On Photography: Truth, Lies, and Photos
Many urban middleclass Indians I know are peeved by what they see as a staple of photography on India: squalor, poverty, lepers, fakirs, the deformed. Their India ...

A Qawwali Concert
A year or so ago, I attended an open-air Qawwali concert by the famous Sabri Brothers, who claim direct descent from Mian Tansen himself, the legendary ...

The Namesake
Mira Nair's movie packs in far more universal appeal than Jhumpa Lahiri's book. Rather than the movie's fidelity
to the book, my main basis of comparison ...

The Asian Art Museum
The Asian Art Museum (AAM) in San Francisco is one of the largest of its kind in the West. Interestingly, over half of its 15,000 pieces come from a single donor .....

Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka
In Aug 2005, I visited a remarkable site in Madhya Pradesh, India: the prehistoric rock shelters and paintings at Bhimbetka, discovered in 1957-58 by Dr. Vishnu S. Wakankar. Of the nearly 750 rock shelters.....

On Photography: Which Thousand Words ?
If a picture says a thousand words, which thousand words does it say to whom? If we all wrote down what we hear, no two accounts would be the same. A picture of an antelope can tickle a palate, provoke...

Jack the Dripper
Does art lie entirely in the eye of the beholder, or should it have minimal standards? Who decides what is art and what is only a visually appealing painting, photograph, or sculpture? What makes a sketch end up on ....

Peter Brook's Mahabharata
Earlier this year I saw Peter Brook's Mahabharata for the third time in fifteen years. Each time my admiration for it has grown. I consider it one of the greatest dramatic productions of all time. Its notable lack of appeal to Indians, except to a sliver, may be ...

Advice to a Young Artist
The idea for writing this came to me from an interview in which an author was reverentially asked, ‘Sir, what would be your advice to a young artist?’  The author turned his nose up and gave a pat, patronizing answer but the question stayed with me. How would I answer it? ...