Khushnu Panthaki Hoof is a noted architect and designer whose humility is disarming, considering she is a protégé of the first family of Indian architecture. She is the legacy keeper of the late BV Doshi [1927-2023], India’s first Pritzker Laureate and her grandfather, having worked closely with him ever since graduation, and now tasked with preserving his invaluable archives. I had the good fortune of speaking with her about what it means to be a bridge, when the surge within feels more like the sea.
Aboard the Shinkansen, literally the ‘thunderbird’ as the Japanese bullet train is called, I take wing into a land of wonders. Shoot a bullet through the countryside, and it will bleed its heart out for you. The bird’s eye view slowly widens to close into a spectacular concert with man, animal, philosophy, folklore, technology, and time travel all becoming one. In Kanji, å’Œ or Wa is the tender harmony that sums up this peaceful, pure spirit that pervades all life, making it so wholesome.
SM: Magic is often seen in conflict with design based on the popular principle, ‘form follows function’. Your views.
GG: I believe magic and design aren’t in conflict, they are co-conspirators. The idea that ‘form follows function’ is practical but it doesn’t account for the emotional or imaginative responses that design can evoke. I see design as a vehicle that transcends the functional, allowing us to touch the intangible. Magic is the experience, design is the craft that delivers it.
Life is fundamentally strange and we don’t know who we are in the world most of the time. Ambiguity is a default state. And Booker winner Paul Lynch thinks that writing should try and convey these things. 'I think that writing should articulate the fact that we’re in the labyrinth and that we don’t know where we are.' And he believes that the decision to become a writer is fundamentally an act of authenticity. It has got nothing to do with wanting to be a writer — with wanting to be somebody in the world.
I have a vivid memory of his deep, hazel eyes on a fine morning in Delhi in the summer of 2016. Ushered into Hanif Kureshi’s cabin at the St+art India Foundation HQ, I met a lean young man, pensive and polite. What sort of guerilla bandit, or daku, comes bathed in such gentleness, humility, mystery and dexterity? “We contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman’s words rang in my ears. Aged 41, Hanif passed away after a battle with cancer on September 22, 2024.
What happens when the force of nature that moved the earth under Japan turns first-hand witness to its spirit? STIR brings the voice of the January 2024 earthquake in an unusual account... 'I am the quake that cuts through the flesh of the country. For a brief moment, I am formless, not the human who traversed Japan's mountains and skies and walked its urban lengths and spanned its countryside breadths—I am the hidden observer from the ground up, I am nature’s tremor...'
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It’s the time of the year when art thaws the cold, grey landscape of Delhi with colour, conversation and commerce. Observing the India Art Fair evolve over 15 years with changing titles, investors, directors, participants and even its fair share of controversy, the celebration seems to have come a long way, and yet the sight is a familiar one with the usual buzzwords all in place. As the commercial art fair returns for its 15th edition, will the curation push the norm?
A few years ago, I sat across an important South Asian guerrilla artist and asked him why his graffiti art was disappearing. He lit a smoke, extending it and slowly staring into the abyss. "You can either work with the institution or work against it...," he trailed off before we got down to his newly minted commercial success. You wonder how Banksy, whose fearless acrobatics are most recently sweeping Ukraine, remains a banger over 30 years of his practice.
Why the Indian museum makeover is important: private museums in India are helping curate new stories
Once upon a time, India was a merry museum of multitudinous histories, traditional treasures, collections of cultural and intellectual inheritance. And then, infiltrative deception and depletion fast eroded this eternal sense of pride. Stripped of its crown of a venerable and vital institution, the museum turned into a dinosaur. Cut to the present — the museum stands as a creature reborn, a harbinger of a much-needed cultural renaissance after the cold, corporate excess.
If there is anything that has the power to pull out a festival mired in controversy, it is the clean slate of a fresh ideology — a new story that embraces all our stories. Away from the cacophonous chorus of heavily corporatised art festivals, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale hopes to return after three pandemic-ridden years to its foundational purpose: to give back to people their real stories, strengths, songs. This year, it adopts storytelling as strategy in myriad ways: words, visuals, film, music.
Alison Killing is admittedly not a writer. But she may have contributed significantly to writing history with an important investigation that exposed alleged Muslim minority detainment structures in the Far Orient. Killing is part of a team that won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize this year in the International Reporting category, being the first person from the discipline to be honoured with the award in an area outside of criticism.
