Winter brings to Calcutta an embrace of culture and festivity.  The Book Fair and the Kolkata Literary Meet are now marked on the Calcuttan social calendar.  After the India Art Fair in Delhi and Kochi Bienalle, Calcutta has woken up to the stimulating CIMA Awards Show, a festival of culture that most certainly engages with our thriving intellectual, artistic and cultural community that has arrived on our doorstep.  To quote Rakhi Sarkar, the director of CIMA: “This project is shaping into one of the most definitive art exhibitions showcasing young artists from India.”  A large international symposium has been included this year and will bring together some of the leading curators and heads of arts’ institutions from India and overseas.  It has proved to be a laudable attempt to gather creative minds from varied disciplines across the world to discourse and showcase talent, ideas and philosophies.  Calcutta has been waiting patiently for such an event.

Besides CIMA, the venues chosen were Gem Cinema, 3 Dover Park, Studio 21 and the Academy of Fine Arts.  The necessity for multiple display areas was merely to best showcase the multitude of artworks.  Debashish Bera’s exhibit ‘Round Table’ took up a large part of the central gallery at the Academy of Fine Arts.  Five life-sized nude figures were seated on chairs in gay abandon.  Remorseful; contemplative; locked in sleep, the table itself was about four feet in diameter and the space was well utilized.  Chandan Bhandari’s tall but narrow stack of books in wood and metal ‘Last Thirty Years’ rose like a minaret.  Tiny mice scrambled all over the books.  It was an apt title.  Kaushik Biswas’s ‘Canine Terrorist’ was stark and catapulted the image without any frills.  The dogs fashioned out of fiberglass, fabric and paint had heads that metamorphosed into weapons of lethal destruction.  There was an unforgiving reality about the artwork which was perhaps the most thought-provoking exhibit.  ‘Pressure’, another exhibit charged with layers of gruesome thought was Indrani Barman’s gigantic hot dog on paper napkins. Fiberglass and mixed media used once again to depict a common, edible snack.  But the filling left a lot to the viewer’s imagination as bizarre objects like dolls, cars and perambulators were pulverized into the mustard-hued filling.  Hers is an active, churning imagination.  The observation and humor packed into the trail of packages and luggage depicted by Girish Chandra Behera in his ‘Journey of Life’ were known objects probably belonging to a whole group of happy travelers.  The surprise element was the young journeyman tucked into the trail.  The most enduring exhibit, perhaps, was Pratap Chandra Chakraborty’s ‘Joint Family and the Apartment’ executed in pen and ink on paper with great sensitivity.  A sewing machine perched atop the body of an apartment with open windows spoke volumes.  The monochromatic, detailed drawing was powerful and opened a torrent of rushing thoughts.  Who were these occupants?  Whose were the hands that toiled silently through the gruesome night?

Abundant talent on display made many a viewer go home with a multitude of thoughts chasing images, ideas and imagination.  So many slices of life, so many creations!  A rainbow of other people’s realities arched above us, interesting, entrancing and enchanting in so many ways.

Winter brings to Calcutta an embrace of culture and festivity.  The Book Fair and the Kolkata Literary Meet are now marked on the Calcuttan social calendar.  After the India Art Fair in Delhi and Kochi Bienalle, Calcutta has woken up to the stimulating CIMA Awards Show, a festival of culture that most certainly eng