Camera-savvy anchorperson
TWO years from now, I see myself directing films. Professionally, that would be my culmination”, says the effervescent, camera- savvy anchorperson Roshan Abbas. For someone, who’s sauntered through many a career, the transformation oughtn’t be difficult.

An emotional rollercoaster show
MADONNA was too shy to fly with them, but Leonardo Dicaprio and Harrison Ford took to the skies with great aplomb.And it’s all down to an exuberant troupe of highly strung Argentines who took New York by storm and are now conquering London.

Audioscan by ASC

Communicating through spaces
By Kavita Bhargava

IN the simplest expression, space is a gap or an area that is not filled between two or more objects or points. It is also the dimension of height, depth and width in which all things exist and move. Juxtaposing this space with the “Spaces Within” Mandira Chatterjee Sharma and Sabita Kundu have given a new definition to this vacuum through their creative pieces.

“Spaces Within”, an exhibition of paintings by Mandira and Sabita scheduled to be held at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai from October 4 to October 10, was well received by art lovers and critics when these were put on display at Abhinav Art Gallery in Jammu last week.

For Mandira, spaces are meant to be havens of rest, special nooks of peace and seclusion, where one is free to introspect, dream and embark on personal flights.

Sabita on the other hand, finds space communicating with her as she believes that it has its own language and there cannot be any expression without space. For the language of her paintings, space is very important otherwise she believes that it is not complete.

But their mutual admiration for spaces and the creative urge to fill it with gaps, was what brought the two artists together and thus the exhibition entitled, “Spaces Within”.

A total of 27 paintings of which 14 are contributed by Sabita and the remaining ones are by Mandira will be exhibited at Jehangir Art Gallery. These paintings which took a little over eight months to complete for both artists, is the second duo exhibition by them. Prior to this, they had a duo exhibition of painting, “Some Views on the Interior” at Lalit Kala Gallery, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi in 1992.

Hailing from West Bengal, both Mandira and Sabita have a long innings of friendship and have ultimately settled down in Jammu, (Mandira is married to a renowned artist of J&K Harsh Vardhan Sharma who is presently teaching at J&K Institute of Music and Fine Arts, Jammu, and Sabita has been working at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Kaluchak, Jammu, for the past four years). Together, they have displayed their works at many places, including at the annual exhibitions of Kala Bhavan at Nandan Santiniketan and Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta and the Trishant Centre for Creative Arts, Jammu.

Among their prestigious commissioned works is a “Siva Parvate Vivah” mosaic tile moral (55ft x 12.5ft) at Parsuram Bhavan, Brahman Pratinidhi Sabha, Jammu.

Hailing from Navadwip in Nadir district of West Bengal, 35-year-old Sabita was working with an ad agency in Calcutta after she did her BFA followed by MFA (painting) from Visva-Bharti University, Santiniketan, in 1992. But the sudden realisation that the creative urge within her was not being satiated in that job, she left for Kathmandu in Nepal where Mandira was already working for a school. They have been classmates since their graduation at Santiniketan days.

Sabita recalls that her mother used to make beautiful rangoli and her brothers also had an artistic bent of mind. One of her brothers, who is in Calcutta Indian Art College, inspired her a lot and made her go to Santiniketan to learn art.

Though she picks up themes from her surroundings, what impresses her the most are women figures, characters, their expressions, inner feelings, spaces and subjects related to spaces.

As Mandira puts it, Sabita’s spaces are interiors, intriguing labyrinths and colourful pocket bearing people, their presence sometimes pronounced, sometimes lurking and sometimes inferred. Her women are signified by a lack of urgency, their gestures are relaxed, they are quietly gliding when in motion, which is seldom.They are preoccupied people, each in a private sojourn. Leaning momentarily on a table, resting on a chair, picking up a “do-tara” to safety, strumming the strings or gently putting it aside, poised in front of an ease ruminating in front of a mirror. They mark the lull preceding or perhaps following an action, anticipating action. The sharp juxtaposition of colours build unusual settings and the clarity of images heighten the mystery and melodrama of her interiors.

Deft strokes are more pronounced in her paintings. Blue and naples yellow colours are her favourite of which she makes more use red subconsciously.

