Chaos Karma

I have visited many places in the world known for their dense populations, heavy traffic, and large masses of people moving every day, by foot, car, or public transportation. We all have experience with this, even in our own cities. Despite being involved in these situations, we still have the security and guidance of a flow moving in some sort of organized, "pre-ordained" direction, ultimately following a pattern. This sense of security disappears suddenly in India. Diagonals, broken lines, zigzags, and unexpected suspensions replace straight lines, and sudden turns replace smooth curves. People move along countless individual directions, and along these directions, there are incessant social interactions. Crossing an intersection in India is not taken for granted. India is not the orderly supermarket shelf we are used to. The eye does not stop at any specific place, and where it sees something worth recording, it spots other colliding scenes just beyond, along the perspective planes. Just as this geometric metaphor plays out on the streets, it reflects on every aspect of Indian life, putting on a "theater of chaos" that eludes any attempt to be represented with an iconographic order that could make it intelligible and thus reassuring. Neither modernity nor tradition is strong enough in India to surpass the other. Western consumerism and modernism seem to demand a universality that here becomes only an abstract concept, grafted onto a millennia-old collective memory. The result is a schizophrenic society that seems always on the edge of the abyss but never falls into it. It is a place where human perceptions are amplified in a formidable sensory resonance chamber. An Ikebana in reverse, pursuing disharmony instead of harmony. The result of all this is a blender of contrasts, a nature that is venerated and violated, poverty and wealth, the coexistence of man and animal, public and private, sacred and necessary, shared in a single space, within an impossible yet achieved balance.