JAYA MEHTA

As a dancer, my favorite part of life is Rasa and Rhythm. Odissi dance, in the tradition of my Guru Surendra Nath Jena, is loaded with both these secrets of life.

I learnt 20 years back, that something amazing happens when I step into my dance room to practice Odissi in the morning. For that hour or two, my body, thoughts and soul are all one. Complete integration of so many parts of me: my moving hands, fingers in mudras, tilting head, swaying torso, powerful yet fluid leg stances, my roving mind, my deepest ideas, my inner intuition, my praying self... I feel healed and complete, in a state of bliss, right after dancing in the morning. This practice of dance is what we call 'Abhyaas' in Hindi. Abhyaas is everything to me. It's always in the morning, always completely alone, and a time for deep plunging. After dancing Odissi, I find some powerful ideas and thoughts rise, as if some churning was happening, and I often note down those ideas.

I love this rhythmic ritual of my life that unfolds in the morning. Morning, because that's the time I learnt that the mind's best butter can be churned. My dance Guru told me, “If you want your entire Self to come together powerfully, mornings are the time to create.” It tallies well with me, as I am a morning person, and also love to invoke the sun with a few rounds of Surya Namaskaar. I live in a sun-abundant country, and I think my brain and body are synced to the rising sun. I don't know how I would survive in a Scandinavian country.

In the other parts of the day, I love my 'trigger' rituals. I have to have my post-lunch siesta that works on my mind and body recovery like magic. I like to go for long walks in the mornings as well, before my Odissi abhyaas. Walking is my favourite way to experience nature, and I refuse to give up the privilege of this magnificent opportunity, Covid-19 or not. But my walking is very leisurely, revelling in the sky, trees, birds and flowers, while other human beings seem to be furtively exercising around me. I get my exercise with Odissi, so walking is my nature-connect, my way of walking away from all my life concerns. It works powerfully for my mind, while being very relaxing.

I think I often create these little get-away moments through my rituals. I believe in building in more movement into life in the first half of the day, and less thinking. Yoga, walks, Odissi abhyaas, afternoon naps, and then evenings to night I enjoy learning new things, than watching anything unfold on television. Every few years I have tried to learn new things: classical guitar, the Dutch language. It is lovely to do so, creating music and language in my brain feels almost tactile. These are my little joys, where I enjoy just the process. Every evening I can give the guitar or the language just half an hour of practice, and then take it up the next day. When this becomes a daily rhythm, I feel the music or the language growing like a plant inside me, and it becomes like dance Abhyaas. I often like to say, “Its not abhyaas that has taught me dance, but dance that has taught me abhyaas.”

Reading what I wrote, I just realized that I think all my rituals are simply a balance between movement and going slow, active immersion and repose, till I feel the juice of life, the Rhythms and the 'Rasa' that we so enjoy tasting in dance.

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Find Jaya here: https://www.jayamehta.in/

SHANA SOOD

Your name: Shana Sood

You are:  I️ am a hopelessly nostalgic dreamer who is as passionate about the mundane things in life as ethereal. I seek to capture what I️ feel - the medium could be drawing, painting, photography or writing. I️ did make two human beings, and love to bring them along on my quest. Fortunately, they both share my love for art!

You can be found at:  www.shanasood.com. Here is the thing about my website, it is not up to date but hopefully gives the viewer a representative taste of my work. Additionally, even though it is set up like an online store, I️ am not so keen on selling my art just yet. In my mind my art is still wet clay and I️ need to keep working on it and building it. I️ have opened my world for people to look into, and they are welcome to stop by, have a cup of coffee with me, talk to me about my art, their art, what they envision it may grow into, but I will be perfectly happy keeping my paintings until they have grown….and, I have grown.

Your rituals: Did I say I am hopelessly nostalgic? My most inspirational moments are triggered by visions of me in Delhi (the city where I was born and spent first 25 years of my life, the city that I am reactively over-attached to, after having been separated from it ever since my husband and I decided to move to USA and make a life here). Some cynical friends like to point out that I won’t love the city so much when I have to fight with the neighbors for parking, or deal with pollution, or deal with traffic, predictability of nothing and unpredictability of everything – of course I choose to ignore all these comments and stick to the vision in my head.

