The Long and Short of It

1. To thine own self be true

A few months after I had left college in Madras and moved to Delhi to take up a job as a journalist, a summit meeting was held at my uncle’s house, where I was staying at the time. My parents, who had perhaps hoped that I would tire of my wayward ways quickly and move back to the promise of my academic youth, had decided it was time for an intervention. I was soon fighting what felt like a losing battle, as the meagre income and gloomy prospects resulting from my decision to leave an engineering career were lined up before me, and heavy bombardment ensued.

Luckily for me, joining us for the happy occasion was my brother Orijit. As a youngest child (Orijit is two years older than I am, our eldest brother Abhijit seven years senior to him), I had been used to being told what was what, and not being able to do much about it. So I wasn’t quite prepared for having him on my side in this fight. But he waded in and made a simple position clear – that it was my life, I would take responsibility for it, and it didn’t matter what anyone else felt about it. My parents were decent people, and the simplicity of Orijit’s arguments – even in his mid-20s, he was an excellent polemicist who cut through the clutter of the conversation – soon swayed them. My career as a journalist and writer was safeguarded.

Of course, that particular statement – that I needed to take the responsibility for my own actions – was meant to cut both ways. If something went wrong, I couldn’t go blaming it on anyone else. It’s one of many lessons – explicit in this case, subtextual in many others – that I have learnt from being around Orijit my entire life.

In preparation for this article, I had a free-ranging conversation with him at his house in Corjuem, near Aldona.

During the course of the chat, he says, “I always live by my values…” He pauses in contemplation, then adds, “…at least I try. It would be foolish, or even arrogant, to say that I am so much in control of circumstances that I will only ever act according to my beliefs. So I try and live by the values I profess, but there are times it doesn’t work out. But that is not an abdication of the values, just the side effects of life and serendipity.”

He continues, “I’m often quite surprised by how easily people can – if a situation arises – take a path of convenience rather than stick with their own professed values.”

He talks of a designer – also like Orijit from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad – who professed an interest in progressive politics. “He started a lecture series and would get people from the Left to speak. He asked me, and through me several others whom I was connected with, such as Harsh Mander, to be a part of it. But for him, it was just a brand-building exercise.”

When Orijit released ‘Gang of 20’ at the Indie Comix Fest earlier in October 2022, this friend was also there. “He stopped by our table, picked up the comic and looked at it, then gave a little embarrassed laugh and said, ‘You know, I’m doing the branding and other design work for the G20’. This wasn’t a big surprise for me, because as his firm got bigger, I had seen that he had been going down that route anyway. But that particular moment served to remind both of us of the difference between pretending to be something and actually being that. We were literally on opposite sides of the table.”

This interaction exemplifies Orijit’s position that “you are defined by the choices you make –how much you claim that ‘these are my values’ and how much you live by them, or how much you are willing to sacrifice for being honest to yourself.”

2. Hew your own path

Orijit eschewed ‘corporate work’ from the very beginning. True, that’s not much of a sacrifice (he laughs when I say so), but it does mean having to swim against the current a lot, which can be tiring. That’s again something I felt able to do in my own life because of his example.

From when he was very young – just a kid, really – his outstanding talent for art was obvious. The walls of our very spacious school assembly hall at the Hyderabad Public School, Ramanthapur, were lined with artworks from past students. By the time I graduated (and from all reports, till much later), more than half the paintings were Orijit’s.

When he finished Class XI, he wrote to NID with samples of his work. The rules of the time required applicants to have finished secondary school (that is, Class XII), but they made a special case based on what they saw to allow him to join the admissions process. In the end they enrolled him despite the lack of the school-leaving certificate.

Later, he would drift off from his final year at NID to start working on a couple of exhibition projects that showed at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He never went back to finish his course in Visual Communications. As a result, he has neither school certificate nor college diploma or degree.

Many years later, when the Goa University made him a Visiting Professor occupying the Mario Miranda Chair in Art in 2013, he would joke, “They should call me Professor Dropout.”

In 1990, along with wife and fellow NIDian Gurpreet Sidhu, Orijit started People Tree, a shop-studio-collective that constituted a truly unprecedented model of doing business. For an entire generation, it was not so much a shop as a hangout before hangouts became a thing, a haven where all forms of belief (barring bigotry itself) were accepted, and a vibrant venue for self-expression. Though it has spawned many other experimental initiatives in the crafts-culture arena, there’s never been anything quite like it. When it closed in 2020 – like so many other small businesses – after months of battling the pandemic-induced crunch, lamentations were widespread.

