Latest news with #Tuli
Hindustan Times
05-05-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Neville Tuli's back, and he wants to teach us about India's heritage
Back in 2006, at a modern and contemporary Indian art sale by Sotheby's auction house in London, a bidding war over a work by Francis Newton Souza drove up the Goan modernist's work to over 600,000 pounds ($1.1 million). The underbidder who lost out was Neville Tuli, whose paddle became a topic of conversation in subsequent news articles. An auctioneer himself, he went on to bring home five miniatures, a work by a mid-19th century Belgian painter, as well as a Ram Kumar and an untitled Akbar Padamsee. His morning's expenditure was a handsome 663,000 pounds ($1.25 million), The Art Newspaper reported. Tuli, now in his 60s, has been a contentious figure in the Indian art scene ever since he set up The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education & Art (HEART) in 1995. In 2000, he started Osian's Connoisseurs of Art Private Limited (OCA) in Mumbai. His aim, he once told a journalist, was to create 'the greatest arts and culture institution in the world'. He authored a book on Contemporary Indian art, held large exhibitions of not only art but also film memorabilia, with society's who's who in attendance, and conducted auctions. He also collected widely, from Hollywood memorabilia to Japanese Samurai masks and modern Indian artists as well as contemporary Indian art. Over the course of the following decade, he established an archiving, research and documentation centre, a wealth management service, an art authentication and valuation service, a film festival, an art journal, and even sponsored a team in Durand Cup Football. In 2006, OCA launched Osian's Art Fund that was, at one time, valued at ₹100 crore. However, by 2013, Tuli had lost much of the goodwill, art and money he had accumulated in the past decade. There were several reasons for this. The Art Fund crashed during the global recession of 2008 and forced Tuli to contend with a liquidity crisis and an angry crowd of influential stakeholders and litigious investors; he faced criticism for scaling up his organisation too fast, and for driving up the price of modern and contemporary art indiscriminately. In 2013, the Securities Exchange Board of India ordered the Art Fund to be closed. A few years later, prominent scholars and gallerists questioned the provenance of some of the works of an Osian's auction in New Delhi. Tuli denied all charges of inauthenticity at the time. But by then, he had sold his home in Mumbai and moved to Delhi and relative obscurity. 'I needed space with gardens and animals. I realized that I was totally ignorant of the Internet. At one point of time, I was totally against an artwork becoming a thumbnail. I thought it was a desecration of the aesthetics of the art object,' Tuli said. That is no longer the case. On April 30, he launched part of what he claims is 'the world's single largest knowledge base on the last 250 years of India'. The website named after his new organisation registered in 2023 — Tuli Research Institute of India Studies (TRIS)— carries information about different aspects of Indian art, culture and heritage, divided across 16 research categories 'to create the first framework for India Studies,' Tuli said. Comprising hundreds of visuals, the site allows viewers to structure their exploration through modules that have been created along the lines of an academic syllabus. The topics on offer right now are eclectic — The Sensual Discipline within Creativity, The Changing Smile of Childhood and its Second Coming, Uncertainty — as are the references within each subject. For instance, the Economics of Art and Cultural Industry, makes connections across fields from mid-century Hindi cinema to colonial painters. The master-lists of these references have been built over 30 years, Tuli said. 'I came back to India with one objective and only one objective. How to change what I thought was a deeply mediocre, totally unjust educational framework that did not give access to everyone or generate any joy or possess the quality which great learning and knowledge gives,' said Tuli. Such encyclopediac ventures, at least on Indian art and cultural heritage, are far and few in between. MAP, a private museum in Bengaluru, runs the MAP Academy which offers a digital resource on the history of art in south Asia. Run by Abhishek Poddar, the resource was launched in 2022. Sahapedia, another venture started in 2011, remains an open resource on Indian and South Asian cultural histories. For someone who was once critiqued for the lack of transparency in his dealings — at one point, the price of artworks that the OCA Art Fund tracked, were based on an Art Index created and managed by OCA and a financial daily — the agenda driving Tuli's latest venture has more connection to his past than he might care to admit. In 2011, long after the market crash, an Indian Express article quoted Tuli saying that he was only interested to work on the digitisation of a knowledge base of Indian art. His firm had also purchased land in central Mumbai, where the single-screen theatre Minerva, stood, with the aim of building a museum and exhibition space. He called it Osianama, and started a website as a precursor. However, the land went to IDBI bank towards repayment of Osian's debt. The TRIS website seems to be the culmination of this effort to build a repository of knowledge. And true to style, Tuli promises it will expand as he adds other subjects.
