Drive by Chennai: 1

 

Quirky!!

Published!

 

In the Fall of 2023, I had the fortune to participate in Kolaj Institute’s Folklore Collage Virtual Residency. There were other residencies on the same theme and the work created by the artists resulted in a new journal called Folklore Collage Society. I had the honor of having my art chosen to be the cover for volume1 of the journal (see above) All artists were asked to create accompanying text with the artwork and I was thrilled that my 1000 word article included in its entirety (see the video below).

Thanks Kolaj Institute!

Belinda Bauer:The Impossible Thing Review

I chose Belinda Bauer’s The Impossible Thing to read for ReadingWales’26 March event by BookerTalk. To take part in this event, we need to read a book from any genre written by an author from Wales. Belinda Bauer presently lives in Wales, where before turning to fiction writing, she was a court reporter at Cardiff and several of her books are set in Wales. She is an acclaimed award winning author. This was my first book by her. I picked up the book because it has a compelling story—beautifully written with engaging good guys, perfectly woven storylines with an evocative sense of place. It bills itself a crime novel—it is that but it is also a story of moral awakening of a young woman. It is also a tale of one stubborn determined bird. 

The story is set in dual timelines—The first part is set in the twenty years between the two world wars in northern Yorkshire by the rock cliffs over the coast of North Sea. The second part takes place in present-day rural Wales. There are two protagonists in each section— a girl and a bird in one; two 20something men in the other. The thread that connects the two parts is theft of bird eggs and their trafficking (legal and illegal) to traders and collectors. The narrative switches back and forth between the two timelines. 

The cracks on the cliffs of Yorkshire, where the story starts, are nesting grounds for millions of seabirds—“Gulls and fulmars and guillemots and puffins and gannets and kittiwakes and razorbills…every one of them drawn back every summer to the same face, the same place, the same tiny ledge, where it would lay its eggs and raise its chicks”. For the “climmers”, going down on the rope along the cliff face, four or five times a day, collecting 40 to 50 eggs per day, from March to July and selling them to traders and brokers gathered on the cliff top was lucrative, more lucrative than laboring on the farm. There was money to be made on each and every egg but colorful large eggs fetched the highest price. Stealing eggs from the nests and selling them for highest bidder was legal then and there was no moral qualms about either. Many farms along the cliff top lived well on stolen eggs but not the Sheppards of Metland farm. Their farm, unfortunately ended on an overhang which made it impossible to rope down the cliff wall and pluck eggs from under the birds. But the overhang had a crack through which a very tiny body could pass.  

While rest of the family toiled on the farm, Celie Sheppard, a six year old with a body so small that a wind could actually blow her away, takes the desperate risk to rope down through the crack in the overhang to steal some eggs because she wanted to eat omelettes.

“She could see hundreds of birds pressed against the cliff-face. And, as they shifted about, glimpses of eggs of every size and colour that she could imagine. They had chickens in the yard, of course, but they laid dull little brown eggs, and never enough to eat, only for selling. These eggs were two or three times that size, and speckled and spotted and splattered with brown and black on backgrounds that ranged from cream, through blue to green. Celie had never had a toy, but the thought of holding such eggs in her little hands made her nearly smile, with a feeling that was beyond hunger”.

When she ‘climmed’ the first time and got her first egg “ even though she had no way of knowing that night—wouldn’t understand for a good while—that was the egg that would change her life”. It was a guillemot egg—“ red in color, a deep, tapestry red, but grew lighter as it rose from the base, fading to a pretty pink blush at the very point. There was not a mark on it. Not a spot nor a squiggle to sully the perfection”. An “impossible thing”, this Metland egg as it came to be known, the one that would sell for £20, promised more if Celie brought one up the cliff top every year. Guillemots are creatures of habit—every year they nest on the same spot, lay the same colored egg and do so for thirty years. This bird too comes every year to the same “doomed” home to lay its egg and watch it taken away. In the struggle between survival and dominance, between the predator and victim, even a puny, scrawny child has more power than a bird. Does the bird feel the loss of its egg? Here is how the author describes it when the bird sees Cecie coming down the cliff: 

For the first time, the bird seemed to know what was about to happen. It did not flap. Flapping had never worked. It did not squawk, for squawking was pointless. It did not peck, for that had never stopped the thief. If birds can learn, it had learned. This time the bird just watched Celie approach… All around them a thousand guillemots shrieked warnings, and here and there exploded from the cliff in whirring sparks of chocolate wings. While this bird just watched her, and waited. Under its downy breast she could already see the prize. A tiny shock of red on the shaded wall. The bird shifted and the egg disappeared, and now there was nothing to distinguish this guillemot from any one of the thousand others under the Metland overhang. As if it knew it could not fight her, but hoped it might still deceive her…Gently, Celie reached under the bird. It turned its head away a degree, and half opened its beak and made a low grunt that Celie felt more than heard. Carefully she placed the egg in the satchel and tapped the rope. The bird sat and watched her all the way. 

