The ten feet tall hand-crafted statue of Ganesha in bamboo, the pride of Ganesh Thottam, a three-acre property in Puducherry, has been partaking and participating in discussions, debates and delineations with nearly four hundred students and creative buffs on aspects of ideas and inspirations in the world of design, art and music—DAM—for short. A two-day festival that started on January 19 and will end with live performances by three independent bands, DAM 2013 debuts in Puducherry, and already has been included among the state’s seven annual festivals.
Despite its size and magnitude and the fact that it attempts to curate an assemblage of thinkers and doers whose core philosophy is to share their concepts and convictions with each other and grow in turn, DAM 2013 is a personal realisation of a dream by Chennai-based Kaustav Sengupta. A product of the prestigious Shantiniketan (where he studied Fine Arts) and with a master’s degree from the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Kolkata, Sengupta is an Associate Professor and Internal Design Consultant at NIFT in Chennai. But across India, and some parts of the world where his ideas have travelled, peers, students, professionals, know and recognise him as a creative soul whose emphasis is on “concepts and ideas precedes the need and importance of skills and their development”.
Sipping a cup of tea, without a spot of milk, back from his two-day weekend trip to Puducherry, where he tied all loose ends for his debut festival, Sengupta tells us a story to illustrate his point on concepts. “Four days ago,” he says, “I conducted a caricature workshop for students at Saarang, an annual fest at the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology)Madras. The organisers were pretty certain that there’d be no takers for this workshop, 300 students walked in. The first question I asked them was, ‘Do you think you can draw?’ More than half said, ‘No,’ and 160 from the group left. So I asked the ones that remained, ‘Can you write A B C D?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ Now, you tell me, who says A B C D is not drawing?’” Needless to say, the students were surprised and for three hours, Sengupta allowed them to create caricatures using A B C D. “The problem you see,” he notes, “is perception.”
In many ways, Sengupta’s personal and professional design course has been dotted with a desire and doggedness to make a difference in perception of ideas, attitudes, and stereotypes. Last January, convinced that students aspiring to become creative thinkers require a “different” style and system of learning, Sengupta launched a page on Facebook that is called the InkLink Collective Unschool. A year later, today, with 26,000 visitors per week and seven core moderators from across the globe—New York, Brazil, London, to name a few—the page is dynamic and buzzing with sessions and content that allows for a free-wheeling sharing, discussion and criticism of ideas and inspirations. “Somehow, the informal but most definitely insightful nature of this platform has allowed students, many shy and introverted, to show their work and listen to what others have to say about it,” he says, “It has also enabled a certain democratisation of ideas.”
And that freedom is the essential trait reflected in the open air ambience at DAM 2013. The event will include a designers’ forum and a Tandavam (an art and music jamming session). “In it,” Sengupta says referring to Tandavam, “Artists will simply listen to music, without watching the musicians and paint.” He is among the painters. His medium is the red lipstick. “It’s a tool of economic suppression,” he says. But wait, that’s another story, altogether!