Some homes keep their secrets well. In Mumbai, Mukesh Ambani's Antilla, which has hosted its big-ticket parties, has floored visitors to such an extent that few recall seeing any art there. On prodding, they might recall "a kind of bird"  possibly a massive Garuda by artist Satish Gupta  at the entrance, part of a series of artworks commissioned especially for the skyscraper, though it is the junior Ambanis who take art collecting more seriously, with both office and their residence brimming with masters and contemporaries from F N Souza to Chintan Upadhyay, Jogen Chowdhury to Sujata Kejriwal. Unsurprisingly, really, with Tina Ambani supporting the Harmony show, and spouse Anil Ambani providing discreet inputs. In New Delhi, it is Sunil Mittal's home that has remained unreported for its art collection, with the Mittals apparently inclined to support emerging artists over established masters.But it is the masters that seem to excite most collectors, with M F Husain right on top as the "

Art in their abode

Business Standard

Three decades ago, when my parents shipped me off trunk, holdall and bed to the capital, there were few friends in the city, and no family, from whom to scavenge meals or borrow rent money. The height of influence then was knowing anyone who could get us into Ghungroo, or Number One, on the strength of an assurance that we wouldnâ€™t get drunk, throw up or otherwise embarrass our host. We could count on the occasional hospitality of colleagues, landlords sometimes let us use their telephone and on rare occasions invited us to watch television, but mostly we were on our own. Knowing people who mattered was not assumed automatically to get us a membership to the Gymkhana, but it could result in an interview with the friendâ€™s uncle who ran an advertising agency.Each decade since has seen the migration of cousins, nephews and nieces to New Delhi intent on education, careers and a good life â€” not necessarily in that order. Those early refugees sought long-term bed and board,

Kishore Singh: My family and other Ã©migrÃ©s

Seventeen years after she last visited Kolkata â€“ once her home and the repository of her childhood memories â€“ my wife says sheâ€™s disoriented there now. â€œItâ€™s so dirty,â€ she complains over the phone. â€œHush,â€ warns her son, â€œif Mamata Banerjee hears that, you could be in troubleâ€ â€” which, as everyone knows, is a possibility not worth considering. Besides, isnâ€™t â€œdirtyâ€ a national identity? â€œI love Bombay,â€ my wife has been known to say, â€œbut itâ€™s so dirty.â€ Jaipur, where sheâ€™s a frequent visitor, is also dirty, of course, and Bikaner, where my parents have a home, has bins that provide banquets for the neighbourhood cows, causing litter to spill over their posh roads.Kerala is a mite cleaner, but thereâ€™s little to distinguish one city in India from another, the sameness of architecture and the prevalence of filth being universal features. Discarded plastic bags flutter like flags in the hills; in the countryside, village dumps are dis

Kishore Singh: Dirty picture, same difference

The couple that walks into the gallery has been â€œcollectingâ€ art â€” though â€œbuyingâ€ might be the appropriate term in their case â€” for some years now, unmindful of spending a lakh or two on paintings that they like. Their picks are naÃ¯ve, not yet jaded by signature scavenging, even though they are a concession to popular (er, â€œkitschâ€) taste.

A cautious optimism

I was in my neighbourhood tailorâ€™s shop, a place Iâ€™d been hundreds of times, and now he was telling the customer ahead of me, â€œYouâ€™ve put on weight, this jacket wonâ€™t look good on you. You might want to buy something off a discounted designer rack instead.â€ I sucked in my stomach and attempted to look slim, afraid of being similarly upbraided. Were my cheeks too full to meet his exacting standards? Had I lost too much hair for him to consider measuring me up for a new shirt?Iâ€™d been summoned for a fitting. Semi-tailored jackets were brought up by his assistants, my arms were prodded into sleeves; I was made to twirl and pirouette; a conference was called on whether to pinch the waist further or not (I was still holding in both my stomach and my breath and slowly turning blue). Could I look in the mirror? â€œNot necessary,â€ the maestro dismissed the request. More tugs, some tucks, while I glimpsed a gap between the lapel and the collar â€” surely his darzi

Kishore Singh: Custom-made for masterji

Cocktail conversations and newspaper headlines have made a habit of reporting the weather which, this winter, has apparently been colder than most. Cooped up in office, or working from home, it&rsquo;s been difficult to tell, though I can venture that the evenings have been teeth-chattering, hand-numbing icy, especially when wrapped around a glass of Speyside&rsquo;s finest on the rocks at Delhi&rsquo;s dinners that, strangely for this season, continue to be organised outdoors.

