Kindness / Udarta
it's had a long history
and it's both
wanting to capture the experience of people who have been part of a cultural
exchange between India and Australia over twenty years.
Twenty years because that's how long the Australia- India council has been
operating.
And it seemed to me that if we were going to tell the story and map history
we would do it through cultural exchange and we'd
capture all the writers, visual artists
and musicians.
What resonates with people are those moments were they are touched in some
personal way
and so we proposed kindness and we searched and searched for an equivalent
in hindi
we finally chose Udarta.
and it's the idea of of true kindness having unpredictable consequences.
you just do something for another person through
a sense of
just human connectedness
and all sorts of extardinary things could rise from that. Though I was
dubious in the beginning about this subject people tend
to come up with cliches about kindness
but i've discovered that that people here
who were also in
Delhi
they're completely
unaware of it but they're genuinely kind
and that is the best kind of kindness.
It's lovely to be with people who
think of others.
Kindness has many meanings and I know the organisers of the exhibition have been
dealing with trying to refine what they mean by kindness
the obvious superficial thing is a kindness of India that people smile
at you. That they're incredibly hospitable and that is fantastic but
from me
the most important kindness that I personally encountered in India was the kindness
of indifference
and it contrasts so strongly
with where we're coming from
in the west. We are taught really to judge
everything with our minds
and it really cameÉ umÉ So I woke up one morning got my togs on i went down to the river and uh...
this is a religious ritual in
uh... the people there are not just there for a bath. They're there to sort of like
commune with their maker really.
and uh... i walk down the grates down onto the steps and the people saw me
coming
they turned and uh... they saw that it was me and I got that smile
that you always get when you are in India
huge beaming
warm, welcoming smile
and they parted
and I stepped down
then within ten seconds of me arriving there was no more looking at me I was no longer
the centre of attention
they got on with what they were doing and I got on with what
I was doing.
That's just classic
quinestential
Indian indifference of the most wonderful possible kind.
One of the work that really
sticks in my mind
is in the work of Soda Jerk. Now they are two sisters, they are Sydney based.
They were in the leopold cafe which is right next to
the Taj Hotel in Mumbai
and it was sprayed with bullets and they managed to escape
and an Indian couple saw them
and rescued them literally. Took them away from the scene and cared for them for two or three
days when it was really chaos in Mumbai.
And they thought that
on reflection thisÉ they want this story they wanted told
so they invited the couple to
identify what they would want to put in the exhibition and their choice was
a picture of their family
so this is lovely image
of the two...
the Indian couple and their two boys
it's justÉ it's very touchingÉ It just
captured absolutely
the sort of...
those intense person-to-person exchanges that will resonate for all time.
The cultural exchange
uh... which had never occurred to me because when you do things you're not thinking of a cultural
exchange, thank god.
uh... but it lead to many other things
the debt to authors is incredible I mean where would I be
or anyone of us without Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky right
so uh...
that is a cultural treasure trove
which has
you cannot ever put a price on it.
definitely culture exchanges for artists are greatly
beneficial. What did i gain from my culture exchange of India? Look it changed
fundamentally as a writer. I remember meeting a police official in a small
town in northern uttar prudish once and I was asking him a lot of
political questions I was harassing him in a sense. I was very adversarial
and uh... he said to me listen
I'll answer every question you've got but let me give you one piece of advice, if you want to understand
this country
your head will only take you so far
uh... the real key tool that you need to understand this place and how it works and how the
people think how they feel is
with your heart
and uh... It never left me what he said and ever since, I think it's always had a big influence on me.
Yes, it's an emotional
and uh...
you can understand a lot of things about the way things happen if you understand that.
The longevity and depth and
profundity of the relationships and understandings that follows through
significant culture exchange
if you want to understand another culture the best thing you can do
is actually engage with their arts
I mean if youÉ
if you listen deeply to people's music
if with the deepest respect and knowledge take it apart
reconfigure it and rework with it within your own idium
you have such insight
and it's that kind of quality
that we believed
would hold our nations in
deep rapport no matter what kind of
difficulties
or vicissitudes this horrible global
environment might throw up
and it seems to me that as we
shift away from allowing
as nations become more conscious of the importance of
of trade in tying together in terms of
of other
driving forces
there's a tendency to left the support for culture
drift away
when in fact it's been culture that sustain everything.
so uh... what can be done culturally if culture took over?
Very likely the Taliban would have no place
the christian conservatives
would have no place, I mean I'm talking about fundamentalist,
in our lives.
And we might actually
find out that you get along magnificently.