‘This calls for continuous effort. It cannot be a one- or two-day affair. It is an effort that occupies an artist's entire life. My generation dived into these choppy waters. Some reached golden shores. Some continued to struggle. Some moved into the shallows and compromised. Some simply put down their tools. The challenge we faced was not only about art or the need to connect with society. It was about moulding the way society looked at art. It was a society to which only realism was acceptable, the mode of art that had been inflicted on us by the British but which had already become stale when they left. The middle class refused to recognize what we were doing as art. We received nothing but ridicule from them, our potential public. It was not, in any case, a time when paintings got sold. Recently, when we read with pride about the work of a painter, not amongst us today, being sold for Rs 99 lakh, we needed to remember that the first painting he managed to sell, at the age of thirty-two, had fetched Rs 200. The buyer was not one of us. He was a collector from the West. We also cannot forget that the artist whose works we now claim as Indian was once told his work was not Indian.

‘It was for all these reasons that we had to fight to keep our commitment to art and our honour as artists. We did that through mutual understanding and support. We drew our strength not from personal ambition, but from the deepest desire to be part of the change that would soon bring forth a modern India. Nobody can deny the work that my generation has done in this regard.’

Loud applause greets Ashutosh Sen's analysis. During lunch many of the college students go away, but an equal number stays back. The last speaker of the day, Kruttika Jathar, takes the mic after lunch.

‘Let me first respond to what Ashutosh Sen has said about the similarities between his times and ours. He is right but only about superficial similarities. The goals of modernism are now history. He spoke of Le Corbusier's Chandigarh. Today we see it as deadly in its rigid grids, its colourless concrete public buildings and its complete indifference to the human aspects of living. Large dams were once proudly regarded as vital to the development of modern India. Today's thinkers are proposing other, more sustainable models of development. Big dams have submerged acres of land belonging to already-dispossessed adivasis. In a country where blood is shed over temples that were razed 700 years ago by alien forces, there is no outcry when adivasi gods are submerged by dam waters. These are our people, the original inhabitants of this land. When we drown their culture, their livelihood and their community life with impunity under the glorious name of development, it is then we know to whom this land really belongs.’