When Art is Skin Deep!

Tattoos are one of the oldest forms of art and this is evident from the tattooed mummies discovered from various parts of the world. Much before it became associated with thugs, pirates and the underbelly of the society, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Borneos, the Hawaiians, the Maoris, the Samoans, the Celts, the Japanese and the Indians each had their distinctive styles of tattooing and in each society it had an important socio-cultural significance. According to 1996 edition of the 30-volume Macmillan Dictionary of Art: “The art is attested in almost every culture worldwide....In Europe and North America, until the late 20th century, tattooing was largely connected with two groups: members of the armed forces and prisoners...From the 1960s onwards, however, changes in the social status of tattoo art in Europe and North America has led to considerable experimentation with forms and styles.”


Today tattoos are going through a phase of renaissance and regaining respect as an art form. Auteurs like Paul Booth, Guy Aithison, Bob Tyrrell, Aaron Cain , Ryan Dearringer, Den Yakovlev, Anil Gupta, Daemon Rowanchide, Filip Liu are not only experimenting with the genre with jaw-dropping effect, they are also pushing the envelope further by incorporating elements of fine art to it.

In the West, tattoo conventions and expos are commonplace and now even art galleries like Arts Center@319 in Virginia, Noyes Museum of Art in New Jersey, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, National Maritime Museum in London, Hallways Contemporary Art Center in 0020New York, University of Colorado-Boulder museum, are opening the door of their galleries to tattoo artists and their art works-- tattoo related art form is a subject of study. Way back in 1986, the National Museum of American Art had added pieces of tattoo design work to its permanent art collection.

However, there is no denying the fact that tattoos are different from any other branch of fine art. Apart from the fact that here the artist’s perception is guided or based upon the wish of the client and these works of art has no resale value, here the canvas is human skin. “Like in any other art form, it is very important for the artist to have a good understanding of the medium he is working on. And skin is a unique medium-- it moves, it bleeds, it changes shape when you move and it can be of different types,” says Duncan Veigas, an artist with Kraayonz Tattoos, Goa. Everyone’s body has a unique flow to it and the challenge is to make a tattoo flow with the body.

According to Abhinandan Basu of Pune’s Inkalab: “The fact that it is on someone else’s skin also makes it the only form of art where a unique relationship based on trust develops between the artist and the medium. In no other art form does a medium have an opinion- but in tattooing they often do!”

However, Abhinandan also points out that Indian skin is far more difficult to work on than white skin—it is like painting on a tinted canvas. “We cannot use the entire range of colors available on tanned skin,” Abhinandan says.

There are various styles of tattooing. With the more common tribal, bio-mechanical, realism, portraits, Japanese, old school, new school etc there are some rare styles like painterly, animated, hyper realism, trash polka, realistic trash polka and the even rarer like dada.

Abhinandan, specializes in a comparatively new style of tattooing that is based on a technique developed by painters like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Called pointillism or dotism this neo-Impressionist style uses tiny dots to create a painting. “Over the last year I have been spending more time trying to develop this style and giving it a direction which is essentially my own and based on traditional Indo-Tibetan motifs. I call it Neo-Traditional-Dotism-in-Color. The USP of this style of tattooing is the unique look that these tattoos have - the geometric patterns give it a 3-D view and the Indian motifs balances it out with a softer, almost surreal look,” says Abhinandan. However, according to him colour realism remains by far his toughest challenge as the dark complexion of Indian skin limits the colour palatte.

Lokesh Verma of Delhi’s Devil’z Tattooz specializes in Xerox-perfect portraits and realism: “I love to reproduce images like faces or any other real image, the USP is that you have to do exactly what is given to you, there are no margins of error if you compare it to other abstract styles.”

However, Duncan does not believe in limiting his work to any particular style and says: “I keep myself open to any request that walks through the door. Given the fact that the tattoo culture is only just taking off in India, I think it is not a good idea to be proficient in just one style. I like to incorporate various styles in my tattoos depending on the design.” Duncan specializes in ‘custom-made designs’. “I may repeat the same idea if asked but not the same design,” says Duncan.

However, not all who ink can be called artists. There are multitudinous inkers who merely take a ‘tattoo flash’, copy it on the skin and trace around. Their work does not involve ‘art’ but a hand that is steady with the tattoo machine. A good tattoo artist should be a great freehand artist first. For Swapnil Gawde, a graduate from J J School of Arts who is now a tattoo artist with the Mumbai-based TattooStar Collective, tattooing has been an extension of his journey as an artist and Swapnil says: “I believe to be a good tattoo artist one needs to be a good artist first. Tattooing has a lot of technical aspects to it, but at the core of everything is the art. Technology can be learnt but art is inherent and can only be honed.”

In the West there are connoisseurs who treat tattoos as collector’s item. There are artists who draw directly onto the skin first and then tattoo. The use of stencils in these cases is almost nil.

“It is like commissioning a painting from a renowned painter. You know the style and the kind of imagery to expect and the fact that you would get a one-of-a-kind work of art, but the rest is on the artist’s imagination and interpretation,” elaborates Duncan. However, in India, the artists have a long way to go to establish the status of a tattoo from a mere ‘fashion statement’ to a ‘work of art’.  

The tattoo side story

Tattoos are probably one of the oldest surviving art forms and its styles as diverse as the people wearing them. For some, tattoos are markers used to differentiate a clan from the rest, some believe in its ‘therapeutic’ benefits and some in its magical powers; some wear tattoos to look more attractive and a few to look ugly.


In 1991, a mummy of a man who lived in around 3,300 BC was found frozen in the Ötztal Alps and it bore 57 tattoos. However, the very first tattoo was probably created by accident by rubbing soot-covered hands over open wounds. It was the Egyptians who spread the practice of tattooing. In 1891, archaeologists discovered the mummified remains of a tattooed woman in Thebes. Known as Amunet, she was a priestess of the goddess Hathor between 2160 BC and 1994 BC. The tattoos found on her body were made of dashes and dots. As time went by, the designs became more complex and by 1500 BC pictorial imagery of musicians, dancers, and acrobats started emerging in tattoos. While in Japan, figures found in tombs dated 3,000 BC or older, have faces painted or engraved to represent tattoo marks. In old-school Japanese tattoos the entire body would be tattooed and a common traditional body suit would cover the arms, back, upper legs and chest. This is known as Irezumi and it may take a horishi (tattoo artist) two to ten years to insert one Irezumi by hand.

Polynesian tattoos are one of the most intricate ones of the ancient world and these people believe that a person’s mana is displayed through their tattoo. Traditional Samoan male tattoo, known as the Pe'a, is an elaborate affair and covers the body from waist to knees. While in Hawaii, tattoos not only signify social status but are also believed to guard the bearer’s physical and spiritual health. The Maori, indigenous people of New Zealand, call their style of tattooing Ta-moko and is one of the most painful methods ever practiced. Here, instead of puncturing the skin, it is chiselled out and the pigment is applied over it. Traditionally, Maori tattoos were used as a means of personal identification and incorporated social status, lines of descent and tribal affiliations as well as exploits and events of life; and covered the entire face, as well as the legs and buttocks of men.

Roman writers like Virgil, and Seneca have documented instances of slaves and criminals being tattooed. During the early Roman Empire, all slaves exported were tattooed “tax paid” and many had “Stop me, I'm a runaway” marked on their foreheads as well. It was in fourth century when Constantine became the emperor, that tattooing on face was banned.

In India, tattooing is considered to be an ancient custom and can be still observed among the tribal people of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Orissa, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Bihar etc . While, Gond tribes wear tattoos to flaunt their status; Konyaks of Nagaland used to tattoo their faces like other headhunters from the Pacific islands. If Mal Paharia women believe tattooing keeps their organs healthy and helps them to function properly, some tribes perform tattoo ‘operations’ to heal muscle and joint pain.

Many believe the absence of tattoo marks would call upon the wrath of Yama after death, while some others plan to engage God in intricate riddles of tattoos in afterlife. While the legs of Khond women are completely marked with sets of parallel lines to make their legs strong for climbing; some Naga tribes believe that distinctive tattoo marks on women allow their ancestors to recognise them in heaven while others think tattoos could be used as currency to purchase food and other provisions in the afterlife. Women of Meena tribe wear tattoos on their hands and faces to look pretty, while women of Kutia Kondh tribe boast identical geometric facial tattoos to recognise each other in after life; Apatani tribe used to tattoo (this was banned in the 70s) the faces of their girls to mark them as their own as well as make them unattractive to rival tribes; and Chang women tattoo their face to frighten tigers!