<B>Kishore Singh:</B> The 'outdoor' winter's tale

Two months to go to India Art Fair and we have a crisis on our hands. The retrospective we had planned as a collateral event has fallen through, but it's too late to pull out the invitation from the VIP Diary. It's panic time.

Republic of art

My favourite for the Skoda Prize walked off with the honours on Friday night, but already before that his sculpture was drawing attention at the India Art Fair. Juggernaut, the work, is a play on Jagannath, whose wooden chariot at the annual yatra in Puri has in previous years led to stampedes, the giant wheels of Vishnu crushing devotees who unfortunately get in the way. This large, anchor-like object pays homage as well as looks at the subject of devotion ironically, the spiked ends crowned with Vishnu&rsquo;s iconic presence. Thought-provoking.

Five at the fair

&ldquo;Hurry up, call now,&rdquo; my wife insists in a peremptory tone. We&rsquo;re a couple of moments from home, and she wants her Man Friday to come down from the apartment to the parking block &ldquo;with my pink slippers, the comfortable ones&rdquo; to walk home in, slipping out from the power heels she&rsquo;d worn to the party. &ldquo;My feet are killing me,&rdquo; she says. I wonder why since she&rsquo;d worn the stilettos only for the duration of our brief mandatory appearance at a wedding, having meanwhile made me carry a spare pair of &ldquo;walking heels&rdquo; in a bag for her to wear while emerging from the hotel.

<B>Kishore Singh:</B> Four-door suitcases

Fifteen years ago &mdash; a lifetime in Indian art, according to some &mdash; Amrita Jhaveri started collecting modern and contemporary art somewhat more seriously than most, becoming one of the earliest specialists with a calibrated eye for picking art works that represented the best of each generation&rsquo;s artists.

Pick of the lots

No one is pulling out the whistles and buntings or putting out the confetti and balloons yet, even though the economy began the year with a economic boost.

Break out the bubbly yet?

The family&rsquo;s grand old bash &ndash; this time at the start of the year instead of the close &ndash; is an annual event and casts its net far and wide. Slowly, the event gathers pace &mdash; who&rsquo;s coming? (why?); who isn&rsquo;t? (why not? ); who&rsquo;s to find board at home?; whose lodgings are being arranged elsewhere?. Grumbles gather pace over exchanged phone calls about the pecking order and the notional hierarchy these suggest. Reservations, car journeys, long-distance carriages and lifts are all planned &mdash; rejected, cancelled, breaking and building alliances on a daily basis. At home, we plan the seating on the basis of rumours: who&rsquo;s speaking to whom, or isn&rsquo;t?; which is the battle, which the war?; To break the ice or keep sparring relatives apart?.

Kishore Singh: My family and other animates

We haven&rsquo;t been to Goa in a while &ndash; at least, my wife and I haven&rsquo;t, though the children tend to treat it like a weekend retreat where they turn up without even bothering to pack an overnighter, simply acquiring a tee-and-sarong on the beach in which they then hang around for the duration of their stay &ndash; because apparently it&rsquo;s no longer cool to stay in a hotel. In certain circles in Delhi, you count only if you&rsquo;ve recently acquired a patch of land on which you&rsquo;ve built your own &ldquo;shack&rdquo;, which is Goa-speak for a villa, complete with fitted Italian kitchens and furniture that&rsquo;s been customised in Bali.