There are things that make you mull and theorise and then there are things that pop out and pierce all your insides, without notice, making you feel so deeply you forget to think. Consider a poem that comes hammering down at your being – with real nails beyond visceral word-work. Dissecting a series of striking films from the streets of Beirut at the Venice Architecture Biennale that mark a year to the Lebanon port blasts.
Reams and reams of print and reels of photography have been dedicated to Pritzker Laureate Dr. Balkrishna V Doshi, and yet, his story is never quite complete. But where the best of words may falter and what the sharpest cameras cannot capture, a playful romance of the two mediums may achieve to a great extent. On a serendipitous afternoon that happened to be World Photography Day, I spoke with photographer Dayanita Singh to observe the Portrait of a House: Conversations with BV Doshi.
This is the last appointment, I get a request to advance it; the 2015 Man Booker Prize winner is waiting only for us to arrive before he can hide away and prepare for another day of speaking at the event. The exhaustion is evident as we begin our interview in a quiet corner, he calls for water and tea too, but gradually as we speak, his eyes light up. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected 70 times before it found a publisher. Tiredness has never got the better of him.
An account of my descent into heaven instead of the proverbial ascent—you may rise Biblically, but it is only when you come down to an earth mired in many a
conflict that you actually appreciate the heaven that still throbs at its heart...A place that absorbs conflict, emanates peace.
Eats the dark and glows with light. A place that turns loss of life into a profusion of pure soul for its visitors. Isn’t that what heaven is?
'The bigger the dam, the more construction material involved the greater the scope for making money. That's why we continue to promote this carbon intensive form of development, and then perceive the environment to come in the way of such development.' My Guardian review of conservation biologist Bahar Dutt's book that explores the tension between development and the environment.
Describe your image
On International Women's Day, I had the privilege of speaking with the woman who has been critical in shaping one of the world’s most powerful architectural firms: the Bjarke Ingels Group.
As a young boy growing up in a working-class Pakistani community in London, the only life Rizwan Ahmed knew was one of dual identity. He won scholarships to go to private schools and Oxford University while maintaining a connection with the Asian street. Later, it is this cultural crossover that would fuel his fire for the arts, give him a voice against xenophobia, and win him the cover for Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
'Faiz [Ahmed Faiz], who had not become a poet by then and was my brother’s teacher, had been given a small house near his hostel,’ recalled Satish Gujral in this interview. ‘Every evening, he came to the hostel and read his poetry. It had not yet been published. One day, my brother told Faiz that I wanted to read his poetry but I could not hear. So he lent his handwritten book...and also sat with me. He became not only an influence but a teacher. I remember those three nights I read him without end.’
The week we spoke, she had all four of her wisdom teeth out. It must be painful, I said, but what can some toothache possibly do to upset someone who has created her entire world from heartache? Lang Leav, Sydney-based author and artist of Chinese-Cambodian origin, took me through her journey of becoming.
When I meet her on a winter's day in Delhi, Nandita Das greets me with the sunniest smile. The gentleness and humility about her is well-known and yet hard to believe given the strength and rebellion of her subjects. The sun is sharp, let’s take the shade, she says, still somewhat awkward with the fan attention we are occasionally interrupted by. I sit face-to-face understanding what makes her filmmaking a force relentless and uninterrupted.
I use performance as a means to unpack the self. I am looking for the common thread that runs through all of us; hunger, thirst, love, lust, greed, anger, joy, pain, passion, sorrow and fear. We are all physically connected to each other by land and water, living out our lives and our rainbow of emotions under one sky.'
'Bete, come and meet me, I’m growing old’, he would say each time he called me in the office, excited as a child to talk about life and filmmaking.
Colonel Raj Kapoor was the man who launched Shah Rukh Khan in Fauji when the actor was a fledgling fighting for his first role. In tribute, I share what he wrote to me in a beautiful handwritten letter that recalls the journey of discovering Shah Rukh Khan.
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"I think my confidence and craft has expanded to allow me more direct access to the way I truly feel about things, especially the more positive valences—the times when life goes well, people are good, love wins, etc. Positivity of this kind is somehow technically harder to depict than dysfunction or violence [or at least it is for me]. I think I’ve also learned to look at a 'bad' character and enter into his or her mindset less judgmentally—which is good practice for living."
What distinguishes a good series as the web space gets crowded with more content, I ask Anurag Kashyap. 'When it stops catering to the perceived expectation of the invisible viewer and maintains its integrity, and is a story told well,' he says.
