Nataraja

Shiva Nataraja dances the universe in and out of being. He is one of the most popular gods in Tamil Nadu, and copies of the famous Chola bronzes of him can be found in every art store in Chennai -- both those for tourists and those for the locals. Natraja is birth and death, beginning and end, preserver and destroyer. His dance rolls on above everything, through everything, and is the source of everything. He danced this world into life, eventually he will dance it out again.

Anna Salai is one of the main streets in Chennai. At any hour of the day or night it is crowded with a million motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, old junk Asian cars, and fancy European sports vehicles and SUVs with tinted windows. There are only sidewalks every so often, and so most of the time the thick foot traffic shares the road with the cars and bikes. Things like lanes and traffic signals are only as real as concrete barricades can make them, and it is common to see someone driving backwards, the wrong way, around a corner, through a red light. Despite the confusion and the crowd, however, it all works. The chorus of horns and honks, the gestures of hands and expressions of faces, all come together to give the street an energy that washes everything and everyone along with it. Eventually, everyone gets where they are going.



Along this street today I saw a group of private school kids, just out from classes, crowding around the entrance to a private club where a devadesi ("god dancer" - a professional temple dancer in the old style of classical Hindu dance) was giving a performance. She was beautiful, her movements telling a story of love and loss with the perfect mudras developed over thousands of years. The children pressed in as close as they could without being disrespectful, calling out in English and Tamil and Hindi and laughing with small, high voices. This was all not more than 10 feet from four busses vying with each other to pass a parked auto-rickshaw on a street not wide enough for two busses abreast. The kids eventually passed on into the movie theatre, the dancer went inside. Eventually, everyone gets where they are going.

Two minutes and a block later, just past a subway terminal, there was an old man dying. His ragged, stained clothes had fallen off of him while a police officer tried to help him sit up. His naked, brown ass was covered in his own shit, which formed a puddle around his toothpick thick thighs. A handful of citizens had stopped around him, trying to help the cops or just stopping to watch because they knew there was nothing they could do but mark the moment. I was one of them. I wanted to help, wanted to do something, anything at the last moments of this man whose life had obviously been long and full of suffering. But the police were already there, and were motioning us away. And while I watched he coughed, rolled his old head with the stringy white hair back, and stopped breathing. When I asked the cop what he had died of, he was silent a long moment while bobbling his head. Finally he said, "Of being alive."

Ten feet away traffic continued on. The police took his body away, and everyone went on to wherever they were going. Anna Salai never stopped, India rolled on. Eventually we all get where we are going.

Done well, Nataraj has a peaceful face, serene and calm and reasuring. However, if the artist isn't careful it becomes arrogant.