I have never been shy of my Bihari identity or affiliations, but I have not really been too pronounced about following the festivals and rituals of the land. And the detachment, I must confess, has been cultivated.

Blame it on the 90s. 

While I’m no socio-political-cultural commentator, I would want to believe we were the last of the generation following the Nehruvian socialism and secularism, and accepting/ embracing our own traditions kind of made us feel a bit guilty about partnering with the right-wing activism that was beginning to take off in this period. Also, with Liberalisation and Globalisation becoming the new buzz words, people like me who became an integral part of the media landscape of the country found ourselves busy shaking and shaping perceptions, and perhaps had no time for what we perceived as reminiscent of the old world order, the non-modern, fuddy-duddy small town universe, that we had consciously left to become mini-metropolises unto ourselves.

Lost between our identities of the past and the future, we became a watered-down version of ourselves. Urbane, articulate, but oddly rootless, letting the noise of the new drown out the voice of the old. In my defence, our wokeism, for want of a better word, was guided by pure idealism, but in the process, we were ready to let go of what was us, what defined the core of us. We did not want to take note of what the “new and improved” label on us was actually stuck to!

We were idiots.

No surprises, therefore, that the last time I attended a Chhath Puja was a couple of decades back! Of course, I’ve always been a loud votary of the puja, how Chhath is perhaps the only Hindu festival which is caste and gender agnostic, how there are no rituals, no scriptures involved, how the devotees worship both the setting and the rising sun, how it represents a bulk of India at its agrarian best, but I kept myself away from the actual festival. 

Till this year, that is. 

I got an invite to attend the Chhath Puja in Mumbai. I wasn’t too sure initially, worried that my presence would feel performative, unsure if I would be observing or actually belonging. And then, almost without warning, an epiphany hit me hard. The so-called old world order that I came from was as much me as the newness I wanted it to adopt. From running at the slushy shores of the Ganges at Patna’s Pahalwan Ghat to now partaking in the celebrations at Mumbai’s iconic Chowpatty, it wasn’t just distant geographies connecting, but my thoughts and identities perhaps finding common ground. 

I was ready to get my feet wet again.

The atmosphere at Chowpatty was electric, the devotion real. Chhath has a way of turning every shore into a sacred space. Despite an errant wave or two playing hopscotch, and the sea of people around, there was something deeply calming about it all. The sincerity and the faith, the smell of the wet sand, the sight of the thekuas, the vratins having private conversations with the sun god, the flicker of the diyas… In no time, I had gone back to where I belonged. 

In no time, I could see where I still do belong!

The year was 1996. Mumbai was still a little bit of Bombay, the megapolis accepting us migrant cousins with open arms. Chintan Upadhyay and I were amongst the very many who had come to the city to make her our home. Mumbai was beautiful and affectionate, inspiring and challenging. The taller-than-tall apartments wowed us, the shimmering lights of the Crossroads mall and the display windows of Rupam and VAMA showrooms excited us. We were romancing with the local trains and rented homes in decrepit lower middle class societies, savouring our starvation in late night road side bhurji-pavs amidst the golden-brown haze of the sleeping city, revisiting our tangential dreams. And we knew we were growing up in an environment that we would romanticise about some day.

But I am digressing.

We were together at the Faculty of Fine Arts, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. We couldn’t take the isms and theories that we thought the world, the art world in particular, was drugged with. We wanted to create our own idiom, our own language, our own movement. We wanted to change the world. We were rebels without a pause, our shabby kurtasspearheading the mutiny. Baroda gave us the freedom to be. We revelled in it. Little had I ever imagined that Chintan’s freedom would be abruptly curtailed some day for what would look like an unlimited period of time.

But I am digressing again.

The Faculty taught us to think differently, humoring our attempts to create the revolution. Revolution of another kind was getting simultaneously created by one Dr. Manmohan Singh. The wise man sure was doing his bit to prod and perturb us lesser mortals. Liberalisation and Globalisation were ceasing to be mere buzz words. We could see the results in the hostel common room with MTV’s funky graphics staring at us, as we discovered a whole new universe, all bright and beautiful.