“I feel that what I wanted to express couldn’t be expressed in any colour”, she says while talking about her painting “Dancing with Joy” in which a young girl is dancing on a red floor which has designed in yellow. She makes use of yellow design to break the composition. Designs form an important part of her creative works and “are part of life too”.

Many of her paintings are to some extent her self-portrayal. While “The Do-tara and I” has a girl sitting on the mattress on the floor with a musical instrument do-tara by her side, “The Creative Process” depicts a room-cum-studio where the artist creates all her works. Interestingly, the do-tara is again a part of the surrounding including the canvas, easel and bed. In an alien city like Jammu, Sabita who had done a two-year certificate course in Rabindra sangeet from Sangeet Bhavan, Santiniketan, finds solace in music.

Mandira’s spaces are area nestling within wall lines and forms. Her spaces are pockets of unifying matrices with object embedded in them. In her paintings, negative spaces form the unifying matrices that hold together different objects, communicate with them, tie them in a relation and also impart a significance to each of them.

In her paintings big spaces cup smaller spaces with complementary spaces holding each other, sometimes spilling into each other. Her figures are human presence with the ability to traverse between enhancing the relativity between inside and outside spaces.

Mandira, who is greatly inspired by miniature paintings, has made use of tilted perspective of a miniature painting in some of her works, including “Looking glass” in which the feeling of a closed cool room on a summer afternoon has been beautifully captured. In another painting, “The Good Life”, vibrant colours like red, blue and green depict the scene of a restaurant which has the warm, cheerful and luxurious feelings of those people who are having an enjoyable evening there.

An optimist, Mandira’s paintings very clearly reflect her exuberance, effervescence and hope for the future.

About her paintings, Mandira says these germinate out of an experience of some interior, some sensation of a vast space or of many windows with white morning light streaming in to fill a room with cool ambience, the rich colour of a wall or a window sill or a rug imparting a strong character to an interior and touching a chord somewhere, a mirror multiplying, splitting, complicating space, enhancing the mystery of an interior or increasing its sensation of vastness or perpetuating its cloistered effect.

Two of her paintings entitled “The Nook” and “The Cerulean Window”, which reflect the memories of her brief stay amid the sylvan surroundings in Kathmandur, primarily focus on windows. It was a place where she could be on her own after a day’s hectic work and do every activity involving with cultivating her own personality. “The Nook” has windows on all sides, the idea for which has been taken from Mughal miniature paintings which have border on all sides. Though the border in Mughal miniatures are mostly decorative, in Mandira’s painting, it is part of the theme.

With the kind of response this exhibition has generated in Jammu, both Mandira and Sabita are sanguine about a good show at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, as well.

Camera-savvy anchorperson
By Sucharita Sengupta

TWO years from now, I see myself directing films. Professionally, that would be my culmination”, says the effervescent, camera- savvy anchorperson Roshan Abbas. For someone, who’s sauntered through many a career, the transformation oughtn’t be difficult.

Roshan’s first brush with the media came early indeed, in his childhood. As they stood outside their house in Lucknow, where Doordarshan was shooting, he and his sister were asked to lie on a charpai, and read comics. A week later, the shot ran on TV with the line “Aise kitaab padhoge to aankhen kharab ho jayengi .”

Since then there has been no stopping. He made his debut in stage plays while in class IV. “My parents say I was a performer. Singing, debating and dramatics were my forte, and I could write well too.”

He stepped into serious theatre by joining the Aamir Raza Hussain’s group while studying in Delhi University. “I went for shows abroad and was hardly seen in college. This was the time when Sidharth Basu spotted me and asked me to anchor a show. Guess what?”, he grins, “I over slept on the first day of the shoot”.

Had he really planned a post-graduate diploma in Mass Communi-cation?

As he puts it, Mass Communi-cation “happened”. His seniors were going in for it, and with his talents, he thought it would be a good line to pursue, especially because very few people were doing this course then. One must concede that Roshan’s timing was perfect, what with the entry of satellite television and proliferation of the media that was kicked off in the early ‘90s.

During his stint as a radio-jockey, he put his fluency in both English and Hindi to great advantage. “ I fully exploited my voice. It was while going the Roadshow for Times FM did I realise the popularity of RJs. We were thoroughly mobbed.”

