Booklet: Whitewash! An Unkind View of India and its Makers
Text by Gautam Bhatia , Arup Giri and Nilanjan Das
A tabloid with a difference, Whitewash is a disturbingly indiscreet piece of writing that rips apart conventional Indian notions of politics, equality, caste, gender, ownership, personal rights, heritage, love of country - all in a way that at once distresses and invigorates
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© Gautam Bhatia.
Reproduced by the permision of The Author + Categorisation: Microsite: Gautam Bhatia (works)... (primary)… with related pages… |
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
- Claes Oldenburg
India, love it or hate it. Certainly it is impossible to be unaffected by it. My own relationship with the place is tainted by the contempt I feel for the people and incidents that unmake it everyday. Whitewash is merely a reflection of the skewed impressions that present-day personalities and events have made on my life. The deafening roar of the street, the family, the bureaucrat, the beggar, the MP, the builder, and the shopkeeper, are all condensed in the book as a virulent strain of muddled and diseased voices that pollute rivers, stage dharnas, rape college girls, adulterate food items, smuggle liquor or contaminate daily life in other ways. Whitewash is not a distillation, but a further confounding, a piece of visual and literary noise: 240 pages of a personal harangue of articles, advertising and misinformation - a sort of Yellow Pages of the social and political life of today. It is not a serious piece of writing, a literary work, but a personal catalogue of graphic, visual and verbal slime. Its truest representation is the view inside and outside the window - to the street, the city, the village, the family drawing room, the marketplace, and other containers of ordinary life. Prejudiced, dull, trivial, devious, despairing, crass, deceitful, blunt, arrogant, malicious, downright stupid, could all describe life in India. I hope they also describe the book.
| A tabloid with a difference, Whitewash is a disturbingly indiscreet piece of writing that rips apart conventional Indian notions of politics, equality, caste, gender, ownership, personal rights, heritage, love of country - all in a way that at once distresses and invigorates, while laying bare the hypocrisy of our ordinary lives. Using personal references, random thoughts, and historical data in a newspaper format littered with misinformation, false advertising, fake tenders and public notices, pretend classifieds and matrimonials - the author presents a happily distorted picture of India. Thieving forest officials, charred housewives, incompetent ministers, conniving bureaucrats, adulterating food suppliers, moneygrubbing builders, established extortionists, are all mixed and matched in the hyper reality of Indian events, places, people and ideas. Whitewash presents them in grotesquely extravagant form - ordinary people driven by greed, depravity and barbarism in pursuit of their ordinary lives - a portrait deliberately distorted to reveal the underlying falsehoods of Indian daily life. |
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Pages that reference Whitewash! An Unkind View of India and its Makers…
> Introduction to Whitewash!
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