Joyous Devi

And as the current year runs its last stretch before it can expel its final shuddering breaths to become: the Year that Was, a reference in the past, a collection of wooly memories; everything within us - the human parallel to the animal instinct of marking territory – invents ways of marking this time. Time intrinsically linked to our sense of our chronological existence, which at a deeper level is an uneasy acknowledgement of our mortality. So that the very celebration of this ‘ time’ holds a kind of quiet keening, a sense of loss, which we try every which way to subsume under a collective , concentrated kind of forgetfulness. This induced amnesia is expressed best through a party and any invented excuses for a celebration. And so we have imported some, concocted some, traditionally followed some, while some remain with us as a hungovered presence from our colonial past, specially while marking this time of the year. There is, to begin with , a mad rush of...

My visit to Chindwara was rife with mixed feelings, an anticipation not unmixed with a certain uncertainty ( what an oxymoron!). It was a project that had been on the burner for all of a 365+365 plus some days and now that it had been tossed into my lap or rather our organisation’s, it came with the rider that it had to be done in x number of days, starting NOW, with not a minute to be expended on wasteful activities such as drawing a deep shuddering breath and getting one’s addled thoughts into some order. My trepidation of course had a history to it. It was an intervention amongst weavers, where the weaving tradition had all but gone into a comatose state and what remained was a stale whiff of nostalgia amongst the old hands, who harboured dim memories of a glory, which in many ways continued to shine rather brightly in their imagined perception of it. And what touched me very deeply during my various interactions with them, was the hope that still made their eyes sparkle as...

My visit to Chhindwara was rife with mixed feelings, an anticipation not unmixed with a certain uncertainty ( what an oxymoron!). It was a project that had been on the burner for all of a 365+365 plus some days and now that it had been tossed into my lap or rather our organisation’s, it came with the rider that it had to be done in x number of days, starting NOW, with not a minute to be expended on wasteful activities such as drawing a deep shuddering breath and getting one’s addled thoughts into some order. My trepidation of course had a history to it. It was an intervention amongst weavers, where the weaving tradition had all but gone into a comatose state and what remained was a stale whiff of nostalgia amongst the old hands, who harboured dim memories of a glory, which in many ways continued to shine rather brightly in their imagined perception of it. And what touched me very deeply during my various interactions with them, was the hope that still made their eyes sparkle a...