Wear your ‘art’ eyes and the whole of India becomes an open air gallery, forever presenting you cinema and installations. The road from Coorg to Mysore can’t be any different. Krishen Khanna spent years immortalising the labour that squats like the ‘I won’t see, won’t talk and won’t hear’ trio of Gandhi. I had sent the artist pictures from my road wanderings so that he would turn them into canvases for posterity – and he did.
Wear your ‘art’ eyes and the whole of India becomes an open air gallery, forever presenting you cinema and installations. The road from Coorg to Mysore can’t be any different. Krishen Khanna spent years immortalising the labour that squats like the ‘I won’t see, won’t talk and won’t hear’ trio of Gandhi. I had sent the artist pictures from my road wanderings so that he would turn them into canvases for posterity – and he did. Fellini wouldn’t have had to labour with any elaborate sets in India, for all incongruencies falls into place eventually. It is not just the naked 19th century faqir for the Orientalists’ camera, or the ruins for the Daniells’ art, which fall effortlessly into the frame today, but how the medieval and modern keep remarrying daily on the streets . This hybrid mating produces an ever-evolving progeny of uncertain DNA. In this photograph, the porters of synthetic white bags stuffed with coconuts, huddle under an electric blue rain cover as the intermittent monsoon remains full of surprises. The truck is flanked by commercial hoardings and it isn’t easy to tell if India is a left-lane country or a rightist one. The centre may seem safe in politics, but remains precarious on the highway. Remember, sitting on the fence always pokes
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