Celie steals thirty eggs from that one guillemot over a period of fifteen years. She even becomes a minor celebrity; every summer tourists from all over England coming to watch her bring up that perfect red egg for everyone to ooh and aah over it. Yet, the author does not allow her to become a heartless waif. One summer she says no to climming and that’s when the collector and the thirty eggs disappear.

In the present day in The Brecon Beacons, Wales, Patrick Fort and Weird Nick, are trying to figure out why and who stole a wooden box containing a red egg that Nick had found in the attic. He had tried to sell it on eBay (because he needed the money for a gaming chair) but his listing is taken down since selling wild birds’ egg is illegal and then someone burgles his house and steals it and now Nick wants to get it back. Patrick is neurodivergent and Nick, a misfit, and both are living with their mothers. But they are sweet likeable characters and their interaction with each other is often lol funny. Their sleuthing exposes them to the world of illegal egg trafficking—a chronic egg thief, a vigilante officer of Royal Society of Protection of Birds and a curator of Museum of Natural History. Drawing inspiration from their Call of Duty slayings, they recover the thirty missing red Metland eggs, including Nick’s. In a scene that is almost cinematic, they metaphorically give the eggs back to the birds. 

The Impossible Thing is based on a true story—the original Metland Egg, all thirty of them are still missing. In the fictional version, Bauer gives them a heartwarming resolution.The novel is about poverty, deprivation, greed and obsession. It is also about redemption and grace. Fittingly, the bird has the last word:

And yet. 

Under one warm breast. 

Nestled against one tiny heart . . .

A single, perfect, red egg.

 

Name That Movie!

 

I created this movie quiz using large letter postcards that were so popular in the first-half of 20th century. A large selection of these are available in Wikimedia. I got printed a number of them at a copy shop and proceeded to create movie titles out of them. See if you can figure out the titles. 

Inheritance of Resistance

I started this artist book in 2019-20 following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Then came Dobbs vs Jackson in 2022. What struck me forcibly was that we should never take our hard won rights and liberties for granted. Revanchist forces retreat temporarily and just wait in the wings for the right moment to take them all away. If we care about protecting our rights, we need to be not only vigilant ourselves but teach younger generations to be vigilant too. Help them understand our struggles, successes (and failures too) and give them the tools to continue to build upon the foundations we have laid. Our resistance is our legacy and their inheritance.

Chetna Maroo: Western Lane Review

For November Novellas reading challenge, I chose  Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Publisher: Picador, 2023) after it popped up on several ‘best of’ lists in addition to 2023 Booker prize short list. Told in first person point of view of an eleven year old girl, it is a grief story, a sports story and a coming of age story. It is only moderately touching either singly or in combination.  

Simply put, it is a story about the death of a parent, the family that is left behind, grief that follows and the game of squash that rescues them. Squash is both a metaphor and  a frequent plot device that moves the narrative forward. There are plenty of observations and occasional action but little direct conversation. We know very little of what is going on inside any of the character’s head. Stuck in the isolation of their grief and unable to express and share it with each other, the family little by little sinks into desperate apathy.  All of these the author conveys in unfussy sparse prose.  Then an unexpected act of aggression (on the squash court) jolts the characters out of their inertia and make them take steps towards active living (a squash tournament helps with that). Overall, a slow predictable story that you can take it or leave it.

Magda Szabo: Abigail Review

Abigail by Magda Szabo is the second book I chose for Read Independent Publishers as well as for Hungarian Literature month at Winstonsdad’ Blog. I read and liked it when it was originally published by New York Review Books in the US in 2019 with a wonderful translation by Len Rix. I have not read any other book by Szabo but the particular appeal of this book is that it is a Bildungsroman—a coming of age story. I really love this genre and as Rix so convincingly puts it, “it is a novel one can and one should return” and I did.