Before we could realize, we were in a strange, uncomfortable place. We could no longer figure who or what were we rebelling against. It was an odd conflict brewing in our hearts and our heads. This dispute wasn’t just between ideas and ideals. The fight was amongst our sanskaari past, our doordarshan-bred-hum-honge-kamyaab present and our shiny-disco-ball future. And it was a very very tough fight. Our middle-class idealism was being hit on its backside by this new India we did not know much about. But we realized we wanted to embrace this India. Despite the guilt.

The pride in poverty was stupid.

We were the gareeb consumerists, sold to the idea of consumerism, though not having the means to live it. It was during these days in Mumbai that I curated what was Chintan’s first independent exhibition. Titled This Has Been Done Before, the exhibition attempted to make a point against what we thought were the prejudiced norms, aesthetics and points of view in the world of Indian art. The catalogue was complete with a “Common Minimum Programme” for young artists. We had heated debates on what should the communication be. Chintan wanted to be loud and vociferous. I was recommending a more subdued approach. We ended up pompously calling Picasso and Gauguin ‘derivative artists’, and talked against the “biased and old fashioned attitude of the artists and art historians of the present century”.

This Has Been Done Before catalogue | 1998

This is how my piece began: “What, exactly, is Chintan Upadhyay? A frustrated phallicentric nerd out to prove the sexual connotations and escapades of everything surrounding him? Or a confused, overgrown kid, still in an animated awe of his trinkets and toys, but whispering voices of discontent against the system promoting their production? Is he just another faceless addition to a metropolis, coming to terms with the various layers of personae being gifted to him by the assemblage of cultures in a big city? Or is he simply an artist, sensitive to all things red, blue and green, exploring for an order in disorder despite his own sarcastic sneers against this search?”

Multicultural face in a cosmopolitan city (Mumbai) | Acrylic on canvas | 10’ x 6’ | 1998

The exhibition was a failure.

Not Chintan, though. He was sharp enough to figure that all the personas that I had spoken about had to be a subset of this overarching singular persona that he had to become. That’s how 90s was preparing us to face the new millennium. By becoming a brand new persona enveloping everything. The Common Minimum Programme was, therefore, out of his life. As were the thoughts of creating an artists’ collective. He had to get there first himself. He had to be in a space where he would be self explanatory and nobody would have to elaborate on “What is Chintan Upadhyay”. He latched on to the right people, allowing them to manufacture him. He figured the importance of marketing, of full page ads in Bombay Times pushing his works. Commemorative Stamps, his 2002 exhibition, flaunting the presence of filmstars and other pretty people at the opening, with wines and cheese we never knew existed, and a completely new artistic language, was a super hit.

A brand was born.

There was no looking back after that. Chintan was always the talented one. He knew it in time that it was not about being just an artist. It was about being a popular and successful artist. The kind that sells. What followed was how most of us 1990s kids embraced the changing times. We figured that life wasn’t about brooding and snorting our middle class affiliations. It was about breaking patterns. It was about earning and spending and earning some more to spend some more. The conflict that was, soon ceased to be. It had been dissolved and resolved.

Chintan, of course, went beyond that. In the quest to become a consumerist, he became a heavily marketed consumable product himself over the next ten years. We continued to play conscience keepers to each other, although I now suspect our chats, infrequent and few, were more to flaunt and justify our acts and actions than question them. I don’t know how convinced I was of the transformation of the Multicultural face in a cosmopolitan city to the mass produced Chintu, and also those performance art sessions created to shock and awe, but I guess he knew what he was doing. Chintan and Hema – another friend from the Faculty of Fine Arts – became the ‘it couple’ of the Mumbai art scene. His ganda bachchas were all over. She was kicking some serious ass as an artist of repute in biennales and triennales across the globe. Chintan’s compromises – artistic and otherwise – were worth the heartburn. He had become famous. He had arrived. He had become one with Mumbai.

But then again, success and fame have their own trappings. The couple learnt it the hard way. After some very petty fights and a very public spat over their divorce proceedings, their love story came to a tragic and abrupt end. Post their formal separation, Chintan started work afresh, low key and guarded. And then, suddenly, Hema was murdered. What followed was a macabre prime time drama that then turned into a tragedy. Insinuations, charges and counter charges. Cops playing art critics, reading motives in his doodles and diary entries. A man in jail since 22nd December 2015, held as a suspect in the double murder of the ex-wife and her lawyer. Guilty until proven innocent. And a trial that is still in progress with witnesses yet to be examined, and the supposed killer still at large. Almost seventy months of confinement. Six long years of waiting. 

