Thanks to Khoj I ( https://khojstudios.org/participant/mohan-polamar/ ) am living now in the Khoj campus exploring art and trying to evolve my process and assumed methods. Since I am relatively new in the circles where art is practiced as a profession I am feeling the pressure of it all, I mean pressure not in the negative sense but just experiencing the compression of time and the resulting entropy of expectations.

I have been an entrepreneur for close to 2 decades now in the fields of consulting to the corporate and in developing software for them. Here too we experience the compression of time. As I learn from my other resident artists who are professionals there seems to be relatively calmer and assured air about them. They do not feel the pressure of expectation and output and that is new to me. In the corporate world we are trained to believe that the lack of such pressure will result in non-performance, and that is ingrained from 2 fronts, both as an entrepreneur and as a service provider to the corporate. The world of milestones and outputs seem to have a lighter presence here in the art world and that takes some adjusting.

It is almost a week now and we have been out travelling into various parts of new and old Delhi every day escorted by the kind team here in Khoj. This is the 6th day and the first where I sit in my studio and write this.

By the way I did get my ego bruised a bit when one of the resident artists commented on my design thinking and training experience not as art, and that the art world laughs in not-so-hushed tones whenever they hear a corporate man talk about design thinking workshops as art. Since I am self-trained and practice both for a while now I will gently disagree with the not-so-hushed tones and believe that the practice of art exists anywhere and everywhere to a larger or lesser degree.

uh! The pressure is back to haunt 🙂 Need to get to work