Another important trigger is music. Though my playlist has music from all eras of Bollywood (dating back to Mukesh, Mohammad Rafi and Kishore), especially effective in triggering the emotions in me that make me want to be one with art, is Bollywood parallel cinema music from the late 70s and early 80s, think Gulzar + Asha Bhosle + R.D. Burman. A. R. Rehman is another favorite – Bombay movie’s theme… the blank space is my inability to describe what I feel when I hear it.

And of course, it is critical that as an artist who is still learning, I step out of my own narcissistic bubble and study other artists’ work. Two years ago, I went on my Instagram and unfollowed all celebrities and “sacrificed” the pleasure of being able to stay updated on their daily routines and flashy parties. Now I prefer to only follow artists, art galleries and art museums. My daily feed, full of eclectic art, is like inspiration on steroids.

I am a full time working professional and have quite a busy schedule, so I make it point to paint on most evenings. If I am unable to paint, I feel I should at least be surrounded by painting paraphernalia, so I am mentally involved and thinking about what I am going to paint next when I return to my canvas. This is the reason my home office is also my art studio (along with being my bedroom).

My ideal painting environment is me alone in my studio and my favorite music playing in the background. I would love to sip on a hot cup of coffee while I paint but it gives me a stomachache so I stick to adrak-vali chai (ginger tea). I am happy to settle for the next best scenario, painting alongside my husband binge watching Netflix or Amazon Prime. By the way, I have also tried PWI – painting while intoxicated. It’s not a good idea, even though in the moment, you might think you are creating a masterpiece.

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Shana Sood: Photo provided by artist.

KORAL DASGUPTA

Your name: Koral Dasgupta

You are: People watcher and pre-midlife critic

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You can be found at: http://koraldasgupta.com/

Your rituals: One of my unfailing rituals adapted with care during lockdown has been, to sleep till late. There is something poetic about sleep and I am waiting for intellectuals to discover that. I look my charming best during those moments of deep, uninterrupted detachment, till I am woken up lovingly by my husband with the breakfast tray in hand and the ginger tea steaming over it. With great delight we sit together (after I have brushed, in case you are wondering), discussing poetry and philosophy, literature and music, as the buttery aroma of warm toasts and eggs and slices of home-made cakes fill our mouths and senses. We happily watch our son, the little genius, obediently absorbed in the reading list I prepared for him and graduating into the revisions of his subjects thereafter. There’s sunlight and air in abundance, when I dig into the books I intend to read in leisure or open my laptop to write my own books in absolute peace. Few calls coming in from various top magazines tell me that they are delighted to review my books. I switch off the mobile to escape from the unwarranted fanfare! They are so much not my types.

I hit the kitchen and take out the wonderfully coloured vegetables that almost seduce. Oh their freshness, having delivered by online merchants and delightfully stacked up in the refrigerator. They talk to me, as I chop them into pieces, tossing them into the hot pan readied with olive oil. My culinary experiments and the little infusions are to die for. The lunch table is soon ready with a five course meal, waiting for the family to make a Bachchanisque pounce (you will understand this reference if you have watched the brothers in the ‘70’s film Satte Pe Satta).

Post lunch, I visit my lit lab, where things are moving steadily with or without my intervention. Leadership, I am told, is largely about dreaming right and I have taken the advice literally. It worked. I see the dream unfold organically, without much strategizing or number crunching.

Towards the end of the day, I talk to my mother. She blesses me for being perfection personified. I switch on my mobile only to be greeted by a bunch of alluring tags on social media, none of which are out of context, not a single one on how other people are taming their cats. Bliss!

Sigh!

OK since you frown too much, I reluctantly admit that all I have scribbled above is everything that my life is not.

What? You want me to rewrite this? No way! Come on, 2020 authors are meant to have model eyebrows; not my groggy eyes that I line in 1.5 seconds with distractive shades before every virtual meeting. You want me to tell you that my melodious voice sounds like the GPS lady’s when I scream instructions at my son any time he veers beyond the parenting radar of his Indian mum?

Come on, I can’t invite the wrath of the author community with such demystification! Authors don’t shout without reason. They get hurt and cry sometimes, and their pains automatically transform into the next bestseller.

What is this pestering for one last question now? Aah ok, it is my moral duty to take that. When do I write? Honestly, I write whenever I get time, generously interrupted by text messages from the bank reminding me of the nonexistent balance, and the intercom buzzing with information like the 16th floor lady is now selling crunchies at double the cost.

Hey, wait! Check the punctuations. I think I used too many exclamation marks!