— AG

Shekhawati: Hand-painted towns on sand

The RTDC hotel at Jhunjhunu was hardly impressive and the town didn’t look any better either. I do prefer places which are less touristy but Jhunjhunu seemed to have hardly seen any tourist until me. And I had planned to make this place my base for the next two days of my Shekhawati trip.


I had already started to regret my decision when I rather reluctantly boarded an auto-rickshaw to reach the market where according to my guidebook I was supposed to find some amazingly beautiful frescoed havelis. After a teeth-chattering roller-coaster ride through some of the narrowest and most serpentine lanes imaginable, when I finally reached where I thought I was supposed to reach, I realised that I was standing in the middle of a busy vegetable market looking for frescoed havelis! There must have been some terrible mistake — I must have landed myself on a doppelganger of the town mentioned in the guidebook!

Just as I was making my way through the crowd to catch an auto back to the hotel I saw a placard saying ‘Modi Haveli’ So, it exists! And I am on the right track!

The colossal wooden door with intricate carvings and fancy brass iron fittings did not prepare me for what was waiting for me inside — a stuck-in-time huge haveli with amazingly intricate frescos on each wall and roof along with an old caretaker who resembled Om Puri of Mirch Masala! He offered to show me around, in exchange for `100. Although I found the rate a bit too high, I was not ready to miss one inch of the experience that was the Ishwardas Modi Haveli.

As my Om Puri unlocked the doors of the rooms and legends he told me about the four brothers who built exact same rooms in the four corners of the house to avoid property dispute and how the 365 windows of the haveli were constructed in a manner to keep a constant flow of air and yet obstruct the harsh rays of sun from falling directly on the walls. However, the frescos had mesmerised me by then.

Unlike other parts of Rajasthan, Shekhawati, boasting of some obscure specks of village-towns jutting out from the arid desert, is yet to make its presence felt on the tourist map and it was not until I reached Bissau the next day, that I realised why this region was called ‘an open-air art gallery’ and was any art lover’s El Dorado!

The sleepy hamlet welcomed me with a cacophony of images vying for attention — horse, camel and elephant-drawn carriages of various shapes and sizes, mythological characters, solemn looking gods and goddesses, weird animals, curly moustached men, self-obsessed women, erotic couples, European soldiers, motor vehicles, trains, telephones, gramophones, balloons, bicycles and what not! The walls, roofs, parapets of every house were plastered with frescos with themes ranging from gravely religious to utter burlesque.

On our way to Bissau, we had stopped at a Police chowki to ask for directions. And the very mention of Bissau yielded the strangest of statements: “Arey woh Bissau jo Bangaliyon ka gaon hay?” I must have looked visibly shocked for the constable had quickly explained: “Madam wahan ke log Kalkatta mein hi rehtey hein”. Oh simple enough! But why would people from such an obscure village of Rajasthan travel all the way to Calcutta? The scorching sun must be having its effect on the constable, I thought.

And it was not until I reached Bissau that his ‘delirium’ started showing tell-tale signs of turning into reality. The ‘obscure village’ was lined with opulant, desolate havelis. As I stumbled upon a huge elephant standing on two legs, blowing a trumpet to please an European officer and a girl in swimming costume getting ready to take the plunge, I couldn’t resist asking a passerby about the mystery behind the locked doors. “Sab gaon gaye hain”... Gone to ‘native place’? Now where could that be? I wondered. Well, Calcutta of course! Most of the owners of these grand havelis are prosperous merchants who have migrated to Calcutta, he elaborated. I was rather curious to check the interiors of these havelis and asked one of the caretakers if I could manage a sneak peek. He asked me to call the owner for permission which I did and was curtly denied because I was an Indian. Only ‘foreign tourists’ are granted entry to this padlocked painted world I was told!

However, after Bissau, we headed towards arguably one of the most beautifully painted towns of the region — Ramgarh. So would there be frescos of Gabbar Singh and his boots? I could almost hear a spine-chilling voice echoing in my brain “Holi kab hay? Kab hay Holi?” The car screeched to a halt. I opened my eyes to reality and saw a road packed with cars, camel carts, donkeys, porters and general madness and a mass effort to clear the chaos leading to further chaos. Suddenly out of nowhere a man in a suit walked up to our car. “Please follow me,” he said in calm voice. I was hesitant to follow but we needed a way out from this pandemonium. So he guided us through narrow alleys and meandering lanes and landed us in front of a heritage property named Ramgarh Fresco. He then introduced himself as the ‘Manager’ of the heritage hotel and museum and told us that we could have our lunch there. He would then take us for a walk around the town. I suddenly realised I hadn’t eaten anything the whole day and the voice of Gabbar that I was hearing in my brain was actually my stomach grumbling for food! And what can be better that a scrumptious, authentic Rajasthani thali!

Most frescos of the haveli were beautifully restored and the ambience and the food were as good as the paintings on the wall. After chilling out for some time I accompanied Mr Manager for a walk around the town. Each haveli that he took me to had breathtakingly beautiful paintings and many were getting a facelift. The manager was a knowledgeable man and told me about the history of the region in great detail. Ramgarh, also known as Sethan Ramgarh (Ramgarh of the Seths) was established by the wealthy Poddars who rebelled against the hefty tax hike in Churu and relocated here. And the baroque havelis of the area were built in an attempt to outshine the flamboyance of their former home.

These small towns of Shekhawati were once part of the Southern Silk Route and were home to the rich and flourishing merchant community. As time passed, many members of this community migrated to Bombay and Calcutta in search of better prospects and with their inherent business acumen most of them made a fortune trading with the East India Company. Even today most of the lineage of the country’s most powerful industrialists and businessmen like the Neotias, the Ruias, the Birlas, the Goenkas and the Poddars can be traced back to the Shekhawati merchants.

It was a custom in this region for any trader who amasses a considerable amount of wealth to build four things in their native village — a haveli, a baoli (well), a mandir and a dharamshala. The more wealthy the businessman, the more lavish the construction and more intricate the frescos.

However, the frescos not only reflect the opulence of the owners of these havelis, they also document the changing socio-economic scenario. What started with painting gods and goddesses on the walls to protect the house from evil gradually started accommodating common men and their daily lives. The frescoes painted in the early 20th century reflected distinct European influences and gave birth to a new style of painting known as the ‘Company Style’ where airplanes, ships, sofa sets, sewing machines, gramophones, trains, trumpets, and telephones were painted using Rajasthani miniatures and so on.

Most of these painters had no direct contact with the western world and would depend on the elaborate, often absurd description of the traders back from a business trip abroad and the result would often be a bizarre interpretation of the actual objects. Most frescos that adorn these houses are over 100 to 200 years old and are done in a style similar to fresco buono method developed in Italy around the 14th century.

Today the profusely painted, often dilapidated, havelis that line the dust-laden lanes and by-lanes of these village towns are just mementos from that prosperous past.

However, my time was up. The sun was waning and my neck had already started to pain staring at the roofs, walls, windows; my eyes watery from the assault of colours, and I could feel crystals of ‘information’ stiffening my brain.

As I left for my next destination, I saw children playing marbles on the street, women making lacquer bangles and roasting them on hot plates, an old man explaining the meaning of some Sanskrit sloka to a young kid sitting on a chair at a corner of a narrow lane, and the brightly-coloured frescos shimmering on the backdrop of the pale ochre town.

And I knew I had to return to these hauntingly beautiful towns of Rajasthan.

Tasting Times!

 One of my friends once asked me how can I get lost so often in a city I live in and yet manage to find my way around completely strange cities! Well the answer is simple: You can’t get lost if you don’t know where you are supposed to be!
And it was on one such ‘Oh-God-I-Am-Lost-Again’ afternoons, while walking through the meandering lanes and bylanes of North Kolkata, part of the city I call home, that my gourmand’s nose led me to a humble food stall. What caught my attention was the name —  Baruah & Dey— a rather unusual name for an eatery! There were seven-eight people eating outside sharing a long wooden bench and inside was a man making fresh batches of fries. “O kaku panteras hobey? (Uncle do you have panteras?) A boy with eyes hungrier and bigger than mine was peering from behind. “Panteras? Now what the hell is that?" I had never heard anything like it before! I went in to check the menu — maybe he meant something else I thought. The menu read: breast cutlet, fish fry, chicken fry, fish roll...and yes ‘Pantaras’!


