1.

Childhood and Upbringing (an excerpt from between the voids/ 2013)

We see a man who appears, but not the man who was expected, a man who is
here by mistake so there is a missing man, but its not that one; but before
disappearing quickly from the diegesis, he says one thing, that words betray
thought, that images and sensations are much more powerful.
- Olivier Assayas

Early displacement
As far as I can remember about my childhood it seems very much fragmented and all
the more cinematic between reality, fantasies, memories and appropriated truths I
dont know how truthful and transparent, I can be with the past that I am trying to
remember! Anyway consider this as some of my readings /observations not as facts
I will try to find out some useful evidences to suggest some direction to the sort of
work I do.
I was born to a family who was at that time under the scheduled cast category
proposed by the Indian government, which never bothered me as such! My father is
an employee in southern railways and we use to live in a different place, displaced
from the other family members who lived some where in the middle of Kerala
(Cochin)
The first thing that comes to my mind is the train and the railways that my father was
working in, we used to travel by train wherever we went! Railways are a modern
means of transport, introduced originally for industrial purposes, but later entering the
daily life of the common man, finally becoming domestic transport. So my father
worked there and we stayed in the railways quarters that they offered and had a decent
education again built up on the western standards.
Like most of the middle classes living and working in the urban setting, we were also
displaced from the culture of our ancestors- I even doubt such a defined culture

existed for us. Because the communist movement in the south actually flushed it out
and most of the low cast people became working class.
I say this because even if we belonged to the Hindu religion we were never strong
followers, from my own experience I can say that my parents actually failed to pass
on any beliefs to me. Perhaps their own spiritual understanding was a big question
mark to them. Most of them were materialistic people may be due to quasi-communist
influence on their life who was dispersed from their culture and land. What happens
to such people? What alternative do they take to fill the voids that modernism has
created in their lives?
Firstly they fill it with technology and then by achieving an elite standard of living.
My father and mother had a radical marriage (inter cast) and which I later understood
was the reason why I didnt have a grandmother from my mothers side (since the
families never come in to terms after that till recently) most of my childhood I had
been shuttling between two kinds of life and one in the village1 and other in a
different kind of social set up and life (some were in the eastern side of Kerala) in a
railway settlement (colony)
As I mentioned earlier I spent most of my childhood in a settlement (a colony) of a
group of people who worked for the Indian railways, so people who surrounded us
were also very diverse and from different places of origin and ethnicity. It was a
random mixture of different traditions and people; we were different without
commonalities (hardly) but lived together there.
My father and mothers marriage had created a lot of troubles in the family set up
from my mothers side who were upper caste. My fathers family was progressive and
leftist politically.

1Colony(n): a country or area under the full or partial political control of another
country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country.

Fairytales and folksongs

My grandmother used to work in the field and my grand father was a government
official. I remember my grand mother vibrantly because of the songs, stories and her
pet cats.
The songs that she used to sing (probably the songs while reaping the fields) the
stories that she used to narrate I vaguely remember two of them mukaranchi (the
nose snatcher) ennthukalan (the lame legged). The second story I mentioned, later I
came across in a book called the flowering tree* but the protagonist of that story
was different and was an handsome young prince, but the story my grand mother told
me had a lame man with his lame horse but with the same plot- rather was filled with
some magical elements like talking animals, mysterious passages which was absent in
the story I read. May be these characteristic and changes can be said as regional
variations or styles, since oral tales are always susceptible to such changes. My grand
father was actually her second husband and I had an elder uncle who was of actually a
different lineage, I dont have any proper knowledge about these things, but these are
some of my impressions that formed and remained.
She was a brave woman and a very loving person. As far as I can remember, she
couldnt straighten her back, because of extensive bending for reaping the paddy
fields, which was her occupation. All the information about her comes from the hear
say of my uncles leaked between talks- all of her sons had a strong respect and
consideration for her.
Again coming back to her songs it was filled with ironies, absurdities even some
radical leftist content. I vaguely remember one of her songs, which mentions
America rocket- moon landing and all these things, all these images flushed
from my mind, which I can recollect now.
But little is known about my grand father except that he was a god-fearing man and
easily fell for any religious crooks. He was a government employee the only educated
person in the locality, that might probably be the reason that he was able to provide a
descent education to four of his sons. As far as I can remember him he was already
well advanced in years and had started behaving like a child, he was like one of us.

