KHOJ Residency, India

During my stay in Bombay I had a skype conversation with Julienne Dolphin Wilding, an artist now based in Barcelona, and a human being of rare integrity and good sense. I was telling her about my plans for the Open Studio exhibition at the end of the residency, which involved creating a hellish cacophony out of sampled hooting and beeping, and painting “Inconvenience is Regretted” on the wall in huge letters, a sign that adorns the construction chaos that is Delhi’s roads, and whose passive aggressive quality seems to typify the relationship of Delhi’s citizens with one another.

Julienne suggested that rather than replicating the mess and frustration, perhaps I should consider an antidote to it. At the time, I baulked at the idea, feeling that honest anger was a valid response. Perhaps it was, but I’d been bothered by a feeling that somehow this wasn’t my own work, having no connection to more longstanding concerns. Her comments stewed in my subconscious along with a dense mishmash of ideas about Cosmic Relativity, and a couple of days later I enjoyed a bout of lucidity in which a new plan for the Open Studio was revealed. Perhaps being away from Delhi also allowed me to see the endlessly perpetuated cycle of anger in which I, along with many of its inhabitants, was trapped. I realised that I could feel compassion for the victims of this hideous, dystopian experiment instead, and that working from this position felt much better.

I’m aware that my Buddhist credentials leave a lot to be desired, if I can’t achieve that realisation while immersed in the pain and ignorance, but I’m trying to be more forgiving with myself as well. Curiously, since returning to Delhi, I have been much less aware of being surrounded by anger. Perhaps I am simply becoming indifferent, but it seems more likely that a lot of it was the reflection of anger that I was carrying.

The other set-up in Unnikrishnan's lab was an apparatus for measuring the speed of light, something that has been done countless times before. However, during a couple of evenings spent with Unni, I came to realise it was part of a quite radical program of research (see sidebar for context). He has experimental evidence backed up by theory, showing that the speed of light is only constant within the frame of reference provided by the mass of the entire Universe. This means the movement of an observer does affect the result of measurement, when done in a way that is not self-cancelling.

He is calling this theory Cosmic Relativity, and it will force some major revisions in other areas of physics. The problem is that, a century after Einstein, Special Relativity has acquired the status of a religious belief. To question Einstein is heresy, and a scientist doing so has to tread very carefully indeed.

I find Unni’s ideas exciting and profoundly significant, and in a way that I can respond to as an artist. It’s the rebirth, in another form, of the aether, that elusive 19th century medium of propagation for light. It restores an underlying reality to the Universe and a coherence to our individual experiences. Light, in its plenitude of rational and spiritual meaning, becomes once again part of tangible kinematics, rather than an abstract anomaly.

When I arrived at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), a seminar given by a Nobel prize winner was just finishing. It’s that kind of place, a spacious 1950’s building reminiscent of the RFH in London, with gardens running down to the sea and corridors full of crates with tempting labels such as “Danger – Femtolaser”. I was greeted by C.S Unnikrishnan, a large South Indian with the smooth solidity of a rock, and introduced to his chum from college days, Sukant Saran, who now works as the TIFR publications officer. In that capacity, Sukant has produced over the years a very attractive series of posters for conferences on various topics, and recently decided to exhibit the images used in the posters as Scientific Art, a concept he was keen to explain. Whilst I sympathise with, or share, his aim of exploring scientific questions through art, I see no point in a proliferation of categories, since context is basically everything. Either by intent or co-option, art has to be part of contemporary discourse. Perhaps, as Sukant argued, everyone is an artist, but then I think most of them don’t know when. It’s about a capacity for self-criticism, really.

TIFR have quite a fine collection of 20th century Indian art, donated by the founder Homi Bajba, though it doesn’t seem that anything is being added to it. They do, however, have regular concerts in their auditorium, and on Friday I was able to hear the renowned flute player, Shri Rupak Kulkarni. Unnikrishnan (or Unni, as I think I have permission to call him) was at the concert too, and it turned out that he had studied flute with Shri Rupak’s father. Back in his office, he showed me his collection of flutes, which are made from bamboo. He was experimenting with adding an extra hole to allow a smoother bridging between the two octaves that can be played. It was a nice illustration of the mixture of theoretical and practical curiosity that drives his research, a combination that is surprisingly rare in science. Other people that I met at TIFR were either focused on the technology, or pure maths theorists such as Sunil Mukhi, who freely admitted that his interests in string theory had no immediate correlation or relevance to the observable world.

It’s not that Unni’s lab was short of technology. Two PhD students were manipulating an assembly nearly the size of a small car, at the heart of which was a Bose Einstein Condensate (or BC in lab slang), an exotic state of matter in which supercooled atoms collapse into a dense clump. This is trapped in the intersection between two laser beams, and experiments can then be performed on it, such as bouncing the BC off its own reflection. Since the jitteriness due to thermal energy and quantum effects is largely absent, other aspects of these interactions can be more clearly observed. What I particularly liked was that the output of the experiment was visual, a shadow pattern created by flashing another laser beam through the BC.

Bombay has boulevards with shady arcades, pavements for the use of pedestrians, night time streets where one can wander from food stall to bar to restaurant. Unremarkable, perhaps, unless you've been spending a month in Delhi. There is dirt, but this seems like functional dirt from the intensive use of a very high density environment, an equilibrium between waste and cleaning, not the pointless squalor of despair. And of course Bombay still has whole families living on the street. No way of knowing if they'd prefer to be in Delhi. But there's a kind of economic apartheid there that seems to be lacking in Bombay, where the city itself means that everyone has to rub along. At TIFR, the Tata institute for Fundamental Research which was the reason for my visit, most of the scientists seem to travel on the local buses and trains. No way would their counterparts consider doing so in Delhi. The inhabitants of Bombay identify themselves as belonging to the city, whereas in Delhi everyone tells you how many hours it takes to get to their village on the bus.

My journey from the airport to Colaba, at the tip of Bombay's peninsula, took one and a half hours due to congestion. There was some hooting, but usually recognisably necessary, rather than blindly imperious egotism. It was as hot as Delhi, but tropical heat that imposed a relaxed acceptance. The taxis are all spivvy little black and yellow Fiats from the 1960's.