STATEMENT OF INTENT:

The intent of my thesis is two fold:

"The name "India" is misleading. It suggests somewhere precise and finite…." [ David Gentleman, "David Gentleman's India", Pg 7]

India is certainly not easy to quantify or describe to someone who has never been there. It seems at first sight,
to be a confusing conglomeration of many different cultures, languages, landscapes, costumes and people.
An hour or two of flight will not only take you into extremes of climate and vegetation but extraordinary different ways of living.
So how does one engage in a cohesive dialogue about a diverse and bewildering country that is India?
In order to convey the Indian Experience, can one identify the essence, the unmistakable flavor and character,
the vivid certainty of being in India? Can this be conveyed through visual imagery and story telling?
This is my first level of inquiry.

As an Immigrant, in the sometimes bewildering but fascinating melting pot of New York, I am as an individual and a designer,
constantly seeking to reaffirm my roots through my work. My goal for thesis would be to use the process of documenting and
repackaging "the Indian experience" as a point of exploration into my own re-constructed cultural identity.
We all at times feel alienated from our surroundings and like many immigrant Indian writers like, Salman Rushdie , Anita Desai, Amit Chadhuri, Rohinton Misitry are fascinated by memory and its role in defining the self. One of the primary concerns of this thesis inquiry
is to explore how one can preserve one's identity without being ossified: "What does it mean to be `Indian' outside India?"

Rushdie's comments on "Midnight's Children" are illustrative of this dichotomy
[Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands", Pg10]

"Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper,
I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original
and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been,
unaffected by the distortions of memory) what I was actually doing was a novel of memory and about memory, so that my India was
just that: "my" India, a version and no more than one version of all of the hundreds of millions of possible versions."

Like Rushdie, I will attempt to investigate the development of a visual language that enters the world of my experience
and memory (in India)-smells, sights, noise, the tangible and the intangible. The level of inquiry will be taken further to explore
the possibility of transcending this intensely personal mode of recollecting to arouse a more universal experience in the mind of the audience.

I am motivated and inspired by the "visual language" that is so inherent in the writing's of Salman Rushdie in the allegorical children's novel,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In the book Rushdie accurately captures a child's (Haroun) astonishment and through him manages
to re-create his Indian childhood not only through verbal images but also by shaping the English language in a way that reverberates
with the nuances of an Indian existence.

The book Haroun and the Sea of Stories is also an interesting study in exploring story telling both as an Indian art form and
as structure for organizing content. The excerpt from the book talks about stories within a story concept and the ability of stories
to interact and to become flexible structures of interweaving information.

"…and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and on different currents, each one a different color,
weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained these were the Streams of Story,
that each colored strand represented and contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been told
and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of Streams of Story was in fact
the biggest library in the universe . And because the stories were held in fluid form,they retained the ability to change,
to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and become yet other stories: so unlike a library of books,
the Oceans of streams of stories was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive..."
[Salman Rushdie, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories", Pg71-72]

The third level of inquiry in the thesis project will be an investigating of a single or possible multiple narrative devices that explore
memory and personal experience and through it recreate the underlying "masala" or essence of a cultural, a country (India) or an individual.
The thesis will, at the same time, question the validity of a narrative structure that attempts to pin down " an experience".

THE CONTEXT

A. Inspiration: An Excerpt from Freedom Song, Amit Chaudhuri:

"He looked down again at the paper box, and gazed at the word "sandesh" printed on its side in neat, stylish Bengali letters…
The letters, curving, undulated, never still, curving into a kinetic life of their own, reminded him of Calcutta, of buying and selling,
of people on the pavements, of office-goers in the mornings, and in the evenings, of children reading books, of arguments and
dissensions in the tea-shops, of an expected richness in myriad rooms, all festivities of color and light. He wanted to return to the city
where all things curved and danced like those letters; it exhausted him to lie in these other still figures.
He longed to come back to life…"

B. The thesis will be a dialogue with:

------Myself, as I explore my cultural Identity.
------My Culture.
------My outside audience-Young (Non-Indian) educated professionals.
------Immigrant Indians.

C. I will look at contemporary South Asian and other Novelists, Photographers, Artists and Film-Makers for inspiration in developing the grammar and structure of "my short stories".
The notable among them are Arundhati Roy (Author, God of Small Things),Satyajit Ray (Oscar winner, Lifetime Achievement Award),
David Gentleman (Illustrator and author, David Gentleman's India), Henri Cartier-Besson (Photographer), Amit Chaudhury ( Author, Freedom Song), R. K Narayan(Malgudi Days, Mira Nair ( Film Maker), Shyam Benegal( Film-Maker), Raj Kamal Jha ( Author, The Blue Bedspread) etc.

D. (Working) Glossary:


Abhinaya -The Language of Gesture
Experience
Identity
Sutradhar (story teller)
Memory
Kahani or Story
Nuance, Detail
Tangible
Intangible
Reconstruct
Dialogue
Fantasy
Realism
Dispora
Imaginative
Context
Narrative
Language
Chaos
Layering
Essence
Discourse
Landscape
Masala- The Spice
Texture
Cacophony
Displacement
Transport
Visualize
Fragment
Zoom
Multiple
Collage
Idiosyncrasy
Dichotomy
Pluralism
Flavor
Intimate
Palpable
Trespass
Contradiction
Ordinary
Spectacle
Quintessence
Compelling
Expression
Gup- gossip/nonsense
Milieu

4. INVOLVEMENT OF OTHER PARTICIPANTS
TBA

5. PRODUCTION HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE
TBA

6. TENTATIVE SCHEDULE