Business Standard
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
Tuli Research Centre for India Studies Launches tuliresearchcentre.org
NewsVoir New Delhi [India], May 1: The Tuli Research Centre for India Studies (T.R.I.S.) proudly announces the launch of a path-breaking digital platform offering free, open access to the most comprehensive integrated visual-textual knowledge base on India's modern and contemporary fine arts, popular arts, cinema, photography, architectural heritage, graphic arts, animal welfare, and cultural economics and thought, so allowing a new conceptual framework for India Studies. The platform's launch marks the culmination of Neville Tuli's three-decade-long journey as a cultural institution builder, beginning with the founding of HEART (The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education and Art, 1995-99), advancing through Osian's Connoisseurs of Art (2000-21) to Vanraja Sanctuary & Hospice (2015-), and culminating now with T.R.I.S. - an institution dedicated to researching upon and sharing an expansive archive, knowledge base, and library for public and scholarly engagement. Tuli's pioneering ideas on education, transdisciplinary knowledge-building, and the fusion of image-text-audio learning within a holistic conceptual framework of theory, experience, and archival preservation have shaped these endeavors. His vision has consistently championed the creation of autonomous spaces of intellectual inquiry, where knowledge is expansive, free, and participatory. Platform Overview: was conceptualized by Neville Tuli post-2020 though it has been evolving for nearly three decades through his writings, personal research, curation, and transdisciplinary knowledge development. The platform places images on par with carefully curated textual and audio materials. It has been built using the most basic technology of the Excel Sheet, thousands of manually structured and templated Excel sheets of knowledge then transformed into web data by the coding team. This foundational approach allows the platform to power a world-class Search and Filter Engine, with each cultural object and archival document serving as the basic unit. Users are empowered to conduct precise inquiries across multiple fields, retrieving highly tailored results that foster deeper, self-directed exploration. The India Studies platform is created upon Tuli's uniquely conceptualised sixteen Research Categories. These are then linked to thousands of carefully selected Masterlists which are represented by "A-Graphy" pages, and these are all inter-related and contextualised through 100,000+ visual and textual objects in v1.0. In v1.1 the structure of the Post and their Q & A are added to begin the deeper engagement process of the visitors, which will soon lead to the personally customised curricula framework by v1.2 so hopefully offering a groundbreaking model for how archives and educational frameworks can be reimagined to take forward learning and educational models. Version 1.0 (30th April 2025): Public launch of the Search and Filter Engine with sample Masterlist pages and access to 100,000+ objects. Version 1.1 (30th June 2025): Expansion of Masterlist A-Graphy pages and object collections. Version 1.2 (30th September 2025): Introduction of the customised curricula framework for "Self-Discovery via Rediscovering India." Version 2.0 (1st January 2026): Full roll-out of support systems for top colleges and universities, particularly in India and Cultural Studies. A Call to Reimagine Education At its heart, is built on a simple but powerful belief that Knowledge must belong to all. Education must be free. Inquiry must be boundless. We live by the principle that every answer leads to a deeper question sustaining the eternal process of learning, discovery, and the joy inherent in consciousness itself. The Tuli Research Centre for India Studies stands in solidarity with students, teachers, and lifelong learners everywhere, demanding an educational future that transcends economic and institutional barriers a future where access to deep knowledge, critical thinking, and creative exploration is a right, not a privilege. represents a bold commitment to this future: a platform that democratizes India's artistic, cultural, and intellectual legacies, inviting scholars, academics, students, and the wider public into a living, evolving dialogue with India's rich creative traditions and global intersections.
CBS News
08-04-2025
- CBS News
North Texas man sentenced to life for strangling pregnant wife on Christmas Day
A North Texas man has been sentenced to life in prison for strangling his pregnant wife to death on Christmas Day 2023, as neighbors heard her screams. Nasib Ahsan, 35, of McKinney, received the sentence after pleading guilty to the murder of Nawreen Tuli at an apartment off Collin McKinney Parkway. Collin County Criminal District Attorney Greg Willis described the murder as a "vicious, premeditated act of domestic violence that stole the life of a young woman and her unborn child." "My team fought to hold him fully accountable and ensure he can never harm another woman," Willis said in a news release. "This life sentence reflects our resolve to stand with victims, protect the vulnerable, and — when appropriate — deliver justice in the strongest way without putting families through the agony of trial." Authorities responded to the scene around 1 p.m. on Dec. 25, 2023. According to prosecutors, Ahsan confessed over the phone to family members, who then called 911. Ahsan acknowledged, when speaking with family, that he had argued with and killed his wife, the release said. McKinney police arrived to find Tuli, who was several months pregnant, dead with signs of manual strangulation. Ahsan was immediately taken into custody. Police found Tuli dead on the bed with "clear signs" that she had been strangled, prosecutors said. Two months earlier, Ahsan, described as controlling and violent, had been arrested for assault on a pregnant person. While Tuli told officers she did not want him arrested, police took him into custody anyway. Judge Jennifer Edgeworth of the 219th Judicial District Court imposed the life sentence.