Though his first anchoring assignment on TV was “Hum Honge Kamyab”, as career show on Zee TV, he really hit bigtime with Public Demand”. It has been a wonderful experience for him. “I liked making people comfortable on the show. I got to travel a lot. But the best part was that we would be celebrating every festival two weeks ahead, while passers-by gave curious glances”, he adds laughingly.

“Public Demand” too has changed a lot over the years. “ Earlier, PD was hooked to a countdown. so the questions asked were film related. But now, I talk about everything under the sun. As far as the changing co-anchors are concerned, it was mostly directorial decision.”

Roshan is currently hosting a number of other shows, including “Born Lucky” on Home TV, “Toofan Mail” on Sony and “Family Fortunes” on Star Plus. So far, “Family Fortunes” has been the easiest to handle.

What makes him tick as a presenter? “I can speak of the cuff, speak for hours on an end. My appeal is very homogenous. I have six to 60-year-olds coming and saying how much they like me on TV.”

The person you see on screen so often is equally active off screen. In August1996, he started his own event management company, Encompass, in partnership with a close friend. Why Encompass? People wanted solutions that would take care of every bit of the problem. “Many a time, I would see live events heading not from conception to creation, but from conception to abortion. Being the host, I had to hold fort. So the decision to start such a company. Event management is not just the idea, but the total organisation. At Encompass, we find creative solutions. Encompass has given me the canvass to do what I really wanted to do as an individual,” he explains.

Now that’s good way of raking in moolah, but wait. There’s more. Some earnings from the commercial ventures are invested in projects, straight from the heart. Like “Graffiti — postcards from school”. A musical play about the past six months in school, Graffiti featured school and college-going teenagers who had never acted before. Written and directed by Roshan himself and choreographed by Shaimak Davar, the play went on to become a big hit in Delhi theatre circuits.

“I wanted to do a quality show that would make people in Broadway say wow! At Encompass, our mindset is very clear — we do business to make money. We want to do good work so that the client does not regret paying the money. As for the non-commercial ventures, those should give creative satisfaction”, he sums up.

Roshan is making efforts to set up an undergraduate academy of performing arts. A finger in nearly every media-related pie. What next? Well, film direction. Though he prefers acting on stage to tele-serials, he gushes passionately about cinema. “What is being portrayed today is not youngsters trying to ape the West, but trying to find a midway between Indian and Western cultures. I’m not trying to be conservative, but there are some Indian ethos somewhere which I want to ground my films in,” he says.

There you are — a complete showman. In spite of his success, he feels the pressure. “There are a lot of pressures on one’s personal life. Professionally too, a lot of people simply see the glitz and glamour. Believe me, there is no glamour in the making process. Moreover, once you’re at the top, you’re under a lot of scrutiny.”

The life span in this career is short. It all depends on one’s performance. “If contacts get you the first show, you get the second only on the basis of your performance in the first”, he warns.

An emotional rollercoaster show

MADONNA was too shy to fly with them, but Leonardo Dicaprio and Harrison Ford took to the skies with great aplomb.And it’s all down to an exuberant troupe of highly strung Argentines who took New York by storm and are now conquering London.

From Belgrade to Brazil, the reaction to the De La Guarda troupe has been equally fervent because they have quite simply changed the rules of theatre with a show that almost defies description.

These flamboyant South American performance artistes combine dance and acrobatics in a wild cross between a rave and a carnival.

Imagine a rain forest criss-crossed with strobe lights. Then add bungee jumpers who hurl around above the audience’s heads at a breathtaking speed.

One sky dancer, clad only in a helmet and a leather jock strap, plunges through a paper ceiling and plucks up one unsuspecting member of the audience to soar above the crowd.

Standing up watching the 70-minute spectacle, you are torn between childlike wonder and adrenalin-pumping exhilaration.

You should also be prepared to get soaked in a sea of mist, water and fog and then be grabbed by one of the acrobat dancers for a kiss, hug and spontaneous dance.

The show has been round the world since the troupe was formed in Buenos Aires in 1993. In New York, the show has been running for 15 months, in London for five months of a now extended run.

