S.H. Raza: The man who saw the universe in a bindu

A few years ago, aged 89, S.H. Raza was game to talk to children almost like one, maybe just a couple of years older. Then, at the Jaipur Literature Festival he allowed the youngsters, who had surrounded him, a little peek into his life. Back in India after spending 60 years in France, his life seemed to have come a full circle. Not ready to confer retrospective dignity to his early years, Raza candidly admitted: “I was not fond of school. I was a bad student scoring low marks. Arithmetic did not interest me. My interest lay in drawing and painting. Fortunately, I found the right gurus. It is imperative parents as well as teachers understand a child’s qualities.” Raza himself was lucky. A restless soul that he was, his primary schoolteacher once asked him to continuously look at a dot on the wall inside the classroom to calm his mind. It was a little exercise that was to change the meaning of life for Raza, who turned the simple bindu into a work of art before raising it to the status of life itself.

23 July 2016