CLP Network

Another opening! This time it was the Palette Art Gallery that showed the latest installations and mixed media work by Anjum Singh.  The place was heaving.. with family and friends, the art collectors, curators, other gallery owners, some artists – well known names, such as Subodh Gupta, Bharati Kher, Gigi..  and of course, some pre

sence of foreign cultural councils too. The work was certainly far more interesting than anything I had seen so far during my time here, but nonetheless less risqué.  May be symbolized by an installation of four rather large eggs that attracted huge curiosity from the visitors.  Two of them were broken in half.  One of them was lined with rusty sewing pins in hair like manner and the other had tiny pieces of drinking straw stuck on like a honeycomb.  The other two were whole eggs;  one of them strewn with metal nuts and the other had pretty map d

rawn all over it. (Sorry folks, no pics.) I stood in front of them, sipping my wine and munching on the delicious finger kebabs, deciphering the meaning behind the egg with a skin of rusty pins and wondering about the bubble that I was in.. the ‘Delhi Art Bubble’…  

But the evening kicked a high point for me when I met with Aranyani Bhargav, a contemporary dancer who helped to shed some light on the plight of the artists, especially dancers in India and a genuine need for the arts managers to step in to help them with the day to day management of the companies.  Equally interesting was to learn about the role of the gurus (not the spiritual ones) in the artists’ lives and the tightrope they have to walk in order to find a balance between their respect for the established and their ambition to be independent. This is seriously serious. Aranyani established her credibility in her own right as an artist, but also by having a famous guru.  Later she left her guru to establish herself independently and this was the acid test.  We spoke at length about leadership within the Indian cultural sector. Certainly in the dance sector here, there is a need for a dialogue on this. But it's not that simple either. There are semantics around 'leadership' that need to be understood and agreed before. There are many young artists who are carrying out pioneering work purely based on their passion, but there is little to support them either at the top or at the ground level. 

Charged with Aranyani’s passion, I then went to my next event, a dinner hosted by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) to welcome Rajesh Gopie, a South African artist/actor.  I met with both the incoming and the outgoing directors of the British Council, India and Sri Lanka. We were later (much later) joined by a theatre producer who demonstrated the most perfect example of ‘how to make a sales pitch’ (to secure funding for the touring of her play).  There was poise, persistence and passion.  By telling us a story about how she persuaded the American cultural attaché to support the touring of her play in America, she was able to convince us all about why her play deserved to tour in Britain.  I was quite impressed by the way she weaved various stories together from the past and present which gave an idea about the range of people who knew about her work.  She was effortless and undeterred. She was on stage and she was acting like it.

It was time for some self-reflection on my own style in marketing and the approach to securing sponsorships!  Needless to say that I’ve just lifted the lid on that.

On a slightly different but related note,  I never realised that a book on marketing/entrepreneurship could be so interesting that I would finish it on a two hour flight. This was ‘The One Minute Entrepreneur’ by Ken Blanchard, Don Huston and Ethan Willis.