The nomad has returned. On an impulse, for over a month, Chintan Upadhyay the iconoclastic artist, was leapfrogging between Hungary, Poland, Netherlands and Slovakia.

Whatever for? To that the Delhi-relocated Upadhyay, on a brief visit to Mumbai, grimaces, “What do you mean? Why should there be reasons?” Still, he couldn’t have gone for a touring spree. “Okay, if you must know,” the strictly vegetarian artist answers over a paneer-palak dinner. “It was to understand the Euronomics of today. Once, East Europe was largely under leftist regimes. Financial structures and lifestyles have altered dramatically. Cutting across all generations, factory workers and manual labourers are in a limbo. For instance, the gypsies don’t know what to do with their handicrafts anymore.”
This is sounding heavy-duty. Could he un-fuzz me? He does: “Okay, old women who used to knit sweaters since decades find themselves redundant. Perhaps their situation interests me personally. There was a time, my mother would knit sweaters on order in Jaipur. She’d be up all night and at times I’d help her untangle the ball of wool.”
Chintan Upadhyay aka Chintu is planning to invite unemployed old women from East Europe to display the lost art of knitting with their counterparts in India.
He believes, “Communities can communicate without language. It is difficult to break political boundaries... but in art, the world is one. There are so many points of consensus. Like the solidarity of the extended joint family system.” The artist is the only son of his parents but a tribal boy was adopted so that he never missed having a brother.
A sparrow-like eater, the artist refuses dessert. He’s getting chatty now, recounting his myriad art-plans, kicking off with an exhibition, in Ahmedabad, of his recent paintings and sculpture. Taipei which he adores (and grows his hair till he can get it cut in a salon there) has frequently exhibited his mega-sculptures of “heads,” versions of which he will show at Delhi’s United Art Fair in September. And whoa, come November he will throw his Greenpark home in Delhi open to the public. That’s strange. Does he mean tramps and thieves are welcome too “Why not?” he laughs. “It’s a door to see the way I live, paint, whatever. I’d like to destroy the space between the private and public space. If someone wants to stroll in and go to sleep, that’s fine by me too.”
The artist is often associated with his Smart Alec series — naked babies with either reposeful or menacing faces. He will never quit delivering those babies because, “I need their presence around me. And they’re always relevant… after all India is the biggest market for surrogacy. Whether it’s my celebrity stamps series, the babies or paintings on the lines of I am a Slut, nothing is over.”
Art is an ongoing process, assert Chintan, concluding, “Of course, now it seems to be at a juncture when technology is exterminating tradition. Like art, even fashion is no longer inspired by desire and imagination. It’s there to compete with designer stuff in the market. So if my driver buys his son a Blackberry, I am not surprised. Like knitted sweaters are out, and branded ones are in.”