Arjun Raj Nirula, of the pioneering eatery family, makes a business of following his interests everywhere but into food.
How much can you pack into 26 years? Quite a lot, if you’re Arjun Raj Nirula. The scion of the Nirula family, that owned Delhi’s iconic eatery until two years ago, is an artist. His first exhibition, “Portals of Perception”, is on until the end of the month at the Rafaael Gallery in New Delhi, where he’s showing his large 3-D multimedia light installations as well as a few 2-D prints.
He’s also a filmmaker, having assisted Bollywood directors like Milan Luthria and Raj Kumar Santoshi on their films Deewar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home (2004) and Family: Ties of Blood (2006), respectively, besides contributing to the script of the much more successful Abhishek Bachchan starrer, Bluffmaster. He’s also got a script ready for a film — one of those new-age multiplex flicks — that he hopes to start working on later this year.
Philosophy is an abiding interest — the whole hog, from Buddhist and Vedantic to phenomenology and postmodern — but business is something Nirula was born into. Nirula is a director in Kloog Offshore Services, a company that offers consultancy and training services, especially to BPOs.
Recently, the company, which hopes to achieve revenues of £10 million by 2009-2010, acquired a British firm, Maia Consulting, which works in the field of consumer management. The food business is, however, an absolute no. “It’s something we grew up with. So I’ve never looked at either F&B or hospitality.”
Nirula says that, while his parents always encouraged his artistic inclinations, it was his school, Vasant Valley, that honed them and gave them direction. Especially dramatics. “But it was at Vanderbilt, where I went subsequently, that I turned to filmmaking. I was doing majors in philosophy, math and economics and I chose filmmaking as an elective,” says Nirula.
That just whetted his appetite, and the 21-year-old went on to do a full-fledged course in film at King’s College, London, which at the time had a tie-up with the prestigious New York Film Academy. Urgency, one of the 16 student films he made there, was premiered in the short films category at Cannes.
More From This Section
And from Cannes to Mumbai was but a small step. “The world of the Mumbai film industry was quite an eye-opener,” Nirula says, adding that in the two years or so that he worked there, he made some very good friends, including young and young-thinking denizens of tinsel town like Rohan Sippy and Sridhar Raghavan (scriptwriter and brother of director Sriram Raghavan), who, Nirula says, shared his own, modern sensibilities.
“In today’s world, art,” feels Nirula, “should function by dissonance.” In other words, pleasing with “beauty” or reproducing faithfully the real world around us should not be its primary function. For an artist, that can be quite a liberating philosophy.
Look at the works Nirula has come up with at his debut show. These are large prints (3’x5’ and 4’x6’) of photographs Nirula has taken, where the subjects — a friend’s wife taking her first steps into her in-laws’ home, James Bartholomew (the royal photographer Nirula went to for lessons sometime last year) on a motorbike, London buses, trays of beads in a local bazaar, and so on — have been digitally altered for colour saturation.
These are then digitally printed on acrylic and then lit from behind using CFL lamps, the whole thing presented in an elaborate frame that’s more than a foot deep. The mango wood frames are quite remarkable — carved by traditional kaarigars in Nirula’s workshop in the elaborate, slightly kitschy designs that you find on old bedsteads and cupboards. “It’s the juxtaposition of the two — the very postmodern, minimalist images and the detailed, very Indian aesthetic of the frames — that I find interesting.”
It’s the same with the set of 2-D prints, where the traditional motif of the mandala has been painted on a very psychedelic background. They are are actually photographs of light. It’s traditional kaarigars again who have painted these very intricate mandalas, but it was Nirula who picked out the iconography for them from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and from the Vedas.
“These [works] have been created to engender a flicker of cultural recognition, thus taking the viewer into an internal discussion that is filled with contradictions that echo in the structure and form of the artwork(s),” Nirula writes. “As you navigate your internal and external journey triggered by my artwork, my only hope is that you do not fall prey to willing an academic lineage onto my work in order to canonise it.” Whew!
So how does Nirula manage to find time for all his many interests? It helps that he has a friend as a business partner and also that most of Kloog Offshore’s clients are in the UK. “It leaves my mornings free to read, paint and do as I like.” Time that he clearly puts to good use.
