What comes to your mind when one says: “art exhibition”? People, champagne in hand, staring at canvass smeared with color that makes you think the artist might have plagiarized your child’s accidents with water colors, new age or classical music playing in the background? Women wearing expensive jewelry, perfumes, hair color air kissing? Or men wearing suits and wives stepping out of their dirty big German cars talking, in weird accents, about means to combat climate change? Something elitist?
Well, pictures like these would definitely flash across my mind. Not that I am against the whole elitist cliché associated with art exhibitions – I enjoy it myself at times. So, once I went to a much hyped about art (performing arts) event with a couple of colleagues of mine. I was thinking of wearing my cool blazer and leather boots, but decided against it when one of my colleagues said that she believed in art for the masses and was just gonna wear her jeans, t-shirt and flip-flops.
Today I happened to be at Jehangir Art Gallery, looking at some modern art. When you think “modern art” one would think only the elite who’d understand (or at least pretend so) what’s on show and dare to venture. But much to my pleasant surprise, the gallery was chock-a-bloc with people one might condescendingly categorize as “lower middle-class”. True, there were times that the curators had to ask the visitors not to touch the artifacts, but then it was a delight to see these people appreciating what most of the “upper middle-class” might grudgingly call elite modern fart. My activist colleague would have been proud.
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King’s Circle garden is one of the few densely green parks left in Bombay, with many tall, lush green trees. One of these trees, if I am not mistaken, has stood there for around to t
wo centuries. It is a lovely Peepal – most Hindus revere a Peepal tree as holy. The amazing part about this park is that it is actually a traffic island on an arterial Bombay road with hundreds of thousands of cars driving around its circumference on a daily basis. Inspite of the manic traffic around it, it always remains calm and peaceful inside itself. The mere sight of this park, while one is waiting for the traffic light to turn green, is soothing to the senses. Hundreds of people throng this park everyday. Correction: hundreds of people thronged this park, until last week. Today I was riding back home, admiring the lovely park, only to find the people missing. I enquired to find that the MMRDA is gonna construct a flyover over the park. Sixteen trees will be axed tomorrow to make way for the flyover. The Peepal tree too, amongst those sentenced.
My dad just told me of a report on NDTV today. It is supposed to have said that the river Ganga might cease to exist by the year 2030. Apparently, about eight square kilometers of the mouth of the river has dried up in the past one year. The corresponding figure, the report is supposed to have said, was four square kilometers for the previous year. It is mind numbing to imagine the impact it could have, if the Ganga were really to dry up! And Al Gore will tell us that the possibility is nothing less that an inconvenient truth.
One name however, immediately crossed my mind – a gentleman by the name of Mahesh Chandar Mehta (or as many law students would know: Mr. M.C.Mehta). I told my dad, knowing how naïve it was to say it, “M.C.Mehta wouldn’t let this happen”. “What will M. C. Mehta be able to do all by himself”, my dad questioned. It was only once my dad asked that question that I could really understand what the man has done for the country so far.
Almost single handedly, with a little cooperation from the Justices of the Supreme Court, Mr. Mehta has successfully fought many an environmental battle over the past two and a half decades. A few prominent cases amongst are the CNG case, the Ganga Pollution case, the Taj Trapezium Case, the Oleum gas leak case… you could ask any law student and one would give you a seemingly endless list. That is what Mehta has been able to do, all by himself. And what’s more? Mehtaji’s integrity has never, in a mission lasting over a quarter of a century, been questioned and he hasn’t been shot dead!
