ET BureauThe title of People of India show at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai reminds your columnist of the preamble to the Constitution, which famously evokes “we the people of India” in a language that originated on a faraway island called Albion!
Also called John Bull’s Island, Albion is, of course, the UK. It has just voted in favour of unity rather than dissolution.
The Scottish referendum is being held up as a ‘glowing testament’ to the democratic process on a driech(wet, gloomy, grey) day! The monsoondrenched weather in Mumbai is very similar.
Does that explain why the ‘natives’ here took to their heart a language that originated in the Auld Lang Synetraditions celebrated by Scottish poet Robert Burns? In her show, Hande grapples with such questions of identity and self-referral with a ‘topography of images’ projected on to a giant mosquito net. She speaks of identity as a constantly shifting continuum.
This also brings to mind the floating world of the self and its reflections that mystics and artists have talked about.
Buddhists refer to this as the grand illusion, what Advaita Vedantins would call Maya: emptiness, or Shunyata, lies at the heart of this illusion, which is nevertheless supposed to be ‘pregnant with potential’.
This sounds strikingly similar to the creative flux of vacuum that cosmologists talk about: empty space is not supposed to be really empty at all.
Nothing is supposed to contain something that is constantly winking in and out of existence in a cosmic dance of virtual and real particles. Are we That (Tatva)?
Also called John Bull’s Island, Albion is, of course, the UK. It has just voted in favour of unity rather than dissolution.
The Scottish referendum is being held up as a ‘glowing testament’ to the democratic process on a driech(wet, gloomy, grey) day! The monsoondrenched weather in Mumbai is very similar.
Does that explain why the ‘natives’ here took to their heart a language that originated in the Auld Lang Synetraditions celebrated by Scottish poet Robert Burns? In her show, Hande grapples with such questions of identity and self-referral with a ‘topography of images’ projected on to a giant mosquito net. She speaks of identity as a constantly shifting continuum.
This also brings to mind the floating world of the self and its reflections that mystics and artists have talked about.
Buddhists refer to this as the grand illusion, what Advaita Vedantins would call Maya: emptiness, or Shunyata, lies at the heart of this illusion, which is nevertheless supposed to be ‘pregnant with potential’.
This sounds strikingly similar to the creative flux of vacuum that cosmologists talk about: empty space is not supposed to be really empty at all.
Nothing is supposed to contain something that is constantly winking in and out of existence in a cosmic dance of virtual and real particles. Are we That (Tatva)?
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