I asked the lady at the counter what this weird word meant and of course she had no idea! But she told me that Panteras is to the Dey and Baruah what Kati rolls are to the Nizam’s — a house specialty. I knew that I had to taste it! And as I took the first bite I realised I was not lost! I felt like Columbus! And it was my destiny to discover the Panteras—a heavenly piece of cutlet made with chicken and eggs and more (however, I still have no clue what the word means. The closest I found on Google was: St Pantherus, martyred in Alexandria, in a slowly burning fire with Paul)
A friend once said: “Families of north Kolkata are very particular about their food. We are brought up on a strict beguni-kobiraji-fish fry diet. Our Sunday mornings are never complete without parar morer gutey kochuri ar jilipi. We need ‘cha’ er shathe ‘ta’ and more oily the ‘ta’ the better!” As a true Bangal should know his ilish and a ghoti his chingri, a quintessential north Calcuttan should be tested on his knowledge about cutlets — how coverage cutlet (chicken cutlet covered with egg) became kobiraji cutlet, and why not to look shell-shocked when someone says: ‘O dada duto breast deben’ and in reply comes another equally shocking question: ‘Kaar?’
And it is for this very reason that in north Kolkata at some non-descript corner of some dark unknown alley you might stumble upon a shop selling even a mouthful of sky (coated with breadcrumbs and deep-fried!). Some such must-try foods of north Kolkata are radhaballavi and chholar daal at Puntiram, mutton Afghani at coffee house and egg devils at Bholanath Cabin. And if you like ‘moton’ and you are a bong, it would be a sin to stop you from sampling Gol Bari’s kosha mangsho (I have always found their mutton a bit dry and stodgy though). Lakhinarayan Shaw’s (on Bidhan Sarani) peyaji— a favourite of Subhas Bose — still remains one of the best the city offers. Another shop famous for its telebhaja is Kalika Mukhorochok Telebhaja on Surya Sen Street — their mochar chop chingrir chop, fish chop, mutton chop and egg chop are simply ‘gorge-ous’!
However, if you are neither the explorer kinds nor belong to the bharey cha-Potla’r telebhaja-roakey adda clan and the ghoogni gali at Hatibagan doesn’t make you salivate, then the cafes and cabin restaurants are just the right place for you.
Cabin restaurants, as the names suggest, had small wooden cabins with curtains (usually red!). Today most of these hotels have tore down these cabins to make space for more customers and gone are the romance of the red curtains but what remains is the cha with some lip-smacking, oil-dripping ta and the bikeler adda. Mitali, Dilruba, New Malancha, Ratna and Silver Valley are some such restaurants which still serve great food. However, a few cabin hotels in and around Hatibagan still boast these romance and nostalgia-laden wooden cabins as does Niren Cabin at Shovabazar. Initially made to provide some privacy to the ‘family crowd’, these are now hot favourites among the lovebirds!
I still remember whenever ma took me to Hatibagan for shopping; we would go to Shupti or such cabin restaurants and gorge into heavenly moglai parotas (famous at Anadi Cabin) and mammoth-size dhakai parotas (I don’t know of any place that still serves this variety). But more than the food, I used to love those cosy little cabins and always insisted on closing the curtain and shutting the world out—now this can be my train, my chariot, my horse-drawn carriage and even my thatch-roofed hut!
However, it was when I was in college that I got introduced to the ‘real thrills’ of a ‘cabin hotel’ with Dikhusha becoming a part of our everyday life. And these 'thrills' had absolutely nothing to do with their amazing kobiraji (which even my brother, who describes eating a oil-soaked kobiraji as similar to having a cold dalda-laden biryani and cough syrup after five days on anti-biotic, found delicious the last time I went)!
These cabins were places where ‘first meetings’ between prospective ‘lovers’ were ‘organised’, where the shy guy would take five cutlets and nine cups of tea to propose to that ‘trying-to-look-shy-but-am-bored-to death-and-I-hate-red-rose’ girl, where friends would console the ‘heartbroken’ by offering him their own precious cigarettes and tea and paying the bill of a mammoth meal, and where the waiter will always peek with the bill when you have finally manage to muster the courage for that first kiss! So much were these cabins a part of some love stories that according to ‘urban legend’ a famous cabin hotel at Shyambazar had specially decorated one of their cabins to celebrate the marriage of one such couple!
Among the existing cafe’s one of the most popular one is the Mitra Cafe at Baghbazar and their brain chop can be easily regarded as Kolkata’s answer to the Mumbai’s bheja fry (even Sarvi’s!). However, near Mitra cafe, is a small cafe called Allen Kitchen, with a brief menu but scrumptious food including the best (even if a tad expensive at Rs 74) prawn cutlets (also try their chicken stack!) in the city. The members of the family still supervise the kitchen and the recipes are never given to outside cooks.
Unlike other restaurants, these eateries serve tea along with food and are ideal for long uninterrupted adda sessions. Although, food in these cabins and cafes are usually drowned in oil, it is nonetheless fresh and unbelievably cheap (and you also get onion- cucumber salad and mustard sauce free! Free! FREE!). Some of these restaurants serve amazingly appetizing stews and a few (like Purbani near Hatibagan) even make mouth-watering mangsho’r shingara (not to be confused with North India samosas) on Sundays!
And then there are cabins meant just for intellectual and political discussions—where all the items on the menu are within Rs10 and includes kata cake, paan cake, lebu cha, biscuit and the likes!

All is not lost! (Sariska)

The three-day Ranthambore trip was over and I was on my way to Sariska via Bharatpur. Every single soul had advised me to drop these two places from the itinerary as ‘there are no tigers left in Sariska’ and the Keoladeo bird sanctuary at Bharatpur is now a desert where one can only find a few crows’. However, I am not a tourist but a traveller and I had no checklist to tick. And tigers or no tigers, forests never fail to cast a spell on me— even the teeth-chattering ride through the dirt roads and the smell of the first rays on the dew-kissed foliage has a charm of its own.
The manager of the hotel, Babulalji, suggested that I take a train from Sawai Madhopur to Bharatpur as the bus journey was not safe and he made sure that his ‘suggestion’ was followed! He got the auto and almost made the poor autowallah swear to god that he will get me the ticket and make sure ‘madam’ makes it to the right platform and the right train! And Babulalji was quick to add that I board the ‘Ladies compartment’. The shopwallah of RTDC, whose chacha works in Burrabazaar and who knows the exact distance and travel time from Kolkata to Gangasagar as much as the number of tigers in each zone of Ranthambhore and which is the best time to spot each, had repeatedly cautioned me against doing anything remotely ‘adventurous’ during the journey as this part of Rajasthan lies close to the border. And like all border towns is not very safe. But nothing could have prepared me for the ‘adventure’ I eventually landed myself in — a journey in an ‘unreserved’ ladies compartment!
It was three hours of absolute madness! The seats meant for four were occupied by seven and at times eight people, there were people sitting (read hanging) from the bunks meant to keep luggage, and the floor was occupied with random bags, trunks, jholas, mismatched shoes, people, feet, and what not. After almost an hour I got a speck of a seat and as I parked myself, I realised that over my head, hanging from the luggage bunk was one of the dirtiest pair of feet ever walked this planet. I was sharing my seat with five other women including a housewife from a well-off Brahmin family from Kota who wanted to be a teacher but was not allowed to, a Muslim girl who lives alone and breaks bricks at a construction site in Faridabad, another housewife from Mathura who has some home remedy for almost every ailment, and a Sikh lady with a kirpan and an infectious smile — each had their own story and their own journeys and yet were a part of the same story!
When I finally reached Keoladeo National Park it was around 4pm. As I got my entry ticket I was told that the best way to explore the park was by hiring a bicycle or a cycle-rickshaw! “What? A bicycle ride through a national park? Did I hear that right?” Of course I did! As I turned around I saw a fleet of bicycles and small box-shaped rickshaws standing at the gate. As it was hardly two hours before the park was to close down for the day, I opted for a rickshaw.
I did not have high expectations as far as bird-spotting was concerned as there were much written on how the heydays of this Ramsar Site are now over due to acute scarcity of water. But since my experience so far was limited to discerning crows and pigeons posing on lamp posts and statues, I hired a guide before embarking on the expedition.
However, after a while my guide told me the best way to explore this Unesco World Heritage site was by foot. So I got down from the rickshaw and decided to go off the beaten track. I was pleasantly surprised to find my guide to be quite a knowledgeable person and the sanctuary throbbing with avian population! From common parakeets, peacocks, owls and kingfishers to pin tailed ducks, purple herons, grey hornbills, and painted storks — it was a feast for the eyes.
My guide told me that under a new government project, some water from the Chambal river has been diverted to this region and this is slowly bringing back the birds to Keoladeo and Keoladeo back to life. The sun was about to set and I was a tad disappointed to have missed the boat ride. But it was time to leave and Sariska was waiting for me the next day.
Sariska is an hour-long bus ride from Alwar. Somewhere in the beginning of 2005 it was discovered that there were no tigers left in Sariska Tiger Reserve and poachers were blamed. It was decided that tigers would be reintroduced to the forest and in 2008 Sariska got its first tiger from Ranthambhore under this project. A total of six tigers have been relocated so far (this before the arrival of ST-7) and at present the number of tigers in this reserve forest is five. Although the topography is similar, spread across an area of around 866 km, it is much larger than Ranthambhore. This makes tiger sightings at Sariska extremely rare and most ‘tiger lovers’ prefer to give it a miss. After spending three days in the tourist-infested Ranthambhore, I desperately needed a trip to a forest which didn’t feel like a picnic spot.
The first thing I noticed was that instead of Canters all tourists can avail jeeps which meant fewer crowds and less chance of ending up with whining babies. Nothing spoils a jungle safari more than a noisy crowd and I had my share of that at Ranthambhore. Also, it is easier to explore the interiors of the forest in jeeps as they can easily ply on the narrow dirt roads.
Apart from the driver, there was a forest guard who spoke little but smiled a lot. Ours was the only vehicle on the route apart from a few occasional patrol cars. 15-minutes into the tiger reserve, I was already in love with the rugged beauty of Sariska and the forest was bustling with activities — as the vegetation was sparse we spotted a fox running after a peacock for no apparent reason, two deer locking horns in a friendly fight, a swamp deer trying a mud pack to cool off, a congregation of spotted deer waiting for some divine miracle, an antelope trying to pass itself off as an unicorn, and what not.
The forest guard decided to check the control room if there is any movement of a tiger nearby. After the reintroduction of tigers the forest department has become extra-cautious and now all five tigers have been radio-collared and cameras have been installed in various areas of the forest to monitor their movements.
There was a signal, though a frail one, coming from top of one of the hills. Our guard had a gut feeling that it might come down in another half an hour and cross the road — nothing works better than a forest guard’s gut feeling in times such as these and we decided to give it a shot. We drove to the road which the tiger might cross and waited. There was an eerie calm and we could almost feel one another’s heartbeats. It was certainly not one of the best places to park a car—the tiger might come from any side and the guy might just not be in the mood for visitors. On times like these reading the hanuman chalisa, or a mere Ram-naam might have helped boost the morale but being an atheist all I found myself muttering was the Mountain Dew tagline: Dar ke agey jeet hay!
After waiting for quite some time, we lost patience and our guard decided to go back and recheck the signals. We were half-way to the control room when the driver suggested it was better that we try for the same tiger and wait at the same spot as there were hardly 45 minutes left until all vehicles are supposed to be out of the park. So we made a U-turn and as we reached the road there it was! Walking majestically down the road! Even the forest guard could not believe his luck! “This is the first time I am seeing this one! It is the ST-6—one of the two male tigers!” whispered the guard.
The driver slowly started following the tiger and I started shooting (of course with my camera!). After some time it turned back and faced the camera with an amused look. For the next 15/20 minutes we kept following it until it got bored with all the attention and went down into the jungle. I pinched myself! Ouch! It really did happen then! After Bandhavgarh, Corbett, Ranthambhore, I managed to spot a tiger even in Sariska!

