Picture a Book

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested.” – Francis Bacon

And some are to be pictured!

While getting immersed in reading a book, we often go beyond the words, into the life of the author, book’s real purpose. Why and how the book was written and even how it might have impacted some people and relationships.
Many times, people read the book in a way that is different from how the author of the book has planned it. We photo the connections in our minds, the dialogues and even imagine scene by scene; sometimes even want to draw different conclusions. In fact, the reader writes her own story too.

The book I was reading is ‘First City Interviews’. ‘FIRST CITY‘ was an independent arts and culture city magazine, started in Delhi during the 1990s & ran for over 19 years now, catering to changing thoughts, opinions and social and cultural values. The book contains many interviews that the magazine did over years, with artists from various genres of film, theatre, art, literature and dance.

Somehow in my mind I was seeing something common between these renowned people from different walks of life. I felt Dalai Lama was talking to Phoolan Devi and Mallika Sarabhai was discussing performance and painting with M F Husain. I wanted to picture them, bringing the core of these interviews out, conversations with each other instead of the interviewer. All four of them have used entirely different and unique means to activism, expressionism and lead their worlds. It is interesting to see what the implications would have been in their lives if they had followed each other’s rationale in defining the actions they took in their lives.