From the death of art to the art of death

 ON MY FLIGHT back from the Big Apple to Tampa Bay, I thought to myself, “So it’s curtains for yet another IAAC event! This one was fabulous beyond imagination, thanks especially to the crowning sessions with Sadhguru and Yakub Mathew, both so ably and brilliantly moderated….”

But let me back up a bit. IAAC stands for the Indo-American Arts Council. The name sounds grand, but it is really a very small New York-based non-profit, started by the Indian community in what is the world’s most exhaustingly rich, competitive, transactional, vibrant, artistic, and now blatantly socialist, city.

IAAC is, indeed, small but its impact has a multiplier effect. Because it is funded and run by Indian Americans passionate about Indian art, culture, literature, dance, music, and cinema. The best unpaid ambassadors, I am convinced, of India’s soft power.

It was founded in 1998 by the late Gopal Raju (1928-2008), Aroon Shivdasani, and Jonathan Hollander. Raju’s claim to posterity is his startup, now defunct, tabloid, India Abroad, the most successful Indian diaspora newspaper ever. Hollander, the American part of its hyphenated identity, dancer and choreographer, was the director of the Battery Dance Studio. Shivdasani, herself a performer, publicist, and socialite, knew everyone there was to know, from Salman Rushdie to Mira Nair.

IAAC organised several memorable events since its inception in 1998, including film festivals, dance and musical recitals, and book launches by the famous. Then it went into a sort of hibernation till it was revived by a new team led by Dr Nirmal Mattoo, a noted and highly successful nephrologist and dialysis tycoon. Mattoo has also endowed the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University.

I was introduced to IAAC by Rakesh Kaul, an IIT-Delhi gold medallist and MBA from the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. Kaul, a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, in addition to being an art, culture, and literature aficionado, is also the author of two striking novels, The Last Queen of Kashmir(2016) and Dawn: The Warrior Princess of Kashmir(2019).

I’ve been attending the festival since 2023, first as a poet-author, then occasional adviser, reader of submissions, session moderator, but now as a supporter. This year’s festival, on November 15 and 16, was at International House on Riverside Drive, close to Columbia University. Despite the freezing temperatures and biting winds outside, the venue was warm and cosy, swirling with ideas, stories, and an infectious vitality driven by a profound sense of purpose.

Over two days, the audience was treated to Megha Majumdar’s blistering political novel A Guardian and a Thief, Padma Venkatraman’s moving poetic composition, Safe Harbor, and Amish Tripathi’s new blockbuster, The Chola Tigers. Cut to Vasant Dhar’s probing interrogation of AI in Thinking with Machines and Devdutt Pattnaik’s contentment-promoting Escape the Bakasura Trap after sessions on food, fun, and frolic.

The rich tapestry of poetry was curated by Ravi Shankar, featuring voices like Amit Majmudar, Sunayana Kachroo, Usha Akella, Srinivas Mandavilli, and Yuyutsu Sharma. Priya Doraswamy and Reena Singh explored how Indian tales turn into reels on OTT and the big screen.

But the closing session transformed the literary showcase into a spiritual pilgrimage. Sadhguru’s deeply intimate conversation on ‘Death: A Yogi’s Guide to Living, Dying, and Beyond’, masterfully moderated by Chandrika Tandon, turned what might have been just another literary festival into a site of existential reckoning.

What happened is impossible to encapsulate, but I’ll try. We the living should also understand, without fear or anxiety, that we are also we the dying. So, if we live life fully, we will also die well. The only thing to do is to live consciously. Then we will also die consciously.

Of himself he said, to the shock of his flock, that he was ready to go tomorrow!

Thankfully, to carry on in Sadhguru’s own manner, not today. For only today matters. Not yesterday or tomorrow, which are imaginings of the mind. If we can create just a little space between our consciousness on the one hand and our bodies and minds on the other, we would be able to end suffering and anxiety.

The moderator, Chandrika Tandon, an extraordinary business leader and creative artist, even has a Grammy to her credit. She and her husband, investor and hedge fund founder Ranjan Tandon, donated $100 million to New York University to turn a polytechnic into a full-fledged engineering school, which is now named the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Far from being a pushover, Chandrika actually pushed back from time to time, making the interaction vibrant and revealing. She told me later, “He is a guru to millions, so I wanted to respect that.” Else, I am sure she’d have pushed back even harder. For the biographically curious, Chandrika is the older sister of Indra Nooyi, the former Pepsi CEO.

Afterwards, Yakub Mathew, a man with a charmed life if ever there was one, launched his Kumbh Mela extravaganza with a scintillating inter-faith panel moderated or, should I say immoderate, by Suhel Seth. Yakub told me that the book, based on his trip to the largest fair on earth earlier this year with a score or so select friends, will now be showcased all over the world, from Britain’s parliament, to the Vatican, to India’s Rashtrapati Bhavan.

That is why this was a lit fest to remember. To borrow the title of the final session, it was really seeking the infinite. Through art. Even at the very door of death. A door which is never too far from where we stand at this moment.

To finish my own in-flight rumination, I thought to myself: Such an extraordinary conjuncture could not have been pulled off without the enormous tapasya and talent of the entire IAAC team.

I recalled how the festival director, the charming and elegant PreethiUrsplus the whole team of high achievers, Anil Bansal, Suman Gollamudi, Matthew Veedon, Keith Tauro, to name some, were all on their feet, from dawn to dusk, often along with their spouses, to ensure that everything went well. They truly lived up to their mission of bringing the very soul and spirit of India to the US