The honourable Supreme Court finally granted bail to Chintan on 17th September, 2021. Amongst other things, the Court has instructed him to reside in any place other than Mumbai, and visit the city only for the purpose of attending court. They have banished him from the city that made him into what he is now! 

But I am not going to give this a Shakespearean hue, and project Chintan as the tragic hero. Despite knowing his journey from 1992 to 2021. The prolonged and tedious trek that he took from the Borivali shanty to the Juhu house, and then to the courtrooms and the Thane Jail, redefining his art and himself in the process. Almost thirty-odd years, how it all panned out, how our values, successes and failures got defined and redefined. I know of his hopes and desires, fears and apprehensions. I know he is very many things, or that he became very many things that I think he was not. I also know that his struggle was real, the achievements hard-earned. I would not want to believe that he would squander it all away just to cater to his whim or vindictiveness. I know his truth. I hope for the world to know it, too.

  I am innocent (I hope you know why) | Performance art | 2013 

I also hope he come out of this more insightful a person. With the same set of hopes, aspirations and positivity that was there when we came to Mumbai in 1996. I may ask him to go back to the Common Minimum Programme when we meet up. He owes me a chai and a long conversation. About what we were and what we became.

We shall curse the 90s. We shall bless the 90s.

(First published in Midday, Mumbai)

So. This tweet went viral yesterday. 

I had a point of view on what Kangana had said. Her biases were showing. And I maintain that she was being extremely vile and ugly by getting Karan Johar in a completely unrelated fight, making snide remark on his sexuality, and insinuating that Diljit Dosanjh must have done something with Karan to get a role in a Karan Johar film. Or whatever. That was a really, really low blow, even by Kangana’s depleting standards. She went on to give a lousy counter-point, saying she had meant something else and the filth was in the mind of the readers, but the excuse/ explanation was so flimsy that it vaporised by the time it left her keyboard.

This was Kangana’s response to Hansal Mehta’s RT of my tweet.

I don’t care about Kangana’s politics. She can be a rabid right winger or apolitical or a liberal left winger. It is well within her rights to be what she wants to be, and be loud about it. It is also well within her rights to question/ troll/ fight with whoever she thinks isn’t on her side. I get it. The Kangana-Diljit debate in isolation is what makes us such a vibrant democracy. People with differing ideologies can exist simultaneously. Along with the mid-roaders. Debates, even in the form of passionate fights, are important for any democracy to flourish. 

Only, there is a decorum that one expects in debates, be it in the Parliament or State Assemblies or on a public platform like Twitter. If you are a public figure, and people look up to you, then you have even more reasons to stay in the dignified space. I am fairly certain even Kangana has a point of view on the chairs, mics and chappals being thrown by the Lawmakers on each other. Her remarks of personal nature were equivalent of that rowdy chair throwing. Kangana lost the debate when the insinuations began!

However, this is not about Kangana. 

What has bothered me more is the overwhelmingly large number of tweets and replies supporting what I have said, but doing PRECISELY what I have a problem with. So thank you for your replies and quote tweets, but you are NOT on my side. And I don’t need you on my side with your pronounced hatred and grating misogyny. For you are being no different from Kangana when you are questioning how she got her roles or what she did to Mahesh Bhatt to get her debut film. You are being exactly her when you are calling her a prostitute, dhandhebaaz, randi, and what have you. Hell, you are being worse when you are posting pictures from her movies, characters that she has played in fictional narratives, and are using those to question her character! 

I am sorry, but you can take your pathetic prejudices and your inherent sexism and shove it where there is no sunshine! This is for each one of you, Kangana included. 

I may disagree with Kangana, and I do, I may also find her approach towards her confrontations repugnant and cannibalistic, but that cannot be the reason for me to call her names. Or vice versa. This is where we do not want the discourse to go. Because once we reach the abyss, it will be mucky for everybody. We would all gasp for breath, and there would be no way to reach the surface ever. I am sure Kangana would agree with this some day, and have a debate the old fashioned way, with arguments and counter-arguments. 

I will buy her a chai, agree to disagree, and fight to win. :)