ABSTRACT
As a student of Professor Gandhi in 1979-80 at the University of Hyderabad I remember that he would encourage me to hone my mental abilities by meditating on pictures. Sometimes these were paintings by famous artists — and I remember references to Tyeb Mehta’s images of Kali in his lectures even then — or to common bazaar prints. He gave me a print of the Dashavatar, from the pilgrimage site dedicated to Narasimhan not far from Hyderabad, to help me think through the concept of the ‘surreal’ — the subject on which I was writing my M.Phil. dissertation. I still have the picture and use it as a teaching aid in my M.Phil. classes.
