Arichal Munai, Where Two Ocean Bodies Meet

 

There are several geological reasons why the Bay of Bengal is calm and Indian Ocean so turbulent, but when you are standing at Arichal Munai, Dhanushkodi, where the two water bodies meet, you can only feel its mystical quality.  Dhanushkodi on Rameshwaram island is an uninhabited strip of land but plenty of visitors come here. We went there early morning before the sun was barely up, the crowd sparse and spent a serene hour just listening to the sound of lapping waves and being caught up in the geographic wonder of it. This was two years ago and I am ready to go again. 

After Lives of a Newspaper

 

This book of collage/mixed media/altered art came about because I could not bear to chuck the daily newspaper, the Hindu, into the wastepaper bin after I finished reading it. Three years ago, when I moved to Chennai, after 40+ years in the US, I subscribed to the print version of the Hindu as a way to know and understand this city and its people. It was a revelation. I had not read a newspaper in its physical form in more than fifteen years. I subscribed and still do to the digital version of the New York Times (it is simply cheaper than a print version). Over this period, I had come to accept the increasing algorithmization of my reading interests. I had also come to expect  a barrage of articles suddenly appearing based on my web search on a topic. I had come to accept the ‘once read, gone forever’ phenomenon too. I recognize that on a daily basis, the print newspaper also exercises  a lot of editorial control in deciding what to publish. But it does give me the freedom to choose what I want to read, discover interesting topics on my own. I did discover that the Hindu put out many articles that caught my interests. Lest I give the wrong impression, the Hindu is not new to me. A newspaper of record founded as a nationalist voice against British rule, it was an important historical source when I was working on my M.Phil dissertation more than four decades ago. Ironically, I read it on microfiche!

I am aware that all online newspapers, including The Hindu, track their readers, use algorithms to place the right kind of ads and share user information in various ways.

As I got familiar with the paper’s contents (its long read articles, Thursday-Sunday supplements, book reviews in Sunday magazine), I began to feel that I should preserve these in some form. As an artist I wanted to more than just simply clip and put them in a file folder. Thus Afterlives of a Newspaper was born. It is a collection of artistically altered news articles using collage and mixed-media techniques. The original contents are not lost. They are just creatively repositioned, edited, enhanced and illustrated. Of the many art pieces I have made over the last three years, 30-40 of them have made their way into this book. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I had enjoyed making them. Many thanks to The Hindu for sending me off on this creative journey.