As I made a deep rani-pink, a red-infused variation on the pink color of queens, and wrote the lyrics on it, I saw myself now, sitting here every day. This song, meaning Wind, Wind, tells the story of a queen who couldn’t stay within the golden walls of her palace and needed to run bare feet into the wind, along with the wind. I had made all the art for my first solo show in Oct 2012 listening to this album.
#Albela sajan aayo re movie#
Hawa Hawa played, from that most special album from the 2011 movie Rockstar. Who was this classical Hindi song speaking of? I re-discovered my old favorite Devanagari letters which I had first fallen in love with when I studied calligraphy in art school in Bombay in the late 1980s. I remembered the video from the 2015 movie Bajirao Mastaniwhere Kashibai runs through the palace carrying a huge flag, thrilled at her beloved’s return home. My charming beloved had come, My heart feels very happy now, it said. Sushant, I found, also means quiet.Īnother blue-green canvas sang, “Albela sajan aayo ri, Mora ati man sukh payo ri”. I had lost touch with my native scripts while I lived my life in the US. I wrote a new word, “Kafirana” written by new poets. I wrote the lyrics in my expressive calligraphic style, carving into the paint as well as applying paint to write in the Devanagari script and the Roman cursive. The shock had rippled through our community. A month earlier the actor from Kedarnath, Sushant Singh Rajput, was believed to have killed himself. So instead, I painted on it an intense deep green-blue. I had been asked to remove some elements related to George Floyd from that project and was given no explanation for it. I pulled out four canvasses I had bought for a commission which I had discontinued. I had not seen the 2018 movie Kedarnath, but the song had moved me greatly. Sushmita Mazumdar painting at Studio PAUSE. It feels blasphemous, Is this love or what is it, the lyrics asked. One day “Kafirana sa hai, Ishq hai ya Kya hai?” stopped me. When I finally felt okay playing music in the dead silent community center, I found the good old Hindi songs, playing on shuffle from my iTunes app, still spoke to me. As I started to explore my work in a new way, I watched what I would allow myself to create. It took a while before I noticed someone was here. Still, there is nobody here!” The wall where anyone could show their art was blank. My work at my studio, Studio PAUSE, a community space for art and stories changed, and I found myself week after week, month after month, thinking, “Nobody is here. The museum where I had volunteered weekly for 20 years was closed. During the pandemic, my home changed as my family members worked, attended school and college from home.