3. Everything you do is political

People Tree was the most prominent manifestation of Orijit (and Gurpreet)’s willingness and ability to mould their own way of doing things. And it came out of the same basic value system that Orijit referred to. You spend any amount of time talking to Orijit, and what you will be struck by is how questioning he is. It’s a way of learning for him, but it’s also a way of imparting learning. When you question even the very fundamentals of your world view, the answers you come up with can dramatically change how you see things.

That in itself is a political way of thinking. The method may be Socratic, but it has been at the root of all philosophy, and of the development of all political thought. Karl Marx called for “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be”, and that is very much what Orijit does.

Most of the artwork of ‘Imposters’, an exhibition of his that showed at Gallery SKE in Bangalore in 2014, had as their theme the rising fascism in India and its sleeping partner, corporate oligarchies. One of my personal favourites from that set is ‘Sentimental Nation’, a poster that unabashedly confronts the notion of ‘hurt sentiments’ which has become a launching pad for all kinds of atrocities.

But it is for his ‘everyday art’ – visual statements he makes on social media – that Orijit is best known to both his followers and those of his usual target, India’s right wing. While the former extol the quality of his thought and the cleverness of his messaging, the latter writhes in impotent rage and responds with shitposting and threats of violence. The brutally efficient manner in which he puts down online trolls is another terrific learning, but not one I have been able to master.

In today’s charged atmosphere, where sedition laws and UAPA are facilely wielded as weapons trained on people who speak out against the ruling dispensation, there is more to fear than the BJP’s IT Cell. As family, we are always a little on edge when Orijit shoots off an anti-fascist arrow, especially one aimed at Narendra Modi. After one such post several years ago, a friend commented, “Okay, I’m going to start designing ‘Free Orijit Sen’ posters!”

It’s not come to that (yet), but strange incidents have been portentous of what could happen. The oddest perhaps was that of a man who attached himself to Orijit on the sidelines of the Kochi Biennale in 2017, where Orijit showed three of his works under the combined head of ‘Going Playces’. After following Orijit back to Delhi, he stated that he was part of the Intelligence Bureau (IB). Of course, the question that went through people’s minds was whether he would make such a revelation if he indeed was an IB guy. But late one Friday evening, he called to say that a raid was being planned with the aim of arresting Orijit, and that he should immediately go to a friend’s house and stay there the weekend. Given the circles in which Orijit and Gurpreet operate, there were friends in the legal fraternity they could consult, who told them that it was indeed a common strategy of the cops to make arrests late on Friday evenings, since attorneys couldn’t get anything done in the justice system till Monday, and the police would have the entire weekend to ‘work on’ their prisoners. The ‘what-ifs’ of the extraordinary circumstances compelled Orijit to take the evasive action suggested by the ‘IB man’, and he spent the weekend holed up at some friend’s. No raid happened, and soon after, the guy faded out of their lives, his true antecedents and motives left unresolved.

4. The line between life and work doesn’t exist

As demonstrated in the encounter with the IB man, the political nature of Orijit’s work has tended to obliterate the boundaries between personal and professional. Another example of this overlap – with less intense repercussions – was in the work he did with a Palestinian group in 2015-16. The Freedom Theatre, Jenin, toured India along with the Jana Natya Manch in December 2015-January 2016. Orijit was asked to design material for the tour.

“Having accepted the assignment, I began to immerse myself in stories of the Palestinian movement,” he wrote in an article soon after, “and understood afresh how this tour is so precious – because it goes beyond governments and their changing priorities. It is, in fact, a first of its kind – in its attempt to initiate people-to-people contact on a significant scale, to establish friendships at a real human level, to speak the language of art not diplomacy, to exchange creative ideas, and to learn from and celebrate each other’s struggles.”

As he does with all his projects, he delved deep into the history of the struggles of the Palestinians. What he eventually designed – visual material centred around the iconic black-and-white keffiyeh worn by many Palestinians – struck a strong chord with the visitors. In return, he was invited to Palestine, and worked with artists and activists there. During his stay, he joined a group of Palestinian villagers as they marched on an Israeli army camp that had been put up to block their traditional access to a local water body. He was teargassed along with the rest of the marchers, but “before we set out, the organisers, many of them women, had told us how to use our head coverings to dilute the effects of the gas”.

The bravery of the villagers – there were even children younger than his then-22-year-old daughter Pakhi active in the protests – was inspirational. In 2020, Orijit and Pakhi came up with a story based on that experience for the Hamzanama Comic Contest run out of the USA. The story won First Prize.

This sort of intense involvement has been characteristic of all the work that he does. ‘River of Stories’ – often cited as India’s first graphic novel – came out of his active participation in the Narmada Bachao Andolan in the early 1990s. He spent months with the locals and the activists on the ground, living their lives and understanding their concerns. In one indication of the closeness of the bonds formed during that time, when he recently announced the reprint – almost 30 years after the original edition – of the book, several of the people who responded with joy on social media were those who had been active in the movement decades ago.

