D Vivan Sundaram Sudipto Kaviraj: You mentioned isolation. I think there are some stages in history when some types of isolation are — I don't know how to put it — well-deserved. There are certain points in history when you shouldn't lament, there are ways in which history has been structured where if you have to live according to what you believe in, then that is the way you live. Geeta Kapur: You're not saying that you live it because you have to live it, rather that 39 it has its historical function. SK: Yes, of course. Because your accepting that isolation is also a way, hopefully, of prising it open a little bit, making it less suffocating, and if you can convince other people to live in similar isolation, then the isolation is lessened. Gulam mohammed Sheikh: As an artist I share to a very large extent in what Vivan has formulated about the situation. Our convergences are often almost incidental, they just happen — we tend to put them away, we do not have a deadline, there is for us no consciousness of the kind that is designed for action. We are sitting here today, and this is in itself an important coming together. But for that to help an artist or to m^ke something happen.... What happened with Place for People was a convergence of personal acquaintance of each other, and I think Vivan has less lamented, and rather indicated that there is a possibility of this happening again, and then why don't we work on it? Our respective preoccupations might have shifted since the time we met for that show. But what I feel positive about is that it is not a lapse, that we have not regressed into something which makes us wallow in the personal. The personal in the case of Nalini has opened some, to me, very important dimensions. That is one area, which I would like to endorse. I think it is a grand culture we live and work in, I don't know what design we can have, or how it happens to work out into a new tradition — but I think of the Mexican muralists, and see that it is possible to read the historical forces that brought them together and produced this work. What is important is that we are all conscious of the fact that we are products of that forbidden paradise; this is something which we have to think consciously about. Perhaps, as I think of this assembly as a convergence of not only artists but of many minds, I think that there lies the seed, and when we meet next we might have formulated, not a national programme, but the consequence of collective thought. The idea of Indian and international — this comes back, again and again. That the avant-gardewasquestioned—-and Geeta has written extensively aboutit—anditwas not just its progressiveness of a linear kind. The avant-garde was also a sort of cannibalism, of devouring, reducing and taking over, making art an instrument of power. This is what many of us reacted against, and asked — as I still ask — whether Numbers 20 -21