Itz a mad MAD world! (Ranthambhor)

I had already begun to regret my decision to opt for a RSTC bus instead of the early morning train. It was around 1 pm and I was standing at a bus terminus of some off-the-map obscure village named Uniyara waiting for a bus known simply as hari rang ki gari — it seemed nobody has ever bothered to know the number of this green-coloured bus and I thanked my stars for not being colour blind!
Finally after what seemed an eternity, the bus arrived and the sight almost gave me a heart attack — there were heads and arms and jholas jutting out from every window, the roof was layered with rainbow-coloured luggage and people, and I am sure even a needle would die of asphyxia if it wanted to get past that door. But then it is the only bus that can take me to my destination. I was already way behind my schedule and was not too keen to wait for 6 hours at this middle-of-nowhere bus stand for the next hari rang ki gari.
So, I gathered all my courage and took my backpack, hand luggage and a deep breath — ‘you got to do what you got to do’ I reminded myself.
But just as I started walking towards the ticket window a familiar voice stopped me: “Arey madam yeh ulti bus hay!” ‘Ulti bus?’ now what is that supposed to mean? I looked around and spotted the ever-smiling Prateik Babbar...erm... the conductor of my Jaipur-Uniyara bus grinning at me. ‘Madam yeh bus Sawai Madhopur se Tonk ja rahi hay. Apki wali Tonk se aayegi,’ he explained.
Ah right! But no sooner had I heaved a sigh of relief, another equally over-populated green bus arrived. “Madam chalo aap ki bus” and before I could react I saw ‘Prateik’ clutch my hand luggage and deftly manoeuvre through the crowd. As if in a trance I followed him and my bag and when I came to my senses, I and my backpack along with the hand luggage were inside the bus, sitting pretty on a window seat and were ALIVE.
This was my fifth trip to Rajasthan and what makes me fall in love with the place a bit more each time are its people — rugged and rustic yet simple and helpful.
And if you are a girl travelling alone in this part of the country, expect men to stand up and insist you sit on their seat, old uncles to draw out weird maps with trembling hands and insist you follow the route mentioned, women to get chatty and enquire about your age and marital status and insist you get married soon and bus conductors to take the responsibility to get you a window seat in a packed bus!
However, after a teeth-chattering two-hour ride when I finally reached my hotel in Sawai Madhopur, the last bus for the evening safari was leaving and the manager told me that since I had not called up the hotel to book my seat for the safari all I could do that day was to hire a jeep and go to the fort. And within 15 minutes the jeep along with a very cheery Rajendra Singh was at my disposal. Ranthambhore Fort lies in the middle of the forest and as my driver for the day was also a forest guide, we stopped and spotted some yawning crocodiles, curious deer, flying peacocks and self-obsessed monkeys and when we finally reached the majestic ruins of the fort, the sun had mellowed  imparting a sombre look to the century-old stone walls and the birds had already begun singing a requiem for the dying day, and the vast forest overlooking the fort smelled of mist and gloom.
As we explored the multitudinous temples, mosques, palaces, cenotaphs and other ruins, Rajendra Singhji started narrating the tragic tale of Hammir Dev Chauhan — how the brave king of Ranthambhore fought and defeated Alauddin Khilji only to fall prey to the treachery of his own men. I felt as if I was caught in a time warp — maybe it was a cold evening like this when after a long war, Veer Hammir rode through the dense forest and reached his fort only to find all the women of his kingdom given up their lives in jauhar due to rumour spread by some of his own men regarding his death in the war and a heart-broken Hammir severed his head in front of Lord Shiva. Standing next to a pond of blood algae I could almost see blood oozing out from the severed head of Hammir and filling the ground. I shuddered.  And at this point Rajendra Singhji’s voice trailed and I could see his eyes moisten. 
As the last rays of sun bid adieu to Hammir’s beloved fort and winter chill wrapped its blanket over the forest I followed Singhji and trudged back to our jeep. The world suddenly seemed to have gone quiet as if to mourn the sad end of a king who survived great wars but succumbed to betrayals of his own men.
Next morning it was time to finally embark on the tiger trail! Ranthambhore has five zones for the tourists in the core area and tiger sightings are not rare. But unlike in summer, when tigers can be easily spotted near the watering holes, tracking one in the winter can be tricky.  Moreover it was an extended holiday and picnickers had flocked from all corners. I was not so much worried about spotting a tiger as I simply love the whole experience of spending time in a forest (although I was quietly confident of spotting one as I have been pretty lucky with tigers so far) but I was dreading the noisy picnic crowd.
There are two modes of transport for safaris in Ranthambhore — the 6-seater Gypsies and the 20-seater Canters and the seats are randomly allotted by a lucky draw and I was certainly not lucky enough to get a Gypsy that morning. When I boarded the Canter the only thing I wished was to ride sans the loud picnicker and screaming kids — and I got both. Not only there were people cracking jokes and shouting at the top of their voices, but there was a few months old crying baby! And to my horror his parents actually changed his diaper and nonchalantly flung the soiled diaper into the forest even after being repeatedly told by the forest guard not to throw even a piece of paper outside.
I was fuming but before I could react the Canter stopped. And I looked out “There! T-6 with its kill!” shouted the forest guard. And behind the shrubs I discerned the striped beast sitting majestically and in front was the bloody remains of its morning feast! What a sight! Of course if we wait for some time it would get up! But then most of the people in the Canter had lost interest in the tiger by then. Some even remarked, “Arey isse achcha to zoo mein dekh lengey”. I was scared that they might start playing antakshari if we waited there any longer when the baby started crying and that woke up another baby whom I had so far mistaken as a bundle of shawls and sweaters. This time it was too much for both the driver and the forest guard and they abandoned the plan of waiting for the tiger to get up. Because if things went as they were going, the tiger might not only get up but pounce on us!
So we made a move and a few dozens of deer, antelope, peacocks, wild boars, and monkeys later we spotted a sloth bear — one animal that is even more difficult to find in this forest than a tiger. So the Canter stopped and the bear started walking towards us munching leaves. I was keeping my fingers crossed that it would come close enough but more than that I was hoping that the babies doesn’t start screaming or the crowd does not try to pull any trick on the bear. Sloth bears can turn extremely violent if provoked. The forest guide was trying his best to keep the noise level low. Suddenly an affectionate voice: “nosey dikhao beta” ah of course I forgot the moms! Surely how can a doting mother give a damn about a sloth bear when her child has finally managed to identify his nose! And that was followed by ‘papa bolo papa’ and also the surreal ‘doggy kahan hay doggy’ (doggie? in the middle of the forest? WHY? I was almost suicidal by then). Of course after so much love the child started crying at the top of his voice shocking the sloth bear who made a face and walked away. For the first time in my life I absolutely hated kids and noses and doggies and was glad that the safari was over.
International travel channels have given this national park a ‘hip’ tag and thanks to the Canters, safaris have become affordable and as a result Ranthambhore has become to Delhites what Digha is to Kolkatans — a picnic spot. Tourism department is reaping good profit but what suffers is what a national park aims to protect — its wildlife.

