Rain-stained walls, cracked windows, creeper-hugging pillars, crumbling steps, rusty gates, desolated and littered gardens, houses that seem to tremble beneath the burden of the past, either engulfed in assorted weeds or standing isolated like a lone warrior struggling to hold back the adversary called time, buildings that seem lonely at the outset but whisper secrets about the long-gone dwellers when you go near... they beckon you to visit them and revisit them on the pages of this digest titled 'between Mysore & Mysooru.'
The coffee table book, with poems on the left and cityscapes on the facing page, is not a book to be read, but one to be enjoyed and contemplated upon.
The verses penned by artist and art curator Shoaib Chadkhan, who has brought out the book, create a world intermixed with innocence and maturity towards life and its happenings. The unedited verses, though seem unrefined at first glance, stays in one's mind long after the page has been turned. Reading between the lines becomes easier with the simple words which carry profound meaning when seen through the eyes of a Mysorean.
The poems say it all; about the feeling of belonging to a place, considering that place as one's own even when it is inhabited by lakhs of other strangers, the onslaught of bland modern housing style -- apartments -- replacing quaint old houses with their own architectural beauty and the blinding of the city's walls with ugly, gaudy posters, the vanishing of emotional value about one's place which have been replaced by material value...
New-age artists like H.K. Vishwanath, Sujan Ghosh, Vishwanath Kondlighatta Hiriyanna, Dhanashree Gadiyar, Kavyashri Shastry, R. Shiva Kumar Rangaiah, M. Chandrakala, B. Brahmanand, Smitha Ningaraj, Yogananda Lakshmaiah, H.S. Vinay, Ambika Shankar, P. Anil Chandran, Shoaib Chadkhan, Manoj Guddekuppa Sripadamurthy, Sharath Kumar, Deborah Stromberg, A.M. Swamy, Mahesh B. Lingaiah, H.G. Kumar Gowrav, Shaitan Singh, H.S. Suresh, Bharath Kumar, Akhilanka, K.J. Pavan, C.S. Vijay Kumar and N. Punith have travelled across the city, searching for the houses which may not have been declared heritage but carry the legacy of the city in them.
The collection is an artistic documentation of a heritage city which, in a quest for development, loses its identity and becomes as mundane as the next city and the next... as seen across the land after advertisements, hoardings, buying and selling gained more space in a city than the basic necessities. When seen through the kaleidoscope of colours and words, the book seems to come to life and begs to be considered in terms of conserving the heritage of this royal city.
Though the efforts of the artists are quite appreciable, the book would have helped old-timers and the young generation who are unfamiliar with the serene beauty of old Mysore, their purpose would have been served better if the paintings carried the titles of the buildings and places alongside to identify them and reminisce on their history. Some browsers, who try to find correlation between the poems and the art on the opposite page, remain disappointed as both do not have any connection whatsoever, apart from a joint mission to protect the heritage of Mysooru.
However, the book is an artistic journey back in time through well-known and hidden landmarks of the city like Ashoka road, Sayyaji Rao road, Doddagadiyaara, Free Mason’s Building opposite Town Hall, Chikkagadiyara (Dufferin Clock tower), Seetavilasa Choultry on Chamaraja Double road, the dilapidated quarters near Nallappa Thana on Dewan’s road, the road that leads to Jaganmohan Palace, bungalow where former President late Prof. S.Radhakrishnan lived...
Hope the artists succeed, considering the poem in the book which is a dialectic on itself:
"isn't it funny
that
anything over a hundred years old
is considered old
it is like a psychological benchmark that got crossed."
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