The Osianama will become the coming together of phase one of one’s vision of creativity in infrastructure. The process towards placing the arts at the heart of India’s developmental framework.

Osianama is fine arts, popular culture, cinema and architecture fused together on a single platform – a new 24-hour art service located at what was formerly Minerva, the famous cinema hall in the heart of central Mumbai. It is about bringing out energy common to different creative disciplines and with it to confront what India has virtually totally failed to achieve: reaching a communion between the arts and audience. In other words it is an effort to put in the same space, on the same terms of love and energy, every kind of citizen of this country - from workers in factories to minds intellectually engaged, from children to senior citizens, from those who have never experienced the greatest Japanese Samurai armour to those who, out of disrespect, never harbored a nostalgia for great calendar art, Osianama is set to create a space where visitors of every hue will once again rejuvenate the love and respect for art in all its spectral facets. Osianama thus aims to resolve the polarity in which the popular has been made to slip into an idle entertainment world and the artistic forced to withdraw into inaccessible, unattainable intellectual spheres. What is forgotten in the process is what, for example, the noble epic traditions of Mahabharata and Ramayana taught us: ‘entertainment’ is in fact the pinnacle of popular understanding of creativity, deeply versed in the philosophical, informed by the political and aspiring to the spiritual.

However, when the base of that entertainment superstructure is weak as it is in India today, then entertainment does not elevate or uplift our people - it takes them down and therefore content has to compromise in expressing itself. We have to do exactly the reverse, we must create a structure in which content does not have to compromise; and that each person who goes there goes there with the intention of saying, “In myself I am going to try to understand it, am going to aspire towards this, am trying to elevate myself, am going to do that with love and self discovery, and at the same time I am willing to be taught; so it is about entering a space with a sense of wonderment, surprise, love, curiosity, and then coming out of it being totally energized; I want to come here again, I want to bring my children, to bring my friends, to come on my own.

This aloneness is very important, the experience of doing things on one’s own, India has lost that habit, of the individual experiencing art and culture as an individual; we do it either in blocks or groups or in masses and therefore the nature of introspection and the nature of learning is highly compromised; what is important here is that without compromising the nature of art & cinema, without making the one feel lesser or more than the other, they are all on the same platform, whether it is the great Japanese Samurai armour, whether it is a calendar from 1920s in India, or whether it is a painting of Gaitonde, they all have only energy to give, that is all that art can do, it can just energise another human being. Our job is to create structures to allow all to willingly rediscover this and want to partake in it, thereafter to sustain that process of learning of participation in this world; that they want to bring their loved ones in that world, wanting to share something they have just extracted and taken out of this world; and that process of participation means a totally different responsibility which has nothing to do with this space because at the end of the day if you go back to the jhopadpattiia and you have no sensibility that reaffirms what you have just experienced you will lose it all; so there have to be several other forces that are simultaneously going on which has given the belief that there is something that is going to nurture my aspirations, that I can proceed further into these new insights and internalise them through education, through a course, through a dialogue, through performance or through some continued ongoing process; so that is the main responsibility of Osianama and its content. Now we have to find how to structure it – the delta, the beehive, the cobweb, the labyrinth, the vein & artery system in our body, these are different holistic, integrated structural mechanisms that bring the whole world’s information together and then distributes and disseminates it back to the world; a continuous renovation and updating of itself; it is without any kind of artificiality, or a thing that is not part of the system or is in anyway alien to the system, every other rivulet is (an ultimate) part of the ocean; an osian. This is the framework we would ideally like to have functioning at the Osianama.

Further, Osianama is not conceived as a building made up of floors. There are spaces that are differently occupied - spaces that are interchangeable with evolving artistic programmers. Elevations at different heights that are preoccupied with exhibitions, auctions, cinema shows, post-production of films, lecture demonstrations, installations, happenings & research. At the centre of the ground floor, approachable from several points of entry, a ramp spirals up to enclose an atrium that reaches a cobweb opening to the sky. The archive, the heart of Osianama’s knowledge base, is meant to flow to every nook and corner of the structure in the shape of exhibitions that are permanent and changing, exhibitions of objects culled from its vast and ever growing collection now in excess of 160,000 objects. The film theatres that will, for the first time, bring a steady flow of world cinema to Mumbaikars on a day to day basis, will once a month convert into Osian’s auction space, making that tenuous link between knowledge and wealth alive and palpable. Young aspiring filmmakers will find Osianama’s Post Production facility that will enable them to realize their first dream on celluloid even as they experiment with the latest in digital technology. An international panel of the leading minds will make for a floating faculty that will supervise the development and making of cinema and art. In the particular active atmosphere of Osianama there will be a key place for quiet work, thought and research: the library. Rare books and manuscripts on a vast scale will reach the shelves of the library once Osianama comes into operation in late 2009. The dissemination of knowledge we have been working towards during the last ten years is hopefully around the corner.