These images have been constructed as flip cards and appear one after the other. The final image that appears on the screen is a hundred rupee note with the image of Gandhi.

The projection on the right side has images of Mao Zedong. This too displays selected archival images of important moments in Mao’s life. There is an attempt to trace similar kind of images from the life of both leaders. For example, the long march of Mao is shown parallel to the salt march of Gandhi. The final image on the right side of the projection has a hundred Yuan Chinese currency with the image of Mao.

It is an attempt to understand the psyche of two nations through their historical narratives. These two personalities have contributed their best to create the modern India and modern China. In terms of historical time, personal values, political philosophy and the impact on the people of their country M.K. Gandhi and Mao Zedong stand in two different poles. These historical icons, when placed next to each other certainly create a serious discourse on the project of nation building and its impact on contemporary psyche.

Notions of politics, identity, nationalism, industrialization, modernism, lifestyle, crime, madness, spirituality and anything and everything that human being has been proud to assert as his/her own are constantly produced and consumed by the city.

Indulging in the core of the urban life made the urbanite think himself/herself as a romantic outsider of the system they deeply inhaled. They wanted to get out of the clutches of the system. Many who went to the wilderness of the nature never returned. Many ran away from all that they belonged but failed to conform with the ‘outside’ came back with much more intensity and conviction that the urbanism is the spiritual existence of the modern man.

Amusement park is a logical extension of an urban romanticism. Here in this park they crawled, flew, fell and screamed with a momentary transcendence of the self. A self never returned to its original self ever.

Gigi Scaria
Delhi 2009

Ideologies and resistance systems which were actively propagated by the different power structures lost its grip due to the advent of a new humanity. At the same time, it also left us with a lot of doubt to reconstruct a new ‘moral code’ and a big question of its survival in the immediate future.

‘Political Realism’ brings this confusion to every single home and recollects the memory of the past to analyze the impermanence of all great power structures of the present as well as many more yet to come.

It is an animation constructed from photographic stills and the old Delhi shot from the minaret of Jama Masjid (one of the Asia's largest mosque built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan). The western classical music is used in the video in-order to show the role of a 'conductor'. The conductor takes the stand as an outsider and controls the event from a higher pedestal. In the same manner the forces of globalization conduct the waves of change into the urban arenas of India, which churns the existing local system into jeopardy. Most of the area you see in the video was once part of the target for the cleaning drive.

My latest work ‘Raise your hands those who have touched him’ attempts to trace the importance, both nationally and globally, of a political murder witnessed by the city of Delhi. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a fanatic on 30th January 1948. The act shocked the whole world. George Bernard Shaw, the British writer, commented “It shows how dangerous it is to be too Good.”

Gandhi was killed exactly fifty-nine years ago, which reminds us that those who have met him or had any direct interaction with him are very few in numbers. In another ten years’ time no one will be left alive in the world who might have met Gandhi. This notion underlines Albert Einstein’s comment on Gandhi: “Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever, in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth.”

This video work is an attempt to trace people those who have met or seen Gandhi in their life time. I would like to submit this project as a testimony, a material evidence of a contemporary world taken over by ‘historical amnesia’.

woman from their elevated apartment blocks can be understood as a symbolic gesture of a state-run development program and its execution in the grass root level. These assumptions are made by the authority and the guessing game is on. But the lack of infrastructure and the ability to understand the social psyche brings this ‘guessing game’ to an abrupt end. The nation building project has become a trial and error construction site where the never-ending process of construction and demolition has been accepted and understood as a ‘normal’ aspect of survival.