Once upon on Sundays!

Finally the ordeal was over. But once I checked the wall clock and my heart sank. I was late. As I walked out, the road was almost empty and all I could hear was a dog barking at some distance. I clutched my bag and started running as fast as I could. I was still a few minutes away from my house when suddenly the eerie silence was shattered by a shrill sound....
MAHABHARAT...atha shree Mahabharat katha...aaa
All the television sets of our locality had started singing. And I am yet to reach home. “Why does this always have to happen with me? WHY? How can anyone even think of drawing oranges and apples (I was never too much into Cezanne really) while Arjun has already arrived for the swayamvar? ”
As I scurried towards my house I kept praying that I would make it before the Kaalchkra was over with its ‘Main samay hun’ flashback—they surely won’t show Arjun or Krishna before I reach the television set, I assured myself. These two breathtakingly handsome men were the best things that had happened to me in the seven long years of my life on this planet...well...apart from the gorgeous box of coloured chalks that ma got me last week.
Sunday was more than just a holiday then. The day dawned with Rangoli which was followed by some amazing serials like Ramayan, He-Man, Space City Sigma and Indradhanush, Bharat Ek Khoj, Chanakya, Mowgli, Ducktales, Talespin, Captain Vyom (which had the absolutely droolicious Milind Soman) and not to forget the never-ending Chandrakanta and its bushy eye-browed ‘Yakku’ Krur Singh. However, I missed most of these thanks to my drawing class (in those days Sunday morning drawing classes were mandatory for almost every child).
However, Sundays were not only about Doordarshan. After an early (but elaborate as would suit a Sunday) lunch it was playtime! Most of us did not have telephones but we knew how to make optimum use of something that we all had — lung power. Whoever was the first to arrive at the playground was supposed to go to each building and shout the names on top of his voice until the concerned person came down (and strangely enough, in most cases this ‘concerned’ person would only hear his name after you got scolded by almost all the grown-ups of that building for shouting so loudly). After the full cast assembled, it was time to take the big decision—would it be ‘ais pais’ (I Spy) or lock and key or hide and seek.
Usually it was hide and seek which would most often end with people leaving for their homes as the person who was supposed to find the rest, kept counting with his eyes shut. There were also times when we would keep hiding at one place, sitting still as a log, only to find out that the person who was supposed to find us had left as he was too sleepy from the counting part (well numbers do tend to have that effect on many!).
However, on the dull summer days, when it was too hot to play outdoors, it was time to turn creative. I would bury myself in crepe papers, marble papers, beads, wires, crayons and what not. And then, there were times when ma would sit with the Rabindra Rachanabali and read out poems or letters or short stories. During summer vacations, Doordarshan would have special programmes for children in the afternoons as well.
In the evening, we would again gather at the playground or the club house but with strict instructions to reach home by 7pm. As we grew up, the deadline extended and instead of ‘ais pais’, lock and key and hide-and-seek, the guys found their calling in football and cricket and we girls in antakshari, dumb charade and so on. But Sundays were never complete without a long adda session.
Winters were for badminton. And the sessions went on till the older group arrived and threw us off the court. At times, the kakimas and jethimas would also indulge in a game or two before starting with their late night adda sessions mostly revolving around para scandals!
Sundays were also for various cultural programmes (and there was some occasion or the other almost every month!) and rehearsals! We would finish our studies early and assemble at the club house. Usually it would be some dance-drama and the most crucial and difficult thing would be to land a role where you get to play a girl. As the guys were too ‘unruly’ and ‘unmusical’, they were not allowed to take part in these hallowed plays and so it was up to us girls to play the role of the male characters as well. All the taller girls were given male roles and I regretted my height.
Later, when we graduated to dramas, the boys also joined us in playing boys (as there were a mere one or two female characters in these dramas, only the most ‘beautiful and slim’ girls got to play ‘girls’ and I was neither!). And even while playing the male characters I would never get the lead roles as I was shorter than the real boys and again I regretted my height.
Another thing I eagerly waited for on Sundays was the hawker who sold puffed rice, door-to-door. Although he came across as the most uninteresting fellow selling one of the most uninteresting items under the sun, his jhola contained many hidden treasures and like a magician he would bring out small packets of badam chaak, tiler naru, chirer moa, aam shotto and other such delicacies!
However, everything was not that rosy. It can never be if you have parents who are obsessed with theatre. So at times my parents would make it their mission to spoil my Sunday by dragging me to the ‘Academy’ to watch people dressed in rags either shouting or crying hysterically over some kind of land dispute or labour strike.
I wanted to grow up, especially on such Sundays. So that there would be no drawing classes and home-work and theatre and I could watch all the cartoons, and play as long as I wanted, have long adda sessions and return home real late. So, I eventually I grew up. But by then it was too late. Doordarshan is now merely a shadow of what it used to be and among the 100+ other channels, none air anything special on Sundays. Instead of Sunday’s Disney Hour, now we have multiple cartoon channels, but Pokemons and Powerpuff Girls can never be a match for the good old classic Disney characters like the crazy Mr Scrooge McDuck and his three nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie or the clumsy pilot Launchpad McQuack or the adorable duo of Tom and Jerry.
As for the playground, it has been converted to a parking lot as the younger generation has no interest in any kind of games apart from video games. And as for the adda, it is mostly on Gchat or Facebook these days as we seldom get to see each other. But as for returning home late on Sundays, I guess I got lucky with that! I get to return home as late as 2 am these days. Well, I work on a night shift and I do not have a Sunday off!

The Doll House

It was a Sunday and the Hooghly River was blushing from the subtle flirting of the morning sun. I was taking a lazy stroll along the Strand Bank Road watching the city slowly wake up. Lined with old dilapidated buildings, time seems to have come to a standstill on this narrow stretch between Sovabazar and Kumortuli. I have walked this walk many times but never noticed what I did on this winter morning. Half hidden behind trees and other ruins, like a mirage, was a lone man standing with one arm raised amid a bunch of fragile women on an ornate terrace — all frozen in time.

The statues had something sad and eerie about them and it seemed they were beckoning me to their world. But there was no door!

I asked a man brushing his teeth on the street: “Dada oi baritaye jabo. Rasta ta...?”

“O putul bari jaben! Eito edikey,” he grinned flashing his lather-laden teeth.

Putul Bari! Doll House! Interesting I thought!

When I reached the half-ruined building I wasn’t much impressed. It looked like the other multitudinous dilapidated structures. I was not too sure if I should go in. I knocked on the door:

“Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes...,”

But, I was luckier than De La Mare’s traveller and the door was not locked! As I pushed the door it screeched and a strip of light made its way to the dark cobweb-laden wooden staircase. As if in a trance, I started climbing the stairs and it was then I realised how dilapidated it was. At certain points the wood was crumbling and with each step it screeched, piercing the dead silence of the house. But the sight

that greeted me when I reached the first floor almost took my breath away — a courtyard hemmed with elegant Corinthian arches oozing baroque grandeur. And the mellow chiaroscuro was lending it an ethereal charm.