Kishore Singh: Goa invitations, regrets only

The pup is beautifully behaved around the trainer, paying heed to his commands to sit, or stay, minding his manners and ignoring the chewy treats thrown his way till he&rsquo;s allowed to mop them up in one greedy gulp. &ldquo;Can you teach him not to bite?&rdquo; I ask, but the mutt hasn&rsquo;t so much as bared his teeth in the trainer&rsquo;s presence. &ldquo;Bad habit,&rdquo; the trainer mutters, though it&rsquo;s unclear whether the reference is to the dog or its master.

Kishore Singh: Mutt mania and other trials

The avalanche began last evening in New Delhi &mdash; more art shows and curated events than had possibly opened in as many weeks, all clustered together, making it impossible, given the city&rsquo;s spread and traffic, to attend a launch or talk or two. But what was driving this action? It wasn&rsquo;t as though the new year had opened with a lot of promise, so it had to be the imminent closeness of the India Art Fair that was the catalyst. With all the action at the NSIC grounds during those four days, galleries and museums appeared keen to take the lead on the offsite action, and if this weekend was busy, you can expect the coming one to go into overload mode.

Riding out the bad times 

Six months ago, artist Vivan Sundaram was taken to the lost city of Muziris that had drowned with the flooding of the Periyar river in the 14th century. Collecting a few hundred thousand of the approximately four million pieces of pottery shards he discovered there, he had the remains shipped to him in New Delhi where he began assembling them into mounds that were then transported back to Kochi, as a site-specific installation for the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale. A shallow pit was dug in which the shards were assembled, and after it had been flooded with water, pepper corns were flung into the water to symbolise the city&rsquo;s links with the spice trade, all of it filmed as Sundaram&rsquo;s project for India&rsquo;s first and the world&rsquo;s (on one approximation) 150th biennale.

A work in progress 

At a caf&eacute;, desperate for something cold to drink &ndash; the water was served at room temperature &ndash; I asked for a cold coffee with &ldquo;lots of ice&rdquo;. &ldquo;Lots of ice-cream,&rdquo; agreed the waiter, &ldquo;okay, sir.&rdquo; &lsquo;Ice,&rdquo; I pleaded with him, &ldquo;not ice-cream,&rdquo; drawing a blank look.

Kishore Singh: Hot spots in Kochi

Protests, however odious, are at least legitimate, but this week when vandals desecrated installations by two artists at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, they over-stepped the limits of dissent. Paint was poured on South African artist Clifford Charles&rsquo; installation, while Australian artist Daniell Connell&rsquo;s portrait of tea vendor Achu was defaced.

Teething troubles?

The world might not have ended yesterday, but the world as we know it appeared to be ending for some among us. Amid calls for everything from incarceration to castration for the perpetrators of New Delhi&rsquo;s shocking violence, my daughter found her freedom being cruelly vetoed by her brother. &ldquo;She is not to go out anywhere alone,&rdquo; he read me the riot act. &ldquo;So, tell her yourself,&rdquo; I suggested.

Kishore Singh: Same differences

Asevere churn is happening in the midst of the worst downturn the Indian art community has experienced since the bad times that have eclipsed contemporary art. Some artists, like limpets, have held on, through the promise of longevity and relevance in their work that has survived the continuing downturn, while others have been hurled into a garret-like existence that would have been familiar to their seniors. And yet, that generation has already passed on the baton. Atul Dodiya can no more qualify as an emerging artist, Subodh Gupta now sits on the cusp of seniority, a queue he shares with the likes of Jagannath Panda and Shilpa Gupta. While Sumedh Rajendran, or Thukral &amp; Tagra and their ilk, are no more stakeholders among emerging talents, they have still to occupy the top slot among their peers. Somewhere amidst this, artists such as Chittrovanu Mazumdar and Chintan Upadhyay have disappeared into a maw, their resurgence still awaited.

Drawing the time 

And so, the year ends not with a whimper but with former porn star and current Bollywood diva Sunny Leone performing live at The Lalit in the capital, showing that those who were previously employed in the adult entertainment industry can indeed be rehabilitated in mainstream culture. Her debut performance in a thriller film might not have been family fare &mdash; apparently even voyeurs were disappointed because her male co-star ended up revealing more skin than her.

Kishore Singh