Anish Kapoor's The Bean at the Art Institute in Chicago mystifies all. In its contoured images of skyline buildings, run children and grandparents in fast pursuit. The drama of morphing sizes and shapes of people imagery adds its own masala to urban America India Abroad August 5, 2011
JOHN GRESS/REUTERS
aving seen it,’ Rudyard
Kipling wrote, ‘I desire
never to see it again. It is
inhabited by savages.’
This writer of Indian lore
and builder of Naulakha,
The day before we memorialize our veter-
ans, the four of us found ourselves at the
intersection of Monroe and Michigan
Avenue.
In the big hours of the morning, it was
dark as the sun had become timid, thun-
derstorms sounded off the rage of the
almighty as lightning streaks slashed the
face of a sky that was about to pour its sor-
row upon pedestrians praying for a sum-
mer day.
We looked across and saw the Art
Institute of Chicago, which never fails to
shelter us — rain or snow, albeit due to the
yearly pass we carry. As we crossed, I
looked for the designated section of
Michigan Avenue marked Swami
Vivekananda Way.
Few notice it or know it, that a cherished
crossroad in the middle of America is
named after the turbaned sage who came to
the city at about the time Kipling ridiculed
it.
The Art Institute has been a desirable
destination for me to shed the toxins that
H‘
build up in the drill that is life’s routine. In
its paintings, shapes that defy gravity,
ancient artifacts and contemporary photo-
graphs one finds a mental spa that is a bet-
ter idyll than the Louvre or the
Smithsonian, for its midwestern simplicity.
CHICAGO MUSINGS
Brightly-lit
words, once
spoken,
glitter back…
Girish Rishi on 24 Hours in Chicago
somber message of contemporary times.
Close to the entrance, going up the stairs
spreads Jitish Kallat’s creation.
Public Notice 3, is Kallat’s depiction of
Vivekananda’s speech — literally, on the
steps that lead up to the exhibits upstairs.
In colors of the increasing levels of home-
land security alerts, the cleavage of each
step spells out his words…
‘I am proud to belong to a nation which
has sheltered the persecuted…sectarianism,
bigotry and its horrible descendant fanati-
cism have long possessed this beautiful
earth… I fervently hope that the bell that
tolled this morning in honor of this conven-
tion may be the death knell of all fanati-
cism…’
Swami Vivekananda gave this speech at
the Art Institute of Chicago on September
restaurant called Veeraswamy. It had
recently received attention from food crit-
ics. A similarly spelled namesake in
London holds some family memories and
we went seeking a correlation.
‘I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted... sectarianism, bigotry and its
horrible descendant fanaticism have long possessed this beautiful earth... I fervently hope that the bell that
tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death knell of all fanaticism,’ said Swami
Vivekananda at the Art Institute, September 11, 1893
11, 1893. On September 11, 2001, in anoth-
er city, lesser men felled long and big struc-
tures to dust.
A step at a time, reading Vivekananda’s
speech on the steps, one attains higher
ground in spirit and in poise. From the top,
the world feels slightly more hopeful as
brightly-lit words once spoken glitter back.
The tour behind us, that evening, we
found ourselves stuck in a cab heading to a
The night struggled to eclipse itself as the
first rays of the morning shot up across the
mist of Lake Michigan.
Girish Rishi is a Chicago-based writer
