Kolkata, Cinema, Painting, And The Cities That Shaped Me

If I were to locate myself at the creative fulcrum of my life, it would be Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then. A city that did not just give me a future, but compelled me to confront my past.

From there, the map unfolded—Kotwara, Lucknow, Aligarh, Kolkata, Delhi—each, not merely a location, but a layer of self. In their convergence, I began to see the architecture of my own becoming: a poet without verse, a composer without notation.

Before cinema fully claimed me, there was painting, advertising, travel and Air India, where I worked in the Publicity Department. Air India opened the world to me, but I saw that world through the eyes of a painter. That painter in me had already stirred earlier, in 1968, in Kolkata, when I first exhibited my works. Painting was not a skill; it was my entry point into perception itself.

The Kolkata Years

Kolkata did not teach art; it lived it. In that city, I understood a fundamental truth that a city without art is a body without breath, and an artist without dignity is a voice without resonance. Kolkata knew this, and it honoured its artists. I encountered people like Somnath Hore, Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, each carrying a quiet authority. They did not perform culture. They extended it. There was a continuity in them, a civilisational ease I longed to belong to. Language stood as a wall, yes, but art found its own passage.

I came with a legacy of visual sensibility, and Kolkata absorbed me into its bloodstream. It was here that I learned to create, enter cultures, and inhabit them deeply enough for art to emerge organically, not artificially. If Lucknow and Aligarh gave me Urdu, Kolkata gave me its context, its lived cadence.

My first solo exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1968 was not an arrival; it was an initiation. Even today, Kolkata continues to exude art, poetry and celebration.

And then there is Durga Puja, a collective exhale, where the city reveals its joie de vivre with unapologetic intensity. Kolkata gave me something rare: the joy of living. It is a city where monuments breathe through congestion and decay, where the Hooghly carries not just water, but memory, reflecting domes, minarets, colonial facades and faith itself. Once Kolkata enters your system, it stays.

A Rite of Passage in Delhi

From Kolkata, Delhi drew me into another kind of encounter. It was a newer city carrying the burden of an older past: the capital of Hindustan, the epicentre of 1857, the making of the British Raj and, later, the fracture of Partition. In 1970, Delhi was still a wonderland to me.

I lived in a modest flat in Nizamuddin East, A-35. I had almost no income, yet two monumental cars were parked outside like relics of another life: my father’s Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A and a Jaguar Mark 7, which I had picked up in Bombay in 1969. Both found their way into the Statesman Vintage Car Rally, echoes of grandeur in an otherwise uncertain existence.

It was, in truth, a superficial rhythm. I had stepped into advertising in Kolkata and now continued in Delhi, working in ASP (Advertising Sales and Promotion) under Jog Chatterji, surrounded by charm, talent and surface brilliance. Delhi, at the time, was a refuge for painters. A slower, more spacious city, allowing thought to linger. I found myself among names like M. F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta and V. S. Gaitonde, artists who carried entire worlds within them. There was also the towering presence of Ebrahim Alkazi, shaping modern Indian theatre with discipline and vision, and a cultural awakening led by Pupul Jayakar, reviving the dignity of the handmade and the rooted.

The Ashok Hotel stood as a symbol of that era, as did the expanding vision of the India Tourism Development Corporation. And yet, for all its cultural density, Delhi did not ignite me. It surrounded me with art, but did not consume me the way Kolkata had, nor did it speak to me with the intimacy of Aligarh. Delhi was not a destination. It was a passage.

Taking Flight with Air India

The acceleration came with Bombay, and with Air India. I moved, cars and all, into Bombay, where they found their place in the basement of the Air India building, as if waiting for the next chapter to begin. Bombay brought scale into my life, and Air India gave it form.

There, I encountered Bobby Kooka. Sorab Kaikhusroo “Bobby” Kooka was the Commercial Director of Air-India for over 35 years, a man who turned an airline into a theatre of imagination. His Maharajah was not just a mascot; it was a philosophy, playful, irreverent, unmistakably Indian, yet global in its reach. At Air India, the unusual was the norm.

I found myself drawn into scale, into spectacle, into open skies and endless horizons. And then came the Boeing 747. It was almost a myth. I was involved in documenting it all, photographing the interiors and the in-flight experience before the first aircraft even touched Santa Cruz Airport, and then shaping it into film, a cinematic articulation of service, elegance and identity.

In those years, India was Air India, and Air India was India. And yet, amidst the vastness of skies and oceans, another image held me: the black-and-yellow taxis of Bombay, small, restless, almost human. They became my counterpoint, my grounding. From the monumental to the intimate, from aircraft to taxi, from spectacle to story, I was moving, almost unknowingly, from painting to cinema. Even there, I was being pulled inwards, towards Kotwara, towards Lucknow, towards the deeper memory of Awadh. Cinema, though discovered in Bombay, was, in truth, a return to my roots. I kept my painting alive, quietly and persistently, even as the frame began to move.

An Unfinished Chapter in Kashmir

Until 1981, during my formative years at Air India, I found myself shaping spaces as much as images: the Sher-i-Kashmir International Conference Centre and the Centaur Lake View Hotel were structures that attempted to hold landscape, culture and aspiration within their walls. But Kashmir was not just a setting; it was a summons that became "Zooni," a bio-epic on the 16th-century peasant poetess and queen, Habba Khatoon. It could have been Kashmir’s calling card to the world, a cinematic bridge between its past and its possibilities, but beneath the fragile calm, a storm was already gathering.

The film carried two voices, English and Urdu. For Urdu, the soul was shaped by Khayyam, with words by Shahryar, and the timeless voice of Asha Bhosle. For English, a rare confluence, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Mohanlal Aima, an East meeting East before the world had language for it.

It was a cinema at the edge of something larger, where history, politics, and memory were converging before they could be fully understood. Kashmir gave me much and took back much more. I returned carrying both pain and enrichment, as if the valley had carved something into me that would not fade. I came back more ready than ever for Delhi, Lucknow and Kotwara, spaces where memory and meaning could find continuity. Yet I knew I would return to Kashmir. That journey had not ended; it had only paused. What stayed with me was its deep cultural syncretism—living, breathing, almost fragile—a quiet confluence where Shaivism flowed into Sufism, and Sufism echoed back into Shaivism. I also carried the ache of displacement. The Pandits, driven out by a climate of fear, left behind not just homes but an entire civilisational rhythm. Their absence echoed and lingered everywhere.

Meanwhile, reality intruded. The assurances around my work began to dissolve. The state stepped back, leaving uncertainty in its wake. What had begun with promise entered an unending wait for clarity, for support, for better days. And yet, in that waiting, something shifted. I began to see another Delhi, not the city of chaos, but the Delhi of Amir Khusrau, a Delhi of compassion, plurality and quiet resilience. I had glimpsed traces of this spirit in Kashmir. That became the calling. Jahan-e-Khusrau was no longer just a festival. It had to become a message of compassion, of harmony. A message that would travel beyond geography, beyond borders, and speak to what still binds us when everything else falls apart.

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