He admires cocooned celebrities who are prepared to mix in with the crowd and enjoy a “trip to the stars” with a dive-bombing bungee jumper.

But Baldinu reported that Madonna was uncharacteristically bashful at the New York show.

“Dicaprio, Harrison Ford — they chose to fly. All of them enjoy it but some are more open. Madonna didn’t want to fly — perhaps another time,” he said.

Even the notoriously reclusive Michael Jackson joined in the party in New York — as have many other celebrities in London.

“Celebrities like Michael Jackson are used to being untouchables. The are used to VIP places. Coming to the show is enough of a challenge for them — being surrounded by unknown people,” he said.

Baldinu, who would like to try the show out in Asia, revels in all those different crowd reactions around the world.

“From Switzerland to Yugoslavia there was such a big difference. In Switzerland, they were orderly and quiet. They opened up, but it took a longo time.

“The English feel it is a very sexy show. In Brazil they feel it is a party, a celebration. In Yugoslavia, it was like a complete carnival with old and young people sharing the show.”

The literally off-the-wall show is a real emotional rollercoaster and London critics urged British crowds to “indulge the primal urge to scream, howl and dance” amid the troupe’s tribal chanting and thunderous percussion.

In the land of Shakespeare it is not every day you get the chance to watch bungee jumping in a cavernous auditorium awash with mist and rain in the most surreal of aerial ballets. — Reuters

Audioscan by ASC
Wattal does another star act

PIYA SE MILKE AAYE NAIN (Tips): Jawahar Wattal is the man behind the launch of many a successful career, including that of Daler Mehndi. He has turned a full-fledged music director and his latest protege is Hema Sardesai, whom he has (re)launched here in style.

She has a promising voice, but so far only a few rather inane film and non-film songs to her credit. Wattal — the pioneer of the Punjabi pop — has this entire cassette devoted to her, except for a single song by Rajendra Kachroo. Hema sings four singles and three duets. Her co-singers are Kachroo and Bhupi Chawla.

All songs are set to a “garba” beat. Obviously, the cassette is aimed at the “navratra” festivities. But the similarity between various songs may be a bit monotonous for some. Hema is particularly chirpy in Kas mas kas mas … and Hamaari gali aaya karo ....

Music has been produced, composed and directed by Jawahar Wattal. Lyrics are by Sameer. To that extent, this private album has been launched in the true film style.

The title song, Piya se milke aaye nain …, has been released as a music video featuring Avni, Richa, Sameer Soni and Shashank Dabral.

YAAR KA DEEDAR CHAHIYE (Venus): Qawwali lovers would surely remember the late Shankar of the Shankar Shambhoo duo. His son Ram Shankar has now come of age and has been giving successful stage performances all over the world.

His first album, Yaaro Sab Dua Karo, did fairly well. He has now come up with this one, which includes everything from qawwalis to ghazals to geet to folk music. Quite understandably, five different lyricists have been engaged.

The album has been composed by Ram Shankar himself in his high-range style.

JOY AND HAPPINESS (Archies Music): Here is a cassette of songs for children by two children, Vishakha Bokil and Pallavi Bokil. In their sweet voices, they sing about God, love, manners, politeness, cleanliness, respect for parents and elders. There are 16 songs in all, which have been compered by Alka Shanker.

Children are likely to appreciate that the cover gives the lyrics of all the songs.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU (Venus): Here is another cassette for children which will be particularly liked by the parents whose children’s birthdays are drawing near. As the name suggests, this one has mostly birthday songs for children from films.

It is a pack of two cassettes and has 22 songs in all. These include Happy birthday to you …, Baar baar din ye aye …, Tum jiyo hazaron saal …, Hum bhi agar bachche hote … etc.

How one wishes these were the original ones but these are remix versions of the much-loved film songs. Singers include Abhijeet, Bankim Pathak, Anwar, Mehboob Ali, Bharat Joshi, Sudesh Bhonsle, Chandana Dixit, Sonali Vajpayee, Sneha Pant, Wrisha Dutta, Nihar Shembekar and Bansi Tiwari. They try to copy the original, but with only moderate success.

Music has been arranged by Keerti-Girish.