His biggest projects have required even more deep dives. Between 2008 and 2011, he immersed himself in the life and culture of Punjab, including the tenets of Sikhism (his wife Gurpreet is Sikh), while designing the massive 20-metre x 70-metre mural ‘Punjabiyat’ at the Virasat-e-Khalsa Museum in Anantpur Sahib. The notion of a giant interactive puzzle depicting the streets around the Charminar in Hyderabad no doubt caught his fancy because that’s where he grew up and went to school. And, of course, in more recent years, he has created a detailed visual representation – preserved online and shown at the Serendipity Arts Festival in 2017 – of one of his favourite spaces in Goa, the Mapusa Market.

This in-depth participation in very large-scale projects means he is always steeped in his work. I remember asking him once to come and watch a movie with us; his response was a genuinely mystified, “How do you find the time to do such things?”

While I do ‘make’ the time to do all sorts of things that are not work, my calendar is also usually blocked full of tasks of different kinds for months on end. One regret I have in this respect is that the personal projects that have been in my mind for a long time are the ones that tend to not get done. There are many book and comic ideas I need to get around to doing, but those I know are going to take large chunks of time, and there are always smaller, quicker bits of work getting in the way.

I ask Orijit if that is not something that bothers him – given how busy he always is, aren’t there ideas in his head for comics or other art he wishes he had the time to execute. “I don’t really feel that divide, especially at this stage of my career,” he says. “Those who come to me do so because they want a part of me in something, so they are not really giving me a brief or anything. They come to me saying ‘This is the kind of thing you would like doing’. Like the G20 comic, say – it’s entirely my thing; it’s just the impetus that comes from somewhere. Left to myself, I might have told a similar story. As an artist, I see myself as part of a network of people and thoughts and ideas that are circulating. I find telling stories of things that are going on around me very stimulating.”

5. The work only stops when it’s perfect

‘This stage in his career’ is that of a well-recognised master at work. People are always coming to him with interesting projects, and he has his hands more than full. “I do way too many things,” he says, “but I feel that everything I do plays into everything else, that each thing I do enriches the others.”

Comixense is one such thing. Orijit was approached by Sanjiv Kumar of the Takshila Educational Society and the Ektara Trust – institutions in the education and culture space – to bring out a comics magazine for high school kids. “A comics magazine has been my dream forever. Sanjiv gave me carte blanche regarding what I do with the magazine.”

Kumar is unusual among people who have money in that he has no hesitation in putting it into progressive political projects, no questions asked. Comixense has, as a result, been able to explore all sorts of knotty issues – from corporate exploitation of tribals in Jharkhand to cross-border pigeon espionage in Kashmir – alongside stories of everyday interest.

Comixense is where Orijit and I work together, two parts of a teeny three-person editorial team. We have done one-off projects together in the past – the original 1994 edition of ‘River of Stories’, for example, was produced through Media Workshop, a communications agency where I used to work – but this is the first time we have had a sustained professional relationship. It’s been a blast – we are similar in many ways, particularly in our thinking, but we also have complementary skills and attitudes that jibe well together. Orijit is all creativity; I have more of an analytical bent. I am notorious among friends and family for a complicated Excel sheet I use to plan my life and work; Orijit’s system for completing tasks is to forget two-thirds of them moments after they are assigned to him.

In fact, that has always been a bone of contention between us whenever we have worked together. He has no regard for such trivial matters as deadlines and commitments. Being acknowledged as a genius also means that most people are willing to overlook this aspect of his work – in his case they know that der he may be, but durust he will be.

When he is working, he is constantly doing and redoing, and at least on one occasion in the past, that has caused me to lose my cool. This was before he became proficient at computers himself, and I was his tool for executing Photoshop and other digital work. I don’t remember what the job was, but I clearly remember him asking me to tweak this detail, manipulate that bit, nudge this shade just that much, no, the other way perhaps… till I said “Forget it, you go learn to do this yourself!” (He did, and became irritatingly proficient at that as well!)

“Maybe at some level I’m too much of a perfectionist,” he says by way of explanation. “Ultimately, the work that you create will last a long time. But the exigencies of the production of it – the timeframes, the budget, those things – will cease to matter. What will be left is the work. And what doesn’t sit well with me is the idea that because of some issues with timeframes, I have to make compromises which stay with me and with my audience for ever.”

He hems and haws, trying to say what he has to without hurting my feelings.

“In some way, it’s almost as though I can’t help it,” he says finally. “It’s not a willingness or unwillingness; not like it’s a choice. It’s like I’m driven to take the work to that point where I feel it needs to be.”

I’ve learnt much from him, and I completely understand his take on this. But this is one lesson that’s probably not right for me.