Everyone has a diaspora
Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, editor of The Nation’s style section, came back from Paris recently with a doubly interesting story.
I didn’t know that every October 7 is Nuit Blanche there, a dusk-to-dawn arts festival in which exhibitions are held all over town, from the Eiffel Tower and Hotel de Ville to the galleries, churches, libraries and even sport centres. Apparently other European cities have copied the idea, as have Toronto and Montreal.
The other interesting bit was the contribution to the festival of Thailand’s Navin Rawanchaikul (pictured above), who screened a 10-minute film called “Navins of Bollywood” that had been commissioned by Singapore’s TheatreWorks for the Diaspora project it presented at the IMF-World Bank meeting in the Lion City last month.
If you’ve ever googled yourself, the movie’s concept sounds pretty intriguing.
I quote below from the story as it appeared in The Nation.
Borrowing from Bollywood song-and-dance cinema, the film has Navin as himself receiving a mysterious letter from someone else named Navin. He roams the streets of Bombay searching for his namesake as tunes in Hindi, French and Korean establish a theme of universality, and along the way, he encounters more Navins, including a few women. In the end they form their own political party and found a new country.
This exploration of identity derived from the fact that Navin’s father is an Indian born in Lamphang and his mother a Hindu Punjabi. Navin, now 35, has become a globetrotter, but divides most of his time between Chiang Mai and Fukuoka in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife and son.
“My roots are Indian but I was born in Thailand and have lived in many cities around the world,” he says. “I have a Thai passport but people don’t think I’m Thai because of my Indian looks. We always associate our identity with our name, so in the film I’m asking, ‘What’s in a name?’
“I’m Indian, but sort of not. I’m Thai, but sort of not either. I have a Japanese green card and can speak Japanese, but sort of not for sure. What all this identifies me as, I don’t know.”
Navin, a common enough name in both India and Thailand, means “new” in Sanskrit, but Navin our mixed-up artist tracked it down to a 16th-century Gaelic word for “saint”. Google turned up hundreds of Navins all over the planet, and in Bombay alone he met 30 more Navins.
He’s discovered his own Navin diaspora – in all races, all classes, all kinds of jobs.
A short film can hardly encapsulate the phenomenon, so he’s going to launch a website called NavinParty.com and a magazine called The Navinist – this is one art project with no end in sight.
Not that he’s finished with Taxi Gallery, his last trek around the world for art’s sake. In the mid-’90s he and a taxi driver rumbled through more than 20 cities, turning the cab into a mobile gallery without ever refusing a fare. The culture has continued flowing through its doors for 10 years.
