwar and Rao's project is a welcome intervention that initiates a new conversation, and provokes us to re-evaluate the existing discourses of state-led development. I saw Beneath the Placid Lake at the Berlinale. The projection-based installation included a television monitor on which the documentary rushes were played along with curated text, and the images from the slides were projected onto the same screen. While the rushes are from Sarma's archives, the images are a mix of the late professor's documentation of the temples prior to the dam project and during the salvage archaeology project, Rao's field research in the late 1990s, and maps and drawings from the archives of the French Institute of Pondicherry. The text on the screen is Rao's poetic reinterpretation of her field notes from a trip to a dargah in the submerged parts of Jetprole village with a few local women. Through the superimposition of three different types of research material, the installation urges the viewer to consider the cultural, social and spatial experiences of displacement. Although it does not attempt to linearly narrate the story of the displacement and the transplantation of more than 100 temples, the formal act of superimposition of research material of three generations of researchers from different disciplines narrates a story of varied knowledge practices in the same context. As an academic with a deep interest in temple architecture, Sarma's images focus on the ancient structures and the archaeological project; Rao's text — as a researcher and anthropologist — reflects on the villagers' loss of social and material contexts and the suspended nature of their lives, straddling the remains of the submerged parts and a new village. Three generations of research While the viewer can experience and engage with the formal features of the visual installation, the multi-layered thematic concerns are not immediately apparent — unless one is already aware of the context of the Srisailam dam project. When I ask the duo about this, Rao shares that their quest has been to find new and different ways of approaching such stories of displacement that don't have to be explanatory, but rather focus on the experience; she feels that the art project provides an opportunity to go beyond the representations allowed by academic writing or activism, which have been done ad nauseam in the Srisailam context. Badhwar adds, 'We exist in relation to a network of texts and hence, are also limited by the material we have collected.' He explains that the journey of the project has been iterative, almost rehearsal-like, from the beginning: it was first presented as a lecture performance on Sarma's archives at the 2019 Flaherty Festival in Canada before transforming into an installation with a focus on displacement. How are they approaching the MOMA event, which sounds more like a symposium than an exhibition? While Rao reveals that they are planning a lecture performance, Badhwar adds that thematically the plan is to engage with two parallel story lines: about the varied knowledge production methods of three generations of researchers, and the story of the dam and its aftermath. The summit will be livestreamed on YouTube on April 27. Registration is via the MOMA website. The Bengaluru-based writer, filmmaker and educator teaches at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