Looking at Mrinalini Mukherjee’s massive hemp installations at Tate Modern, I wondered if the world was getting enough of these; and so it was hardly surprising when I learned that her work at Frieze London was quite the hot property—one of these was reportedly sold even before the fair opened, and another was reserved for an institution within just a few days. But it was not just Mukherjee — many contemporary Indian artists left an impression at the fair with their distinct works.
One of the 99 isles spread across the archipelago of Malaysia, Langkawi, surrounded by 600-million-year-old mangroves and the richest flora and fauna all over the world, is a lady of charms hard to demystify. A treasure of history, a wealth of nature and a pinch of magic — the island of Langkawi has all this and more. A travelogue.
What happened to John Allen Chau was unfortunate. Even more unfortunate is our ignorance and insinuation—long before the American tourist tried his earnest religious mission and got martyred in his journey, the explorers and invaders had tried what he did—and there was ample reason they decided to leave alone the North Sentinelese tribe of Port Blair. A close study of the book Islands of India, written by Bharatendu Harischandra Award-winning author Dr Sarit Kumar Mukerji, reveals how the islanders are torchbearers of sustainable living.
'Coherence is to be obliged to think tomorrow the same thing that you are thinking today. My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul. Like in archery, the paradox is the bow that can be both tense and relaxed.' One of my first interviews, back in 2007, with award-winning author Paulo Coelho, when I was age 20 and full of
naive questions.
Vivan Sundaram’s gentle strength of voice drowns the din that surrounds us—the gallery is under reconstruction for the artist’s show, men and wires and art strewn all around, forming an inconsistent yet harmonious landscape. It is much like the veteran’s own process—picking up archives, memories, found objects, industrial tools, used oil—and constructing a story in difference and concurrence, his work always in progress.
An animation filmmaker who does graphic narratives, designs wildlife interpretation centres and drives production design for a certain kind of cinema, Prakash Moorthy has slowly and dedicatedly changed the smart design landscape for India. I trace the journey and challenges of this rather reclusive pioneer.
While most of us were caught up with the race, changemakers Bablu and Mary made a place with farms, forests, animals, man, schools, latest technology and the simple, good life all rolled into one. An example in a minimal, sustainable manmade habitat that spans 32 acres and embraces 21,000 families in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, this off-the-grid ecosystem is what the country has been craving for. I go over the journey of building a community that shines as a beacon of hope through our modern-day holocaust.
Performance art is all-embracing, transformative, fluid and powerful beyond measure. It does not conform to medium, is ever a work in progress, speaks a great deal in silence and challenges the artist who is also his work. If you closely enough, it is life as it would appear in evolution. In the case of Sajan Mani, it is the stark, stinging Black Dalit's life that plays storyteller.
'I don’t think artists are inspired as such. What you do is you constantly observe and collect—I collect a lot of things in my head and call it a pseudo archive, or sometimes even physically or virtually from the Web. It’s about constantly researching and collecting and everything I do is adding to my archive. Sometimes it could be the conversations you’re having with people,' says Pushpamala N., the Phantom Lady of contemporary Indian performance art.
I’ve realised now more than ever that I love books and reading and writing, but before all of those things, you have to love stories. I love the idea that stories are what we’re made of. Stories are what make us who we are.
Gurmeet Sangha Rai’s journey as one of India’s most important conservation architects has been one replete with revelations, awakenings and blessings thanks to all the people she has met and experiences she has had on the road, from the Red Fort in Delhi to the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra, the Grand Trunk Road in Punjab to the historic Golden Temple and the Gobindgarh Fort in Amritsar.
Kalki Koechlin is clear as crystal that no democracy
in its right mind deserves a censor board,
forget the kind that can’t do without its snip-and-chop routine.
“Censorship is basically the government controlling the people, while in a democracy it should be the people controlling the government,” she says to me in this interview.
“It was still dark when the enemy with approximately two companies formed up at a distance of about 700 metres. The tanks came within 100 yards of the mortar position and Sep Charan Dass, one of the mortar numbers, was killed in a direct hit from the enemy’s tanks...As a result, the other tanks stopped.” Col (Retd) Dharam Vir’s words ring loud in your ears as the war hero recalls the Battle of Longewala of which he was an important part - so much so that JPDutta’s, Border, had Akshaye Khanna essaying his character.