meethapani

“Chal Nikal” “0 to 60 in Five Seconds”; “Drive it Like You Stole it”; “Lose Your Innocence in 3.9 Seconds”   are typical marketing slogans for the latest car models. And then a Honda 70 motorcycle has a flamboyant message in reflective stickers on a shiny CD number plate that says “chal nikal”. Chal nikal ( come, lets get out of here) is a collective call to escape, get out of an impasse, find one’s own way out.   Somewhere in this contrast lie the social challenges of Pakistani society. The global image of the biker: outlaw by choice, unfettered by society’s docile norms, is a far cry from bikers in Pakistan, and most developing countries, where the motorcycle is simply the most affordable form of transport. According to Arif Hasan the monthly costs are half of bus fares and cuts travel time in half. American   WWII veterans wanting to relive the camaraderie of the shared dangers of the battlefield, formed some of the first Harley Davidson biker clubs ...

Posters – Art for the people The posters I grew up with were the wonderful psychedelic pop art posters of the Sixties and Seventies. .  They were possibly the first posters made for youth. On July 16, 1966, impresario, Bill Graham went around San Francisco on his scooter pasting up Wes Wilson’s now famous “Flames” poster announcing a concert on July 23. It had orange flame shaped letters vibrating against a lime green background. The posters slowly disappeared from the walls as people started collecting them. Aaron Skirboll writes for the Smithsonian Magazine, what was an advertisement had become “a coveted work of art”. Postermania best describes what followed. Florescent colours, op art, pop art, all came together is a psychedelic explosion   that characterized art, design, and fashion of the time. Graham was instrumental in commissioning and marketing psychedelic concert posters by designers such as Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and...

The Gypsy Soul The first time I realized that gypsies were not just characters in a film but real people was as a child when my father, an orthopaedic surgeon, told us of a gypsy patient he treated. Of Irani origin, he was told his leg was to be amputated and he came to my father to see if it could be saved. The reason caught our imagination: in gypsy law, if a man was disabled, another could take his wife, as it meant he could no longer take care of her. His wife was beautiful and his cousin, who accompanied him, was keen to benefit from his amputation and marry his wife. My father managed to save his leg and the gypsy gave him a blanket with a huge tiger printed on it.  The next time I met a gypsy was more recent: he was from England and had come to understand truck art so he could paint a truck in London. As we shared experiences, I discovered many words in Romany, the language gypsies spoke, were similar to Urdu.  Andre: inside; angustri: ring; bal: hair; baro/ba...

Celebrating Jugaar The basti kids in front of my mother’s house have become avid snooker players, except the table is a cloth placed over a bit of wood with sides made of stretched tape wrapped around nails. With 6 pockets, the cues are simple sticks and the balls are marbles.  The whole fragile contraption is placed on a couple of plastic boxes well below waist level even for a child. But each player has focused concentration for the next shot and a silent audience surrounds the table. Every so often photographs of innovative low cost solutions do the social media rounds: the missing numbers of a broken clock written on the wall, a shower made of a pierced empty plastic coke bottle. These are what we would call jugaar. A jugaar is an innovative low cost fix or solution in response to a need. Almost every culture has an equivalent: gambiarra in Brazil, zizhu chuangxin in China, jua kali in Kenya, system D in France, trick 17 in Switzerland, chindogu in Japan.  ...

Choosing to Study Art and Design Another academic year is about to begin. The number of young people wanting to study art and design is growing. Young people in Pakistan seem to know something that parents and policy makers do not. Subjects that will materialize into successful jobs are usually identified as medicine, IT, business studies, and engineering. School and college curricula channel young people in these directions. For the last five decades, education has been serving economic development, and public policies reflect this. The term “human capital” developed by economists Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer in the 60s, is overused as an aim to produce labour capable of increasing economic  growth. But as we know youth has its own recalcitrance, and as society’s elders are less and less able to guarantee pathways to success, there is a growing urge in young people to plan life journeys on their own terms. Along with business school, computer sciences and pharmac...

The Romance of the Balcony Shakespeare never envisaged a balcony in what has come to be known as the famous Balcony Scene of Romeo and Juliet. Balconies were not introduced in English architecture till the late Georgian period. David Garrick first included a balcony in his production of the play in 1748. Ever since, the balcony has become an enduring symbol for lovers. Oft quoted are Romeo’s lines “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?/It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”  Less noticed are Juliet’s lines “Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud”. Women of genteel families, rarely ventured out. The balcony became a cherished space for women, an allowed outdoor space. Called “a space in between”, balconies are both  public and  private, a connection with the world outside for women whose movements are restricted either because of social norms or domestic duties. The balcony has come to be seen as a feminine space.  . As Grace King in her w...

A Cultural Vacuum During a recent lecture I presented on the role of art and literature in Pakistani society, a gentleman asked what we can do to stop influences from across the border. “Don’t leave a vacuum” was my response. This is an age of influences. Like King Canute realized, we cannot halt the tide. In fact influences are not only to be expected but encouraged. Humanity has always learnt from the experiences of others. However, being able to choose what influences one wishes to adopt requires a filter. The filters are created by a number of factors including belief systems, collective societal values, family, language, educational systems. These evolve over time and are protected, refreshed or added to in a considered way and normally embedded in cultural expressions. However, we are living in an age of disruption. The custodians of cultural transmission fall silent. Culture is a series of organized  events, rather than a seamlessly assimilated continuity. ...