As I stood mesmerised at the middle of the courtyard, I started feeling increasingly uncomfortable —as if there were people staring at me from all corners. I looked around. There was no one but a strange bearded man peering from each of the arch. There was something eerie about the face. It seemed he was keeping an eye on trespassers like me. I tried to shrug away the feeling and concentrated on the intricately designed figurines perched on the columns. Although the elaborate detailing in stucco and plaster has fallen prey to the ravages of time, I could discern almost all the popular members of the Hindu pantheon from amid thick layers of moss.

As I explored the ‘shadowiness of the still house’ I realised that the house, tagged as a heritage structure by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, is not inhabited by ‘Phantom listeners’ but with real people! Makhan Lal Natta, an old man who owns a more than the 140-year-old Natta Company, acquired the property in 1978 and now the third floor of this grand mansion doubles as his office. The rest of the rooms are occupied by ‘tenants’.

It is hard to believe that this magnificent building which served as a shooting location for Roland Joffé’s City of Joy and which Desmond Doig tagged as ‘a perfect example of Calcutta rococo’ was built as a warehouse. The Hooghly River was navigable then and barges laden with spice, jute and such like would dock in the ports nearby. Hence several warehouses were built in this area to store imported goods. But why such an elaborately decorated structure for a warehouse? Well, the answer is surely lost in the mists of time.

Bollywood's 'poster boys' making a comeback!

It rarely happens that the ‘first look’ of a film poster creates such a buzz — getting 7,800 ‘likes’, 2087 ‘comments’ and 926 ‘shares’ on a social networking site. But Sanjay Leela Bhansali seems to have managed to do just that with the hand-painted posters of his upcoming film Rowdy Rathore. A tribute to over-the-top action films of the 80s, the Faulad Ki Aulad poster almost instantly brings back memories of walls plastered with faces of angry action heroes in bold red brush strokes and nubile beauties oozing pink paint. Magical, dreamy (and usually huge!), these posters were the mash up of advertising, art and storyboard depiction, all rolled into one canvas.

Bollywood’s poster art came into its own in the 1930s under the studio system that employed artists to paint posters and banners. And, after the decline of the studios, this art was created by a network of painters, photography studios and billboard workshops.

It all started with the publicity artists going through the trial screening and zeroing down on the aspects that need to be highlighted. However, in many cases they were just given albums of random production stills and from there they would choose the right images and do the sketches based on those. The sketches were sent to the producer for approval and then began the work of imbuing life to the final posters through oil paints or gouache.

Apart from highlighting the central theme of the movie, great deal of attention was paid to present the actors and actresses in new avatars. Another visual strategy employed by the Bollywood artists was dictated by the audience’s taste for paisa vasool entertainment and an item in every square inch is what masala posters and billboards offered. Not content with showing off just the lead pair, it incorporated the character actors, the villains and the vamps replete with the background dancers, and the spaces in-between filled with throbbing vignettes of a sleek car-chase scene or a sexy dance number or an action-packed climax scene.

The colour schemes of these posters were distinct (though not too different). If red signified revenge or anger, blue was synonymous with evil and pink portrayed love. But, it was the traditional style of mixing the colours and creating unique shades that made these posters alive. Often, New painting techniques were invented to bring out the right emotions and the posters more dramatic. One such was painting with a knife to add textures and contours to faces thereby making the heroes appear more macho and rugged. In the case of the poster of Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, the artist creates a peculiar Van Gogh-like quality through its brush strokes in order to reproduce the delirium of elm trees on the Gangetic plain. The psychedelic Andy Warhol-like poster of Bobby and the pointillist style poster of Zehreela Insaan are few examples of some brilliant use of technique in film posters. Even M F Hussain, regarded as the Picasso of India, started his career in Bollywood where he used to paint film divas like Kanan Devi and Durga Khote on giant sizeposters along with painting film sets.

In the 1970’s, when a fleet of young directors and actors moved away from Bollywood ‘commercial cinema’ to explore radical new themes, a new kind of no-frills approach in posters came into being.These minimalist style posters of the ‘art house cinema’ were often created by graphic designers and illustrators from outside Bollywood and one such instance is the booklet cover for Ardh Satya by cartoonist Manjula Padmanabhan.

In 1980s new photo-reproduction technologies arrived in India that could blow up smaller artworks to the size of a 30-by-40-inch poster with superior quality. Painted posters started getting replaced by photo collages which had minimal work for the painters and scissors became more important than paint brushes. But, even this was short-lived.

In the early 1990’s, computer aided graphics slowly started replacing photo-collages and with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, one of the first movie posters to use digital artwork, becoming as massive a hit as it did, photoshop made the paintbrush almost obsolete. Most artists had to clean their brush and palettes of the garish colours almost overnight and take up odd jobs or diversify by producing portraits of politicians and election hoardings.


However, in true Bollywood ishtyle, within a decade, hand-painted posters made a comeback. And, from huge billboards to forgotten stacks of some dilapidated closed studio to the walls of some of the most high-profile art galleries, the journey was no less dramatic.

Considered nothing more than just a vehicle of film promotion in Bollywood, these posters became coveted art in cities like Paris, Toronto, London and Berlin and almost like a ripple effect, India too slowly began to appreciate these as art form and initiatives began to revive it.

However, young entrepreneurs like Hinesh Jethwani, founder of Indian Hippy, believe that the beauty of film poster art should not be limited to an elite few and hence Indian Hippy came to existence two years back. “We wanted to present this art once again in front of people, albeit on a fresh canvas and a fair price,” says Hinesh.

Besides a line-up of very innovative and funky fashion accessories and small furniture and décor items such as hand-painted chairs and coffee tables, Indian Hippy offers unique custom painted film posters that allow individuals to bring their fantasy to life on canvas.

“Very few film poster artists remain in India who hasn’t given up the paintbrush entirely and I am glad to have found a few of them. Working with them is a continuous challenge. These billboard and poster artists were used to painting on supersized canvases with large brushes,” says Hinesh.

For Nida Mahmood, fashion designer, graphic artist and co-founder of New India Bioscope Co, which is a design conglomerate set up to revive the art and the artists of hand-painted Bollywood posters, it all started in 2009 while making a few mixed media frames inspired from the posters of Deewar. “While talking to my my business partner Raul Chandra, we suddenly had the same question, where have all these poster artists disappeared? With immense difficulty and several dead ends, we managed to find a few poster artists in their late 70s and 80s and convinced them to pass on their art to our generations. Initially unwilling, sceptical and cynical they agreed once we set up a corpus for them. We took a risk and made an attempt to bring film poster art, away from its usual hoardings, onto wearable garments.”

Her brand offers two lines. The affordable line consists reprints of digital works inspired from poster art, while the collector’s line comprises objects that are hand-painted by poster artists and include trunk tables, chairs, hand-painted jackets, tote bags etc. “I do see a huge change in the modern thinking. People are appreciative of the bygone era. It is just about presenting it to them and making them aware. Kitsch is an all pervasive word, which is not defined by filling in a handful of colours to an image downloaded from the internet. I find myself bringing kitsch and poster art together and the results are phenomenal,” says Nida.

“With quirky being the mantra of the day I feel that there is nothing more interesting and colourful than hand-painted posters. The best part about them is the fact that they can be used on almost anything ranging from cell phone covers to bed sheets to garments and even shoes,” says accessory designer Rohan Arora.

Rohan’s shoe line Naya Daur, that walked the LFW Winter/Festive 2010 ramps, had old Hindi film posters hand-painted on khadi, and chicken legs leather and became an instant hit. He has three poster artists working for him. “They are all very old today and doing odd jobs due to the digitalization of the art. One of them was pulling rickshaws in College Street, one of them working as a waiter in a roadside restaurant on Moulali and the third one was selling baby toys at the Park Circus traffic signal. Initially, it was very difficult to get them and then convince them to paint the posters on shoes instead of large canvasses. But when they did, the response was amazing,” says Rohan.

An ardent fan of Bollywood, hand-painted posters has always fascinated Rohan: “I think digital techniques are no match to brush and canvas. Painted poster brings out a lot more emotion and is far more original than a digital print. Every poster has a story of its own. Even two posters from the same film are different. And I guess it is due to this that a lot of new film directors are going back to hand -painted posters today.”

