The world comes to us in the form of bad news. From India, reports of rape and lynchings. I have used newspapers as my painting surface, using gouache to alter, change, transform what I had first encountered only as news. I ask my sister in Patna to mail me both Hindi and English newspapers that she gets at home and then I set to work in an effort to regain a small measure of sanity. In one image,"Haadsaa,"  painted in the days after the world learned about Asifa, I imagined the temple steps. In another, I saw girls playing Holi and, sheer luck, on the same page of the Hindi newspaper was a photograph of the great writer, Mahadevi Verma. The other two images link Asifa's story and her identity as a Muslim to what we see happening with horrifying regularity in India: communal riots and the lynching of Muslim men on one spurious pretext or another. Talking about the news, this is what a friend of mine wrote about a picture taken in the aftermath of the recent violence in Delhi: 'Heartbreaking is such an inadequate word. Rage is such an inadequate emotion’.

Amitava Kumar