Life in my mind!

The garden of forking paths: of expenditures and receipts or gulu guggulu guggulu gulu gulu. That's the title of one of Surendran Nair's works. The title is a bit like his artwork "" symbolic, quizzical and intellectually engaging with bits of silly smuggled in through the backdoor.

Try asking him what it means and you may not be any more informed for it. Nair doesn't like having to explain his work. Whether that stems from his desire to nurture a dialogue on several possibilties of reading an image or that he is plain reticent, or both, it's not quite clear.

Born to a middle class family in Onakkoor in Kerala, growing up, Nair convinced himself he had a fair touch of abnormality for being interested in art. He attended the Trivandrum College of Arts and Crafts only to find himself thrown into an ineffectual art programme (being the first batch of fine art students, teachers there were few and curriculum there was none), and the eye of the political storm that was the Emergency.

Says Nair, "The socio-political structure we grew within had a lot of impact on us as students. Also, the literary and parallel cinema movement taking shape then, with pioneers like Adoor Gopalkrishnan, opened us to the different ways in which to articulate concerns".

The intellectualising and questioning didn't stop there. Nair doesn't pussyfoot around the historical and political ironies of his time. "I have a fascination for Utopia, a craving for a better world." Employing a gentle surrealism, and idiosyncratic iconography (the ubiquitous half-man, half-swan "" "a symbol devoid of meaning by itself, but used to provide a context"), personal ideologies underpin all his works.

Nair's penchant for ancient literature and fantasy fiction is mirrored in his vivid vocabulary of images fed, as he says, by "a variety of sources". There are occasionally elements of contemporary pop culture, like the work that addresses the redundancy of the 12th man in cricket, who has to deal with issues of belonging and exclusion everyday.

"Viewers have their own ways of creating meaning, all I do is provide certain clues," he says. And those clues often come in the form of textual intervention (religious or otherwise) and lengthy captions with markers from mythology. The abtruse captions don't always offer immediate explanation: "It does demand a certain cerebral engagement, but they're not always profound, sometimes they're silly. In fact, they mock the bizzarely complicated process of naming," he says. His grasp over his craft allows Nair to achieve playful mockery without frivolity.

Akbar Padamsee's visit interrupts the conversation. Nair takes a break and returns to say, "I was so excited the first time I showed in a Mumbai gallery, in 1987, senior artists like Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta came to see my work."

In a time when artists double up as great marketers, Nair sticks out for his apparent unease for money-talk: "I have never understood money, or how the market functions. I don't even ask who my buyers are... Once my art steps outside the studio, it isn't my domain any more."

With Nair, it's easy to tell when it's time to leave. His inner world is too pre-occupied and explanation is exhausting. Nair is an artist who finds it hard to wear his genius lightly.