Our weekly Saturday afternoon meetings were routine affairs. Over samosas and chai, crucial decisions were made, as back then, we were primarily a TV production company. Six years down the linewe became a factorychurning out formats, inventing soaps, re-imagining game shows, and the weekly meetings then were an opportunity to catch your breath, let your hair down and assess.
Our colleagues, Sharupa Dutta and Manika Berry Asgaonkar, looked stressed and suggested we stop! Stop? How would that work? My partner, Mohit Satyanand, mulled over the thought, but after some number crunching, announced that the only people making money from the shows were the channels, who used to pay us in 90-120 day cycles. In essence we could, if we wished to, take a break.
Hara-kiri has many forms: this was its finest! The channels, unhappy about our decision, delayed payments even further. The overheated TV scene collapsed with channels sputtering out, sacking people and financially ruining the producer fraternity. We were cash strapped, overstaffed and having to paddle hard to stay afloat.
Mohit then calculated that given our outstanding payments across channels and money owed for an ongoing Television Awards project sponsored by Onida, we would have enough to keep us afloat for a while, till we reinvented ourselves. However, Onida ran into serious financial problems and decided to wind down the awards.
Stung by non-payments, many of our trusted colleagues left in search of fresh pastures. In the same year, Mohit, his sister Kanika and Val Shipley had begun a bi-monthly get together where friends and family would gather to listen and make music. And, thusThe Friends of Music (FOM) group was born. A slew of today’s stars, SusmitSen& and Indian Ocean, Mohit Chauhan, Bobby Cash strummed and sang their way to stardom from those early concerts. We took heart and expanded our work to include dance and theater.
In the eighties and nineties, the British Council in India was a hub of activity. SushmaBahl, the council’sDirector of Arts, had boundless energy, a rare vision, and the experience to work across international borders. Having seen me perform in Primetime Theater’s ‘Me and My Girl’, she invited me to visit the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1999. This set the agenda for our first cross-festival presentation in 2001.
Working closely with the Festival Fringe, the International Film Festival, the Edinburgh Tattoo and the Edinburgh International Festival, we created an annual platform of work from across India, enlarging our presence from six productions to sixteen. Many thought we were mad, but our long-term objectives paid off as we presented an array of artists: AditiMangaldas, Mrigaya, Indian Ocean, LilletteDubey and her Primetime Theater group, Adi Shakti, LushinDubey, DadiPudumjee and the Ishara Theater Company, to name a few. Even Shah Rukh Khan, made his way to Edinburgh, in a celebration of the best of Indian arts.
The year we presented Ishara Puppet Theater’s `Transposition’, the infamous liquid bomb incident took place at Heathrow as we landed. We arrived in Edinburgh after a 16-hour delay, only to find that 24 of our 30 odd suitcases and outsized puppet boxes and bags had been lost!
Five days and three cancelled shows later, BBC ran a story on our predicament. Hours later, a passenger Dana Macleod, rang to say strange-shaped bags were going around the carousel with stickers bearing her name. Thus, the show was back on the road!
SushmaBahl&Edmund Marsden drove British Council’s agenda and for three years we worked together, we worked to create offsite weeklong programmes for artists, managers and art administrators.
This culminated in the setting up of the six-month long ‘Great Arc Festival’ across the UK. Commissioned by India’s Department of Science & Technology and steered by an innovative Amitabh Pandey, the then joint secretary, this project virtually brought us to the brink of bankruptcy due to the intransigence of government organizations.
`Reinventing’ sure sounds cool but the process is terrifying! Television paid salaries which the arts could never afford and Investments in shows and festivals meant that our balance sheets were red, year on year. Setting up or collaborating with existing festivals led to some degree of success, with annual presentations in Singapore, Wellington, Perth and Melbourne.
Prompted by our then Counsel General, Navdeep Suri, we then set up the Shared History Festival in South Africa. With an audience returning to the theater, New Town had now seen a rise in property prices, new businesses opening and residential blocks being re-built.
Our accidental business model kicked in as we expanded out of Johannesburg to include Durban, Cape Town, Pretoria and Pietermaritzburg. We were able to amortize costs across the cities and build on revenues in a unique private public partnership model. A series of Art Therapy & and Theatre workshops run by Puneeta Roy and the Tehelka Foundation, helped us reach out to a demographic somewhat different to our average theater-going population.
