Eruda, also being showcased at Sweatopia, is an iconic sculpture of a young boy selling books near traffic signals. Made in black lead, Eruda ensures that you receive a black stain on your fingers if you touch it, provoking notions of being privileged. Black lead is the softest form of carbon while diamond is the hardest.

Another of my preoccupations is reflecting on death and mortality. Even when I was doing self-portraits, I was constantly engaged with the theme in works like Corpse Cry or Evidence from the Evaporite. These preoccupations continue into my current profile where works such as Collidonthus (the crashed car sculpture) or Autosaurus Tripous (the auto-rickshaw) carry a strong inscription of death as is omnipresent on the overcrowded Mumbai street.

Another recent work called Death of Distance shows two contrasting scenarios — one, where a rupee connects the country’s north and south through an inexpensive phone call and the other, where a little girl commits suicide because her mother could not give her one rupee to buy something to eat. This work is a prelude to my future works wherein I wish to disentangle the bundle of contradictions we live with every day. I want to show the flipside of ‘India Shining’ or ‘Incredible India’. ©
As told to Georgina Maddox