‘The art world has changed too rapidly in recent years and become too closed-in for the lay person to understand what is happening. Shah realizes that the schism between what is generally seen as a beautiful painting and what critics praise as good work has been growing wider. Further, because we have entered the globalized world with such enthusiasm, narrower schisms have sprung up within the art world itself. In art as in life we are living at many levels and in different times. It is for this that Vikram Shah has felt the need to take an all-encompassing look at art today, in the presence of the lay public.

‘Artists face many questions today. What is and should be the connection between today's art and today's world? Is the growing power of the art market a good thing or a bad thing for the making of art? And the old, old question that continues to hound artists—what is Indianness? Does an artist need to make a conscious effort to achieve it or do we assume that any work an Indian artist does is automatically and by definition Indian? At the root of this question is another. How do we define Indianness in the context of the globalized world if we still need to do so?

‘It is the organizer's hope and desire that this seminar will throw light on these issues. He has therefore invited speakers, artists and critics, who belong to different though not necessarily opposing schools of thought. The seminar is structured as follows. Four speakers will be on stage to make preliminary statements that will be open to comment by invited artists and critics on the floor. The discussion will then be thrown open to the audience at large. Vikram Shah has charged me with the responsibility of conducting the seminar. May I therefore request the four speakers of the day to come to the stage please? We have with us today Sadashiv Bapat from Pune, Ashutosh Sen from Kolkata, the senior Mumbai painter Jairaj Santoshi and one of today's leading young installation artists, Kruttika Jathar.

‘I shall call upon Jairaj Santoshi to speak to us about his art. He was one of the half-dozen artists who went to Paris and London after Independence. While the others settled in Europe, Santoshi returned home at the end of the fifties. Thereafter he developed his own style of abstraction where you might see sky, mountains and sea or you might see only colour, line and texture. His palette has always comprised muted shades of pastel colour. Jairaj Santoshi on the ideas that feed his art.’