The Artist
My father studied Poly- technique and he had an electrical shop named after my
brother. In my native place, my fathers younger brothers also studied poly-technique
and started repairing TV, radios, new electronic gadgets (I believe in India TV/
radios/ stereo music systems and all were getting popularly introduced to the mass
public) there was a huge collection of broken electronic items back home. The other
two brothers studied arts and were active politically in the CPI.
And one of them was an artist him self, who had done his graduation in Fne Arts in
fine arts from a local state university, later became immensely active politically. He
now lives the life of a artist making paintings. Even though I couldnt understand or
consider his paintings to be beautiful enough (at that time) because he had adapted
himself to a nave style, much like child drawings having hardly any naturalistic

qualities rather than a more schematic understanding of things. Most of his painting
were based on the memories of his childhood of the place were he was born, the
mythologies, stories and oral tale that was prevalent at that time which was mixed
with some magical elements of flying celestials, representation of gods, flora and
fauna of the local, he emphasized on the anthropological identity of the people he
represented their black and Dalit identities. His style was childlike and nave. Even
paint was handled and applied in a nave manner

paintings of k. a. devadas
He later becomes my source of knowledge on fine arts, culture and reading. He is a
well-read man with plenty of knowledge at his disposal. I remember his room in my
native place with a shelf filled with books stacked up from top to bottom (all sorts of
books). On which I used to spy in my childhood to look at the marvelous photographs
and pictures that it contained thats when I came across some of the European
modernist painters (Monet, Manet, Picasso, Pre Raphaelites) which later I started to
imitate or make copies of (I was recognized as having some skill at drawing) I used to
go for the Sunday classes to learn painting- tuitions., coaching classes, Sunday
classes, holiday classes were very popular! Most of my friends did some thing- all of
these were developed as options for the working class parents and rightly suited their
working and domestic time management of which mine was one.
Evening discussions
My grant fathers brother is one of the other important person worth mentioning he
was part of a revivalist group (identity politics) of reviving the Dalit cultural identity.
He was a member of the political party, which was based on the caste identity. There
used be discussions in the house in the evening when every one sat together.
So the point I am trying to make here is about the heterogeneous combination of
different views that was prevalent in the home and how these ideas were predominant
in the formation of the social mind set of the people- but all these ideologies were at
one side, was a conscious takeover or adaptation- rather positioning, but as a person I

was not affected by any of these because I was just an inactive observer of all these.
As I never stayed there, but visited during my summer vacations to meet my granny
and other relatives.
Most of my time was spent in a different place away from my place of origin. The
way of life was entirely of different kind even my parents had entirely a different kind
of living standard as their ideal, as things were changing with time, the way of life
and the surroundings were also changing accordingly. They wanted to achieve an elite
standard of living not actually elite but similar to most of the middle class working
population. To improve the standard of living by material possession the equation was
like material was directly proportional to your standard of living again I was out of
it!
Electronics for you
Television- school- playground was my world were I could meet people, even the
school had particular kind of people and the native people were entirely cut off from
the people which were settled in the colonies, technology was one thing that was
predominant in the house at that time. India has completed its share on global market
and liberalization rules of the capital economy were making the leisure goods cheaper
than food or other essential items. All the houses (not only ours was invaded by theselike TV, computers, mobile phones, cars, pagers, video players, cd players, Walkman,
video games, was getting gradually introduced in the domestic set up things were
going through a drastic change. Movies audio cassette, popular culture was coming to
or homes, as in India and any other third world economy the working middle class
was the mass consumer off all these changes.
As far as I can remember, in the matter of months and weeks newer and newer
technology was coming home and was changing the domestic set ups. Change was
some thing inevitable. Every day there was something new to look forward- as films,
music, and new gadgets. Along with that comes new vocabulary, new words entering
these houses holds (mostly technical and industrial terms). My father was having a
strong interest in all these (technology) he was slowly becoming a techie

When I now think about all these resent past, I realize that all these activities were
fused with an understanding of progress (a modernist notion), which started with
industrialization, and now it was coming in more domestic level. I remember learning
the term globalization in social science classes back in my school, which I hardly
understood. All these socio- economic policies were not making a drastic visible
change in the local but rather in a slow process, more like a drug entering the nervous
system
When I look from outside I was silently witnessing three important discourses at
stake. One was on identity politics, the other on social egalitarianism and the third on
material progress. And I believe that these was three predominant forces that acted
not in my own social set up but in most of the people who lived back in my ethnical
place of origin and how they dealt with it or still dealing with is worth observing.