Red Threads
PUBLICATIONS
WRITINGS
“Nostalgia is not a place to live”
February 3rd, 2025
An addictive lingering fragrance, sweet and enticing, familiar and unrefined furnishes itself in our lives and often in our work. Yet for the artist becoming enamoured by the shining gleam of nostalgia, effaced of it's troubles, is a tight rope.
We find that a rose-tinted idealist perspective is set on contorting the un-modern past into the modern context. “Nostalgia is not a place to live” unforgivingly states the uncomfortability of wishful longing. Gulzar’s words issue my arising quandary towards nostalgia art, they express an emotion to move beyond. Mere reminiscence is the act of keeping a foot turned backwards, living to converse with the past.
In the contemporary now, a climate can form whereby the cultured artist feels direct conformity into their performance box of ethnicity, from his peers and wider art community. The artist is only ushered forward after their existence is neatly confirmed with a tickbox in the dropdown section, assisted too by the bettable interest from an appeaseable audience. A notion where a generalised paintbrush, strokes aesthetic cohesion and marketability over the artist, confining them to the box of "South Asian art", “Black Art”, “Oriental Art”, or simply put, anything but “Western, ambiguous artwork."
I too felt my work taking in the language of those scenes, as long as a paisley design is sewn into the canvas, I can stamp the assurance of finding ‘my’ artistic vocabulary, unknowingly abiding by the dictation to what my box already visually looks like. A colonising to the entry requirements of being an artist with an ethnic tagline.
Nostalgia itself is not the true issue, but it’s the potential to be forgotten within it. The artist will indeed explore the tensions between past and present, tenderness and void, delight and grief, the here and there. Similarly, Gulzar is essentially advocating for a balance, acknowledge the past, learn from it, but do not let it overshadow the present or future.
To un-tint the glasses is to see the un-bowdlerised past in its holistic view. The artist is able to re-define their now, taking away the need to extrapolate, contort, and disfigure. The shadows of fragrance will continue to linger while crafting novel expressions and stories, henceforth bringing its own identifiable top notes.
Written by Hiten Bhundia
This Tense
June 29th, 2024
As waves go onwards,
I am carried inwards.
Skipping through velvet sand,
Its whispering grains dissolve between my toes.
This feeling of comfort, a touch I recognise,
An embrace shivering though my body.
How can one forget the warmth of a hug,
How long can one hold onto a memory.
A hug like this exists beyond time stretching over ticking years.
Through your life, and lives on.
A moment to hold,
A moment to embrace,
A moment to love.
Yet they were just that, moments.
That’s the thing about good times,
It’s that they were ‘the good time’.
A moment to recall,
A moment to recollect,
A moment to remember.
We often don’t recognise the good times,
But so easily put name to the bad ones.
Like a thin black silk veil over your eyes,
Those times make it unable to feel the sand between your toes.
The strong urge to fall, caught in false pretence.
Falling tents, I tried to live in.
I wished to feel at home, but it was only past tense.
The desire to bathe within the past can feel selfishly good.
But change is the law of this universe, something I’m coming to understand.
The mind alone can be one’s friend as well as one’s enemy.
When the mind is conquered, it becomes your confidant,
When left unconquered, it remains a foe.
For a conquered mind
Joy, sorrow
Heat, cold
Pleasure, pain
Devotion and despair
Are all the same
Like a tortoise pulling its limbs into its shell,
A learned man can keep his senses under control.
Hence, I mustn’t lament over the tense.
Except practice in this tense.
Drifting Leaf
June 06th, 2024
The leaf that has fallen
Returns not to the branch.
But whispers its memories as it falls towards the shore, entering the Sea of Transmigration.
With its swift, irresistible tide, the leaf is lured in.
Enchanted,
Succumb by the overwhelming force of the ocean.
The body is wasted, the hands are trembling,
The light has gone out from the eyes.
The ears can no longer hear any words,
The last of the senses, fighting to stand tall.
The teeth are broken.
I cannot utter, any words.
Beauty has disappeared from the face,
Phlegm covers my throat.
The body has become alien,
Turning me out of my own home.
As the moon has a black mark it cannot shed,
I cannot rid myself of attachment to what I can hold.
Who can overthrow greed?
Who can cast away desire?
Sadness may never vanish, but you learn to go longer periods without feeling it.
The heart from grief can be the most selfish,
Knowing no prison, no fort can keep it within.
Moonlight may shine in from outside the courtyards,
But the moon will never enter the home.
This affliction behaves as such.
It stands by your side like a hovering fog,
You can try to reach for it, yet it’s not material enough for you to grasp.
One who understands the deathless nature of the Self is not afraid of death itself.
This moon’s midnight grief glows through the windows, illuminating at your feet.
But it will never give you the warmth as the sun can.
Weapons do not cut this Spirit, and fire does not burn it.
Water does not make it wet,
and the wind does not make it dry.
The Spirit cannot be cut, burned, wet, or dried. It is eternal, all-pervading, changeless,
immovable, and primaeval.
Atma is beyond space and time.
The Spirit is said to be unexplainable, incomprehensible, and immutable. Knowing the Spirit
as such, you should not grieve for the physical body.
So, I bathe myself in warmth, in comfort, in heat.
And pray towards the lotus feet.
