Narender Bhaiya| A lesson in making

Ek

Introducing Narender Bhaiya, the reason why Ice Factory forests (I can’t call it a garden, the word garden comes with its own pretentious formality to me for some reason at this moment, and forest seems too wild and untamed but thats what they are wild and untamed but set free with love) are so pretty and we get to eat home-grown potatoes and red rice for three months. Protecting us from all the snakes that come visit us during these times and maker of a gorgeous (and supremely yummy inducing) pizza oven, Narender Bhaiya’s slight quirks and eccentricities manage to blow me away once in a while. While I believe every human is quirky and eccentric and mad and has some weird actions/habits that are unique and a story in itself, some people prefer to keep it all inside and some people unleash that madness on the whole world while the world worships them as artists or heroes. Or locks them in an asylum.

Whatever.

But then there are people like him, for whom its neither a show not any sort of release. They indulge in it with such innocence, such naive normalcy. A casual usualness which wonders with wide big eyes at the possibility of another state of being, which is unbelievable to me, a person who was thrown in the cauldron of society and steeped in filters and pretences. One who has had to do a lot of unlearning and unwrapping to let myself simply be. To let my madness and insanity exhibit shamelessly. But for me again, the word is shamelessly, as if there would/should have been shame attached to it and now its without it, whereas its the most natural state of being. And thats where, Narender Bhaiya comes in.

Here he is.

On the Ice factory roof. Throwing the gunk out just at the onset of monsoon. As always, completely unaware of the spectacularity of his self.

Don

And the award for most innovative scarecrow goes to:

In the few months that he has been here, there are times when I am confronted with something that I feel like I have to take a picture of. And I’m not a photographer, sometimes stubbornly not. I have a weird phobia of photographs distorting my memory and history. But keeping that aside, sometimes I am confronted with this and my hands reach my battered phone and I click a shot.

Narender Bhaiya’s iconic scarecrow. The cutest, creepiest scarecrow. Which makes me wonder, isn’t everything thats cute also slightly creepy if you really think about it.

Tin

Life imitates art imitates life.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the prettiest of them all?

Mirror is one of the everyday objects that have been laden with so much meaning and sort of mysticism that its unreal. It’s the object on the wall, it shows you your face, your friends are a mirror sometimes, so are your lover’s glasses, a nicely polished shoe and the glittering lake as you jumped into it.

Why do we look in the mirror? Again, an action so simple, yet laden with so much meaning. I remember at the beginning of Truman show, as Jim Carrey talks to himself in the mirror and we are looking at him (we along with the whole damn world, I felt so so so weird. It is encroaching the privacy of a person in the most obscene manner. But that’s what we do, bare ourselves naked in front of our own selves each damn day as we look at it to tell us our own damn truth.

And then we have art, as a mirror to our society, culture. But what if we went back to the basics. Art as simply the mirror to ourselves. As if to say, why are you looking at me? You want to look at yourself, you don’t have to look at your face, You can look at yourself, without fucking needing me.

Look at your writing, is it angry, tormented, hypocritical? Look at the way you draw, or how you make your coffee, or how you feel when you look at that post when men are beating other men as they force them to sing the national anthem.

That, right there my friend, is your mirror. It’s not the face in the mirror with the crooked smile or the raised eyebrow, it is this. That’s all.

Also, mirrors, I feel, along with some other things are some of the objects that completely fucked us up. As people who know me know, I have an issue with the unbalanced focus on visuals. The visual-centric approach to everything in life that this medium that I am publishing this on is also a huge party to now. Anyway, I digress.

Back to Narender Bhaiya’s antics making me question life and my approach to it. Art as his mirror. And his mirror as mine.