Bombay vignettes: celebrating Sarnath

Scenes from a Bombay trip earlier this month. Of course I did my usual walking around south Bombay (always a bracing and therapeutic experience for me) and having great meals with my people in Churchgate, but I also made sure to attend the Royal Opera House event for Sarnath Banerjee’s brilliant, moving, multilayered book Absolute Jafar. Here was a launch that this book really deserved: a warm conversation between Sarnath and Kiran Rao - very old friends - along with an equally resonant series of readings by Imaad Shah, to go with visual presentations that put much of this graphic novel in context. 

I had attended part of Sarnath’s Delhi event a few weeks earlier, and had bought the book there, but got around to reading it only on the flight to Bombay - and was very impressed by its breadth and its emotional depth and candour (the sense of humour and the bizarre juxtapositions and analogies  are of course a given). Reading really good memoirs/part-memoirs is something I have tried to avoid as I struggle with my own book about my formative film-watching experiences - it can be demoralising - but this was worth it. 


At the event, I was in the company of Nirupama Kotru (Our Lady of the Taxes), as well as Amborish Roychoudhury and the filmmakers Amit Masurkar and Aastha Tiku. As you can see from one of the pics below, Imaad’s proud dad Naseeruddin Shah showed up too, and had a quiet chat with Sarnath, plus a book signing.

(Also don’t miss the “Trophy wife” on the drawing behind Sarnath and Nirupama.)

The following day, Sarnath was doing a walkthrough of his art at the Project 88 gallery in Colaba. In one of the pics included here, he is patiently explaining to his admirers that once you’re a middle-aged male, your erotic life basically consists in watching women eat.