A current bunch of contemporary artists are also taking inspiration from poster art. Sharmistha Dutta’s ‘Yaadon Ki Baaraat’, which concluded this week in Delhi, was a tribute to the lost art of hand-painted posters, while Vinita Dasgupta’s ‘Bollywood Reverie’, which is on in the national capital till December 18, is a collection of paintings inspired by Bollywood and the posters. “I have presented it in a manner similar to western pop art but the theme very much belongs to the mainstream. I have used mixed mediums,” says Vinita.

Be it old art work discovered by some enthusiastic 'relic hunter' or the ones smelling of fresh paints, be it customised posters starring at you as Don or wearing Gabber on your boots, be it digital prints of old hand-painted posters or incorporating posters in digital art, or film directors going old-school again, it seems the fate of hand-painted posters is taking quite an interesting turn break ke baad!

The dream sellers of Calcutta

The feriwalas, on a sweltering afternoon, not only enticed women and children of the household with their goods, but also like magicians would cast a spell on them

Even with the monsoon being officially over, it is still raining at times and my favourite umbrella has a spike jutting out. For the last one week not a single repairwala could be spotted in the vicinity. It was Sunday morning, the best time to catch a repairwala or a feriwala. I sat myself by the window keeping a hawk’s eye and an owl’s ear on the street to grab one. One hour into the ordeal and suddenly realisation dawns: the Sunday soundscape has ceased to be what it was even four or five years ago.
There is no prabhat feri. The sound of Disney cartoons merging with old Hindi film songs and mythological serials only to be broken by an occasional “G-O-A-L” from the nearby football ground and the cacophony of a cricket match is no more. And the street that used to be abuzz with hawkers shouting on top of their voices to sell their products and services has faded making way for an eerie silence of a claustrophobic sophistication.
Yet, I could almost hear the voices:
“Aataa oyiiiiiiiiiiii...” whenever I would hear this scream, I would run to the verandah to catch hold of the custard apple (aata) seller but all I could see would be some old newspaperwala or some random hawker. To me it seemed the most surreal event on this planet. It seemed nobody else but me could hear the custard applewala’s shrill loud cry. But Ma never took this seriously. Older people never take children seriously. Not until one hot summer morning, when Ma caught me running from one window to another trying to spot the fruit vendor once again. “Certainly, this is not the season for custard apples!” But I was not convinced. I made her listen carefully: “Of course you can hear his shout! Aaataaa oyiiiii... it is loud enough!” And then she bursts out laughing: “Of course it is loud enough and it says “Purono khata boi’! It is the chap who buys old newspapers and books.” But, even after so many years I am not absolutely convinced.
Feriwalas or hawkers selling glass bangles, ice-lollies, plastic dolls, balls and cameras, Kashmiri shawls, mangoes, fish, jasmine garlands, mattresses, sweets, brooms and dreams were an integral part of the streets and the soundscape of the city till a few years ago. Every house would have their set of fixed feriwalas who would pay a visit to the household just when you ‘need’ them.
Ma would often tell stories of the Magnolia ice-cream vendors, the bel phoolwalas and the chanachurwala who was so ecstatic to have extracted some compliment from my rather reserved and strict grandfather once, that for the next few months his usual hawking chant boasted an addendum: ‘D-a-k-ta-r b-a-b-u kh-e-ye b-o-l-e-che-n bh-a-l-o h-ye-chhe! (Doctor babu said it’s good).
The cacophony of these different distinctive calls created the background score of the drama of daily life and social essayists, poets, dramatists used these characters and their cries copiously to recreate the city streets in their works. Rabindranath Tagore immortalised the simple but scary-looking, tall, bearded, Afghan dry-fruit sellers who were a common site on the streets of Calcutta in his classic short story Kabuliwala, and in Gora he brings to life a typical old Calcutta residential area replete with the distinctive calls of street vendors. And who can forget the Doiwala (curd seller) whose chants mesmerised little Amal in Dakghar! The monotony of the slow-paced, black and white ‘opera binoculared’ world of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata is often broken by the calls of street vendors. But the most noted works on hawkers and their cries are by Amritlal Basu, Kaliprasanna Sinha, Ishwar Gupta and Sashi Chandra Dutta.
However, the first hand-painted depiction of the hawkers of Calcutta was probably by Balthazar Solvyns. Published as early as 1799 from Calcutta, A collection of 250 coloured etchings descriptive of the manners, customs and dresses of the Hindoos, this book provides a glimpse into the streets of European Calcutta. This was followed by Twenty-four Plates illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal, published in 1832 by a certain Mrs S C Belnos. The book, which later received the approval of the Royal Asiatic Society of London, has three plates dedicated to the hawkers. Titled The Pedlar, Cloth Merchant and The Boxwallah, the paintings not only give us an insight into the trade but also stress the importance and prominence of these people in the society. Mrs Belnos writes that these vendors were accompanied by three/four coolies laden with huge boxes stacked with almost all things imaginable-ribbons, gloves, plastic beads, pearls, French satin, Dhakai muslin and what not and thus earned the name ‘boxwallah’.
A vivid account of these boxwallas is found in William Tayler, Thirty Eight years in India, published in 1881, where he writes: “The Bengal Boxwalla is an animal per se; hawker, pedlar, itinerant, no known word of civilised or uncivilised vocabulary will truly and befittingly describe the phenomenon. Isolate him from the angular appendage of tin and padlock, he sinks into a cipher mingling with the mass of brown humanity in which he lives.
After gaining entrance to a house, he peeps into the room or knocks at the door with confidence, sufficient for him is the listless and unequivocal assent of the unoccupied matron or an idle damsel, and in another minute he is in the middle of the room, while at his heel, two, three or four semi-nude followers, with capacious boxes on their heads enter and with silent and stealthy action deposit, in turn their freighted burdens and their own bodies. Their presence for a time is hardly noticed, but the head-man commences his exhibition by removing the choicest specimens of his goods; the quiet perseverance of the boxwallah triumphs in the end. Some attractive objects are produced and forced upon her attention. The love of bargaining or the desire of possession, forces itself on her mind and she condescends to examine one or more of the articles.”
Apart from boxwallahs and vendors, hawkers included street show artistes like jugglers, snake charmers, magicians, monkey players, tight-rope walkers etc boasting various levels of ‘bizarre’ quotient. And then there were the various ‘service providers’ and the most sought after among them were the kuor ghoti tola walas. Most houses in those days had paat kuo (water wells) and every now and then the ‘favourite’ earring of the wife, or the ‘precious’ plastic doll of the daughter, or the ‘ancestral’ brass bucket, or the ‘goodluck charm’ ladle of the servant would fall into the deep dark gorge of the well and these bounty hunters would be called and entrusted with the job to bring the treasures back from their watery graves! Although wells were long replaced by Hindware taps, and kuor ghoti tola walas by plumbers, there are still some ‘service providers’ like sheel kataowala, chhuri kaanchi shaan deoawala, chhata sharaiwala, purono ghori, gramophone sharaiwala, purono khata, shishi botolwala, chaabi katawala, khaat palong toierwala, toshok, balish toierwala, etc remain as indispensible as ever.
But the hawkers were often elusive — when you are in dire need of one, you would hear their cries and keep waiting impatiently on the street only to realise that they have passed by or changed their route.
Often every member of the family along with the neighbours, extended neighbours, visitors, servants, roadside shop keepers — all would join in this ‘feriwala spotting’ exercise. However, it was us, kids, who would usually win the challenge. But of course, we didn’t believe in free service and our parents would have to place formal requests along with the promise to buy us one 25-paise worth orange lozenge each (the deal worked fine with both the parties).
Most of these hawkers were men but when it came to popularity, it was those few non-Bengali ladies, with huge rag bundles on their heads, who stole the show. Usually tagged along by one or two young lads with tubs full of utensils, these ladies would take old clothes and give new utensils in exchange and the dupurer meyeli adda (women indulging in afternoon chats) would often revolve around who got the best deal and what they are planning to exchange next.
However, it was always the kulfiwala and the gas balloonwala who made me go weak in my knees. Then of course there was the ghotigoromwala who always seemed to arrive from nowhere on rain-drenched evenings!
And with that it starts pouring again soaking my train of thoughts. I rush back to my present and immediate concern — how to get my leopard-print umbrella repaired.

