“As creative people, I think we get tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. I’m a firm believer in the idea that excellence exists everywhere,’ says Antonio Ciongoli, director of Eidos, whose Spring 2017 menswear collection is inspired by Jaipur in India, and who used all Indian models in his NY collection.
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“What I find remarkable is that miniature painting is so intrinsic to Indian art history but it seems as though Indian artists and Indian art schools have decided to be just colonized by the West and Western art traditions instead,” says Olivia Fraser.
” All the most important Western-born twentieth century art movements: cubism, abstractionism, modernism, post-modernism have been successfully encouraged and developed here but miniature painting has been relegated to the dusty shelf of ‘craft’ – something that is stuck in the aspic of tradition and has no developmental, political or aesthetic possibility of change.”
On the Delhi-Matura road heading out to Agra, as our pristine luxury bus merges into the sea of dusty, meandering trucks, lorries, buses, cars, scooters, cycles and the occasional camel, it is possible to see life being lived in the open.
From the window of this secluded and privileged world, I can see India whizzing by: ramshackle paan bidi shops; one man – one table entrepreneurships selling chole matter for Rs.15; dingy snack shacks bursting with bottled water, chips, and of course Pepsi and Coke.
There are helmet stands with colorful helmets positioned on the sidewalk; a sign ‘Hell or helmet’ which tells of people’s growing awareness of road safety; a mini roadside temple to the God Hanuman festooned with marigold garlands; and of course, people, people and more people everywhere.
If the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was really a hotel in Rajasthan, I think I’d like to spend a few weeks there for there’s just such a kookie charm about the going-to-seed establishment and the young manager Sonny Kapoor, played by Dev Patel with maniac energy and chutzpah, is such an exuberant, happy host.
Indeed ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ gives outsourcing a whole new dimension. What if old age could be outsourced – to India? The film follows a group of British retirees who decide to move to India to get more bang for their buck – and discover a whole new world at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ‘for the elderly and beautiful’. Recently the stars of the film were in New York and weighed in on their experiences in India.