Abigail is also a historic fiction, set during the penultimate phase of World War II. It is the story of a fourteen-year old girl, Gina Vitay, a motherless and only child of a general in the Hungarian army. She is loved and cherished by her father and other family members, and her life in Budapest has been a privileged and cultured one. When the novel begins, Gina’s beloved governess, a French woman, is sent back to her home country and Gina is told without any explanation that she will be attending a boarding school away from Budapest —a fact kept secret from rest of her family. She and her father have a close and loving relationship, and not knowing the reason why she is being so abruptly uprooted she is uncomprehending and heartbroken. The months between fall 1943 to spring 1944 that Gina spends at the  Bishop Matula Academy in a remote part of Hungary is the heart of the story. 

The first several weeks at Matula goes badly for her, totally through her own fault. Being told that she cannot communicate with any of her family or friends, she is desperately longing for all the things she had to let go—her beautiful home, her friends at school, her boyfriend, her aunt’s parties and soirées, trips to the theater. Matula is not a fun and frolic place—a former Calvinist seminary converted to a girls boarding school, its setup is puritanical, highly regimented and strictly monitored. Her classmates are welcoming but Gina finds them immature and their secret games utterly childish. She is scornful when the they confide that Abigail, the girl statue in the garden, comes to the aid of girls who need help. When asked to join in their game, she throws a massive hissy fit and tells on them to the administration. She is hoping that it would get her thrown out of the school but what it gets her is a complete ostracization by her classmates. Eventually, she breaks through that cold wall of exclusion but not before she makes a disastrous attempt to run away from the school. When she pleads with her father to take her with him and tells him of her escape attempt, he finally reveals the reason for hiding her in Matula: Her father is a member of an underground group of army leaders that has been opposed to collaborating with the German army and if it comes in and occupies Hungary, he will be arrested. And that puts Gina at risk because they will use her as a hostage to force him to confess the names of the other members of the dissident group. He makes her promise that she will keep this a secret and not attempt to leave Matula unless it is him or someone trusted by him come to take her. What a burden to put on a fourteen year old! Loving and dutiful daughter that she is, she makes her promise. 

Even though she desperately misses her father and is frightened for his safety, typical resilience of youth and companionship and solidarity of other girls help her settle in her new school. But not for long. When outside forces come knocking on Matula’s doors, she makes a near fatal mistake of putting her trust in the wrong person risking not just her life but also of other students and adults at the school. When the book ends, Gina is once again spirited away, this time incognito, in the care of strangers.

Abigail is a coming-of-age story but also a war time story of children caught up in the dangerous and bloody games that adults play. Whatever adults get out of this game, for children it is nothing but displacement, loss, trauma and sometimes even death. We know that Gina comes back to Matula a year later (after the war ends) and we also know that she grows into full adulthood, married with children. Though the book is written as the events unfold but we are also made to think that she is looking back trying to make sense of that confusing and painful period of her life. When I finished the book, I wished that Szabo had written a sequel. I  would have liked to know how she survives that one year of hiding, how she deals with the death of her father and what kind of adult she grows to be. 

The book is completely centered on Gina and Szabo does a beautiful job of describing her thoughts and capturing her interiority. Gina comes off as a typical teen but she is also an interesting mix of sharp and the dense. She is observant but proves incapable of putting together the clues to figure out the real person behind the mythical Abigail. She learns from her mistakes but not before she brings heaps of trouble on herself. She thinks she is alone in the world but does not see that there are people looking out for her. But her heart is good and we get the impression that whatever the future brings, she will be sustained by the memories of her father’s love and the moral anchoring that Matula gives her. 

 

John Sayles Yellow Earth: Review

 

For this year’s  Reading Independent Publishers Month call, I read John Sayles Yellow Earth published by Haymarket Books. According to their website “Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.” A laudable mission, one after my own heart.

It is not surprising that Yellow Earth is part of their catalog. John Sayles used to be an indie small budget filmmaker and, one of my favorite directors. He came into prominence in the 80s with Matewan, Eight Men Out, Lone Star, Passion Fish, Sunshine State and The Secret of Ron Inish. His movies were critically acclaimed even if they did not make much money. Certain common themes run through all his movies: rapacity of capitalism; corruption in its institutions; exploitation of labor; class conflicts; struggles of working men and women; toxic racial bigotry; environmental destruction. Along with moviemaking, he has been building a parallel career track in fiction writing, which address on a more panoramic scale, many of the themes in his films—they are like big budget films on paper. Several of his novels are historical fiction with a handful of big characters whose stories stretch over several decades. Yellow Earth is not a decades-spanning historical fiction. It is very much a twenty-first century American story; all its action are compressed within a year; there are great many characters, all memorably written, but no single character is dominant. It is sweeping in scope with just one force driving the story—shale oil.