Back to U.S.S.R and Baba Yaga

It was a Friday twenty years ago. Moscow woke to the sound of tanks in the streets. The television channels went off. Troops were deployed in all major cities of Soviet Russia. President Mikhail Gorbachev, vacationing in Crimea, was taken under house arrest. There was a military coup in the USSR. And it failed within 72 hours. But, this changed the world as we knew forever. Four months later, on Christmas Day, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. The breakup of the Soviet Union led to a complete reformulation of political, economic and military alliances all over the globe. The United States of America celebrated as its most formidable enemy was brought to its knees. The Cold War between the two superpowers finally ended. The newly formed Russian countries faced an overwhelming task to develop their economies, reorganize their political systems, and, in many cases, settle bitter territorial disputes.
But, none of these really had any effect on the little girl in Kolkata who was sitting by her window waiting for her latest copy of Misha—a Russian children’s magazine translated in English. Named upon Misha, the bear mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, the magazine within its colourful glossy papers had a world of stories, news of sports, discoveries, science and technology, cartoons, pictures, fun games and craft ideas, ’How and Why’ s, poems, riddles, and what not!
The big black and white television was saying something about Russia—the snow-covered hand-painted land where the wise Elena, the witty Alyonushka, the dashing Ivan and the wicked Baba Yaga (in her hut on chicken legs) live. She runs to get a glimpse of the wonderland and all that flickers are heavy boots, blood, canons and chaos on streets—this was certainly not the Soviet Russia she knew. But then she was just ten and fairy tales were more real than reality.
I had grown up on Roosh Desher Upokotha (The folklores of Russia). My very first memories on this planet are of my dida telling me the story of the cunning ‘Chhotto Gol Ruti’ (The Doughnut) that escapes from the window of the old lady who bakes it and as it starts rolling through the streets it meets many hungry animals who lust at it but it escapes all by singing:
‘I am a doughnut round.
I was fried and browned.
From a flour bin scraped.
From a corn bin swept,
I have sour cream inside,
In butter I am fried.
They left me to cool,
But I am not fool,
Grandpa didn’t get me,
Gandma didn’t get me,
And, you Hare, won’t get me either! (Adapted by Aleksei Tolstoy)
After a rather adventurous journey the bread meets a fox who tricks it into sitting on his tongue and eats it up as soon as it lands there and with that dida would trick me into having one more morsel of food. Eventually, the black and white sketch of the haughty, cute, round bread became what the bell was to Mr. Pavlov’s dog!
However, this beautifully illustrated book with fascinating stories of Ojani desher najani ki (Go i know not where, bring I know not what), Jholmoley Baaj Finist (Fenist the falcon), Alyonoushka bon ar Ivanushka bhai (Sister Alyonushka and brother Ivanushka), Borof Buro (Father Frost), Byang Rajkumari (The Tale of Frog Tsarevna) managed to keep me under their magic spell for the first few years of my life. I would listen to the same stories each day and at times the same one twice or thrice in a single day and knew almost all the rhymes by heart!
The stories were all translated in Bengali and translated so well that for many years I had this notion that Russians are actually fur-coat clad bongs with weird names who lived north in a big blob of land of snow-capped fern forests throbbing with all kinds of weird but friendly animals. Russia on the small tin globe didn’t seem too far from India—the tiny triangle where I was told we lived. I would dream of going to Russia and talk Baba Yaga into letting me take a peek inside her ‘bone-fenced hut spinning on a chicken leg’. I was mesmerised by this creepy witch with iron teeth who rode a large mortar with her knees almost touching her chin, used a pestle to push the vehicle across the forest floor and swept away her tracks with a broom as she moved. Although she was notorious for kidnapping and even eating children, I was never scared of her. I was simply in awe of her sheer wisdom and I was convinced that there was a reindeer-drawn sledge car service from Calcutta to Russia and I was sure if searched properly one such car can be found amid the rows of horse-drawn cars that stay lined in front of Victoria Memorial—after all reindeers were nothing but horses with long-branched horns!
It is important to be literate and it is even more important to have a chhotomashi and I realised this pretty early in life. I was in upper nursery when chhotomashi got me a copy of Anari (Dunno) and after that there was no looking back! With each book I realised that there was more to Russia than snow, sledge-cars, magicians, witches and Ivans. In the colourfully illustrated (by Boris Kalaushin) pages I discovered Dunno and his clever antithesis Doono and their friends Blob, Gunky, Swifty, Rolly-Polly; Flower City—an Utopian land located by the Cucumber River where Dunno and his friends live; the tech savvy world of Sun City where Dunno goes on a road trip; Greenville¬¬, inhabited only by ‘girl-Mites’ where Dunno’d balloon crash-lands; and the spirit of adventure. These Nikolai Nosov books were a unique mix of fairytales, adventure stories, school stories and science fictions.
Slowly, stories from around the world started making their way into my life. But none could measure up to the Russian genius for storytelling coupled with quirky and intricate art and design. Published largely by Progress, Mir or Raduga, these included a variety of topics ranging from fables of Leo Tolstoy, fairytales of Alexandar Pushkin, folktales of Alexandar Afanasiev, adventures of Two toreadors from Vasukovka Village by Vsevolod Nestaiko, adventures of the curious little curious Pochemuchka by Boris Zhitkov, short stories written in verse by Samuil Marshak, story of Legging the robber by Leonid Yakhnin, Hello, I am robot by Stanislav Zigunenko (with wonderfully detailed illustrations by Eric Benyaminsona that elucidated the Soviet view in the late 80′s of the future of robotics) to stories of Lenin, Revolution, Communism and the Red Stars of Kremlin. Illustrated by stalwarts like Yuri Cherepanov, Ivan Bilibin, Vladimir Lebedev, Evgeny Rachev, Igor Yershov, the books were translated in Bengali mostly by Nani Bhowmik, Supriya Ghosh and among the English translators were Irina Zheleznova, Fainna Glagoleva, Benard Isaacs, Olga Shartse, Miriam Morton and others.
The Bolshevik regime regarded children’s books as major vehicles for transmitting Soviet ideology and propaganda among the future ‘soldiers’ of Russia and by 1924, two years after the Soviet Union was formed, the Central Committee of the Party rejected the pre-Revolutionary era, children’s literature that primarily consisted fairytales, legends, and fantasy stories. Children were the great red hope for the Marxist-Leninist and as early as 1918 Pravda affirmed: “the children’s book as a major weapon for education must receive the widest possible distribution.” And Soviet educator believed: “Even if the child cannot read . . . [pictures] will stimulate an interest in study and the child will to learn to read.” However, it was not until 1934 that the new regime granted folktales, fairytales and magic was a new lease of life.
My heart always remained loyal to Vasilisa the Beautiful and Baba Yaga. These folktales, fairytales and fables of Chukchi, Nanian, Nenet, Caucasian, Belorussian, Moldovian, Ukranian, Turkmenian,Yakut origin seemed more interesting and multidimensional than Hans Christian Andersen’s and Disney’s. The stories exuded an earthly charm and it somehow seemed as if these were stories about ‘real’ people. Each story reflected the culture, customs and costumes of the region it was set in. Unlike its Western counterparts these characters had variety in their wardrobe and not all wore tuxedos, leggings and long gowns. These were not typical stories of a hero rescuing his damsel in distress-- the stories were mostly centred on a girl who wins battles and hearts through her kindness and wit. Magic and sorcery could be triumphed through intelligence. And even the evil usually had a kinder side and can become quite lovable creatures at times! The vivid description of the locations and the hand-painted pictures would often transport me to the snowy Tundra,’ a barren realm of fierce frosts and howling blizzards’ and I would dream of living in a ‘choom’ (tent made of animal skin), wear deer-skin boots and have a gold-feathered ‘finist’(Falcon) as my pet.
But, it all changed after that Friday. Soviet Union seized to exist and the publishing houses that churned out ingredients for my dreams slowly pulled down their shutters. ‘The next issue of Misha’ never arrived, what happened to Dunno when he finally landed on the Moon remained a mystery, nobody ever knocked on Baba Yaga’s ‘spinning hut-on-chicken-legs’ again and frost accumulated on the memory of Tundra. And the man, who once eked out a living by selling these books on the trains of a small far-off city called Calcutta, lost his only source of income (only to be found 20 years later begging on the platform of a railway station).
Today, Russia is still trying hard to stand back on its feet and according to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century and even Boris Nemtsov who participated in the opposition to the coup attempt and later became deputy Russian prime minister admits: “We were very naive -- not only me, but Yeltsin and all of our team. ... Unfortunately, reality looks much more serious and much more complicated than we believed at that time.” The coup had many casualties and among them was the thriving children’s book industry. There has been much debate on the deep impact of the collapse of USSR on world politics and economics and diplomatic relations between countries, but, one of the best kept secrets of the fall was perhaps the expunged legacy of its innovative children's book industry that had revolutionized art and design and captured the hearts of young readers all over the world. And it was a sheer delight to discover a few reprints of these nostalgia-laden treasures on the streets of College Street after two decades!