I had a nice time conducting the walkthrough for the (very elegant) Nemai Ghosh-Satyajit Ray colour-photo exhibition at DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery). I can never assess how well or badly these talks are going when I’m in the middle of one, but a few people told me later that it went well. There was a very large crowd, which was a bit scary at first (the idea of all these people moving around together to view the photos in a compact exhibition space… I was thinking of those videos of enormous clusters of birds performing synchronised flight), but everyone was attentive and there were some warm interactions. A few photos are here, and below.
Having previously seen these Nemai-Ray photos only on a PDF on my laptop, I was very impressed both by their innate quality and by the careful restoration and display. As I said during the walkthrough, it was particularly moving to see the photos of a frailer Ray in his final years, after the heart attacks, including one of him dutifully walking up and down his verandah because the doctor had told him to (and looking like he would much rather be sitting in his favourite chair, writing, drawing, composing, intently chalking out the next film). A reminder that everyone slows down, and even the greatest multi-tasking achievers eventually do only a fraction of everything that they wanted to do. Got a chance to speak about his work after a long time, and to revisit some books about him.
The exhibition is on till July 4 – if you’re in Delhi anytime in the next month and a half, please do go for it when you can.
P.S. here is the essay I did for DAG's earlier Nemai Ghosh book, for an exhibition of mostly black-and-white photos.
P.P.S. a personal highlight after the event: an elderly lady brought along her copy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book, asked me to sign it, *and* hesitantly pointed out a mistake after specifying the page number: I had referred to the actress playing Saeed Jaffrey’s wife in Kisi se na Kehna as Usha Kiran, when it was actually Lalita Kumari. This was quite a blooper, considering that I was something of an Usha Kiran fan, including back when she was much younger, playing opposite Dilip Kumar in Musafir.
It was a bit embarrassing, obviously (though this woman was being very apologetic about even mentioning the error to me) but it made me happy for another reason: this, and a couple of other observations she made, indicated that she had read the book closely and carefully. Which is something that doesn’t often happen. Too many readers are skimmers and dabblers.
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