The novel, set in North Dakota (nicknamed Peace Garden State, why I don’t know), is divided into four sections—Exploration, Stimulation, Extraction and Absquatulation (which means leaving suddenly). North Dakota is about to experience massive oil boom with the advent of a sophisticated technology that uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract oil from the Bakken Formation, a massive subsurface source rock for oil (about 4 billion barrels). Lots of oil and, with oil selling at $104 dollars per barrel, lots of money. 

I

When the novel begins, we are introduced to many characters—they catch your attention even if you don’t always remember their names. They are functionaries exploring the lay of the land—a salesman selling oil leases to property owners with mineral rights; a biologist monitoring a large colony of prairie dogs (which will be systematically exterminated to facilitate the laying of the pipeline); a geologist preparing his mineral survey report; a sheriff worried about the flood of outsiders coming into the town bringing with them crime, drugs and prostitution; a well meaning but misguided head of the tribal council wanting to make sure that his people are not cheated out of the spoils of the boom; a veteran of many boomtowns setting up a dive bar, a lap dancer looking to make good money in short time and, finally the residents of Yellow Earth and the Three Nations Reservation, many of whom have lands that sit atop a substantial chunk of Bakken. 

Sayles spends more time with some characters than others—he takes us on an entertaining long ride following the salesman as he glibly manipulates the landowners into signing the leases for oil extraction.

                          “I’m starting at fifty an acre,” he tells her. 

She laughs. “It’s not your money, Sig.” 

“They hire me cause I’m careful with it.” 

“If this rock pays anything like what they hope,” says Ginny, “careful is out the window.”

 “Anybody can wrap up a lease if they throw enough money at it,” says Sig. “To do it and maintain your company’s economic advantage requires a salesman.”

Stories of men who make the longest journey—the trucker who hauls drilling machinery from Houston to Yellow Earth, a journey of 1300 miles, all the time terrified that a piece of the machinery will fall off on the road and kill people in the cars behind or the illegal immigrant crossing from Mexico all the way to Yellow Earth, only to find that he has come a little late to the party—are the most poignant. This is not a story about oil barons, corporate bigwigs,  hotshot lawyers or powerful politicians. This is about people on the ground, cogs in the wheel—salesmen, long-haul truckers, drillers, mechanics, bartenders, lap dancers, bouncers—journeymen who have come to town to earn a living hoping that  drilling would go on for a long time but suspecting that it may not. This is also about the people of Yellow Earth and Three Nations Reservation—those who profit from the ownership of mineral rights and those who are made to bear the physical, environmental and social costs of fracking. (Actually, everyone bears the costs but for some the deal is sweetened by the monthly checks they get from the oil company.) 

If extractive capitalism is indifferent to the lives of the ordinary people who make its massive profits possible, Yellow Earth is not. Its pages are populated by many small characters sketched with care and empathy. When boom turns bust and they leave bruised and battered (some don’t, they die) we come to care about them too. 

Thanks for visiting.

Call and Response

 From inside the apartment, I don’t see them, only hear them. But that’s more than enough. 

Thanks for visiting, 

RECAP 2025

 

In terms of creativity it was somewhat a fallow year. Early in January, I completed the final version of Afterlives of a Newspaper.  I had submitted information about it to Kolaj Magazine Collage Books who were kind enough publicize it in their weekly newsletter and on their Instagram feed. As a result, I got several purchase requests but unfortunately I could not fulfill them because of tariff spat between India and US which had caused India to suspend all postal communications between the two countries. Because of prohibitive cost of shipping, I am not mailing anything from India right now. 

I responded to a few photography and collage calls for submission which were not successful. I wrote a couple of book reviews for All About Romance but did not want to do it regularly  (that site will cease publication by the end of this month but its archives will be available). Last year was the first year since I retired that I did not participate in workshops or residencies or take any course. Perhaps, I have plateaued in wanting to learn anything new. Last year, I also injured the fingers on my left hand hefting my big DSLR camera photographing birds from the terrace. DSLR photography has been on hold since then.
The only thing I did consistently was responding to Are You Book Enough monthly theme-based challenges. I did complete eleven out of twelve challenges-not bad for a newbie! It was an interesting challenge and it did stretch my creative muscles. Check out my instagram posts at  Indiragovi for the artist books I created for this challenge. The image at the bottom of this post is a tunnel book created in response to the theme of SPACE.

The video above shows the book I made for the month of December on the theme COLORS. 

Watch it with the sound on. 

Thanks for visiting. 

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.