Governments rarely credit the direct contribution that Arts interventions make to marginalized communities. At Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT), an organization providing support services for street and working children in Delhi set up in 1988, we laid great emphasis on theater, music, dance and visual arts as therapeutic tools for homeless children, most often violated and abused.
Salim, a four-year old boy, lost his family during a religious procession. The police brought him to us and our social workers sent out photographs and we were able to reunite Salim with his family. He was later cast in an Academy award-nominated short film and went on to become a full time contemporary dancer and actor.
Vicky Roy, an enthusiastic photographer, one of our older kids who had a rare ability to capture incredible imagery, went on to win the All India Photography Award and a commission by the World Photography Association in Amsterdam. Other SBT kids -Kapil, Pawan, Shamshul, Shameem, Viraj and Kumari were trained as puppeteers with DadiPudumjee and went on to become independent artists.
In India, we have 110 million children out of school. And thus, even if the GDP spent on education were to double, it would take 20 years to build the brick and mortar to house this population and train teachers required. Hence, new ideas and out-of-the-box solutions need to be found, to deliver education to these children. Story-telling forms through the arts could be one way of delivering much needed literacy to those who live outside the system.
Recently we took the Kahani Festival to Dantewada, Chattisgarh, an area at the heart of the Maoist insurgency movement. Thousands of kids from a 100km radius were bussed in for the three-day programme of workshops, music, dance, storytelling and art. Their day of discovery was to access the wonders that non-verbal forms like puppetry and dance brought to their lives. Transfixed and transformed, they left enriched, even if for a fleeting moment.
As India’s economy gained momentum, we began consolidating our position by setting up a slew of platforms: for theater (META), literature (Hay Festival, Kerala) & and puppetry (Ishara International Puppet Festival).
Entertainment districts traditionally contribute to a city’s economy. Broadway offers up $9–-11 billion and London’s West End £3–-5 billion through its restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, bars and concerts. The Edinburgh festival too contributes £225m of additional spend during the seven weeks of the festival.
At our annual DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, which brings together 250 speakers over five days and attracts over a 100,000 visitors, the additional contribution to the city’s economy has been estimated at approximately Rs 15–-20 crores.
In India, where tourism and culture should contribute a greater share to the GDP, we are still stuck in the 5-6 million visitors. India however has a million heritage sites, all waiting to be rediscovered and leveraged. Faith and John Singh, in their landmark initiative in Jaipur, showed that built heritage can be preserved with help from the city and local communities. AmanNath and Francis Wacziarg pioneered the conservation and conversion of crumbling forts. Maharaja Gaj Singh (Bapji) of Jodhpur has demonstrated how investment in the arts builds bonds within communities and creates a platform for development and progress.
In today’s polarized world, it is imperative that we use the arts as a window into other cultures. The arts know no language and have a universality that allows the viewer to absorb the exotic, within a given context. India needs to learn from this. Our concept of jugaad, which rescues us in the nick of time, is no match for years of diligent planning and preparation. Why can't state governments use lottery money for the arts and sports, much as the UK government does to fund arts infrastructure projects?
While a few first steps have been taken in creating an education policy, which includes the arts as formal coursework in schools, there has been little thought of how this will be delivered in the short term. Barring the initiatives of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) and sporadic schemes brought about by the Ministry of Culture and its many institutions, there are few initiatives to realize the needs and aspirations of India’s creative class.
These shortcoming need to be redressed. It is sad to see that the capital city of Delhi has not one new public space, with a sense of aesthetics or pride reflecting the national culture. Projects based on the lowest bid will never create excellence and will only lead to further corruption of the nation’s soul.
Every journalist loves to do a story on the dying art forms or the revival of an art form. In India nothing ever dies, artists like the societies they inhabit, adapt and move on. In a country like India, all you need to do is create a ground that is fertile and enrich it with the nutrients of imagination, social and economic inclusion, vision and resources. May a million fireflies rise in to the night sky illuminating our hearts and our minds!
(The story has been extracted from BW APPLAUSE)
