I am an artist did my masters from S.N.School of fine arts Hyderabad. I am based in Mumbai and practice visual art, the theater, and short filmmaking. My family upbringing also gave me certain other distinctive kinds of exposure which I have been negotiating with within my practice now. I visited Anandwan (ashram in Chandrapur, Maharashtra ) many times, which also gave me a chance to meet *Baba Amte during the last Anandamela. Baba's unique mix of pragmatic action and philosophical aspirations showed me to dream of a better world while creating it. Even the many challenges he faced are worth sharing - for they never stopped him from trying new things, taking risks, and persisting against great adversity. Even at the age of ninety-two, despite his health problems, Baba Amte was dreaming up peace missions to Pakistan. He was not an unreachable ideal or a religious saint but was always identified with common people. His life also includes the untold tales of those that society has often rejected -people with leprosy, Dalits, the disabled and indigenous tribal people.
Baba Amte inspired me to imagine a better world, and see ourselves as part of the solution. This inspiration also helps me to find a common humanity that binds us together, instead of all the things that divide us. To get stimulated from him was very natural. There, I understood that there are more accurate ways of activism.
I like to walk in the crowded places, old cities, markets, roads etc. They hold different faces each with different stories, full of essences of life. As a student of fine arts, there is a definite change in me. There are newer, different ways of looking at the things. Neither exactly like a philosopher nor like a scientist but there are certain inquiries within me.
At this point, as an artist, I am making images that are able to germinate thoughts within a curious observer. I am not taking the position of a radical social worker or an activist at this point. Rather, I am working to generate a minuscule amount of thought, a doubt in the onlooker’s mind, which may or may not be replete with various kinds of prejudiced opinions about society. My work at this point is to locate the people who, like me, are ready to step a little aside and renew their ways of looking and thinking. Painting, or work, cannot be a form of escape from reality, it does not beautify the world, making it acceptable for visual consumption; rather it beautifully reveals the harshness and cruelty of our own existence.