At the Art of Bangalore

(Published in Times of India, 2008)

I was having dinner at the food court of a multiplex when I looked up from my bowl of soup to survey my neighbours. Suddenly I didn’t know where I was. Was this Bangalore? Or Singapore? Or New York perhaps! I had around me people from at least 15 different nationalities leave alone the Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and Tamil that I was hearing in a babble. Bangalore truly has become the international melting pot. But this somehow is restricted to food courts and malls, cinemas and corporate offices. This does not reflect in the city’s cultural life. One would expect a city this multilingual and multicultural to have a more exciting and buoyant cultural calendar.

If one looks at the year 2007, one finds only a few spaces like the Rangashankara and Alliance Francais which have programmed cultural activities which cater to various kinds of audiences, with the theatre festival at the Rangashankara being one of the most visible and exciting cultural event in the city. Other spaces like the Chowdiah Memorial Hall, the Guru Nanak Bhavan or the government run spaces like the Kannada Bhavan, Ravindra Kalakheshtra are only venue points for any show that is booked there. Of course one saw the Habba this year which had an interesting lineup of programmes but lacked audiences for most of the shows except the music ones. Also the few scattered film societies did their best to showcase various kinds of films round the year and workshops happened at the Centre for Film and Drama. There were theatre performances and some book readings organized by Toto Funds the Arts who also gave out annual awards for creative writing and music. But all these are small, private initiatives of people in the field who care about the arts and culture with very limited or no help from the government or the corporate sector. They fall way below what could be the potential of this city to become a vibrant cultural centre.

My wishlist for Bangalore beyond 2007 would be to have a thriving cultural life with arts centres in various localities so people don’t have to travel long hours through the city to reach these spaces where lecture demonstrations and workshops train the young and not so, adequate spaces for rehearsals and performances by groups at low costs to them, festivals that bring together national and international groups to perform in the city at prices affordable to the public, seminars and conferences that discuss and debate issues and concerns, platforms where artists across various disciplines can meet, work together and connect with their audiences in interesting ways, schools which look forward to including education in the arts and culture as part of their regular curriculum and so much more. Of course each of these wishes need funds, organization who are dedicated to making them happen and the support of the public that often cribs that Bangalore has nothing but watering holes to hop in the evenings.

I have often thought whether Bangalore needs city cultural policy which will pave the way to create a platform to bring the government, artists, corporates and the citizens together to create, promote and contribute to the city’s cultural life. Some vibrant cities like London has a policy that is created by the Mayor and then a held together by a working team of citizens and cultural activists. Will that work for Bangalore? One could try. But to begin with could we look at some ideas here – could the corporate houses give their free spaces ‘free’ to artists to set up camp or theatre wallahs to rehearse and perform, could they also put a small portion of their marketing budgets into supporting arts centres, arts spaces, and cultural programmes in the city, could they look at involving the arts in their employees lives as well, could government agencies maintain their spaces better and look at hiring professionals to programme and run these, richer schools provide funds to less priviledged ones for arts courses and experiences, could multiplexes give up a show a day or even a week to documentary/ non mainstream films? Above all could we as citizens contribute both in terms of funds and volunteering to the arts and cultural organizations in the city so that they are more enabled?

Passionate Profession

(Published in The Bengaluru Pages March 2009)

One of my earliest memories takes me to the dingy Godhuli Cinema Hall in Asansol, just across our little house, where I, four year old, am sitting on Gopalda’s lap, watching ‘filums’ being ‘cut’ to fit into the timings of the four shows. My jaws wide open, my eyes stuck to the screen I would watch the black and white images on the screen with complete awe. We would then rush to the tiny machine room, collect the pieces that have been cut and bring them home for my view master. Gopalda and I would stick these cut pieces together to create our own stories where gods and nagins fought, princesses danced around palaces and the villains got a thorough beating from the heroes. My first love affair, my first rendezvous with the arts still holds me captive.

Working for arts philanthropy though, happened quite by accident. After spending years with the corporate sector and running a business, I was looking for something that would make more sense to my life, make me feel less like a bonsai. When a friend spoke to me about the fundraising job at the India Foundation for the Arts, about eight years ago, I thought why not give it a shot? In the mean time, I had completed my masters in dance together with my MBA, had acted in the theatre, was writing a bit and thoroughly enjoying every art form I could lay my hands upon. As I started working with IFA, a bit gingerly at first, getting paid a quarter of what I used to earn, I realized, I knew so little about the not-for-profit world or about the state of the arts in India. I began to learn and apply those learnings as quickly as I could. And today eight years later, I still see myriad challenges facing the arts that needs to be dealt with.

It’s impossible to discuss the various areas of needs in the arts or suggest ways of engaging with them or even talk about the range of work that IFA and I are involved in, in one article. What I can do instead is talk about a few of the issues that I am concerned with at a professional and a very personal level in the arts.

It worries me to see that spaces for the arts and culture, hubs where addas would happen, performances would take place, artists would huddle and discuss and work in our cities are diminishing at a tremendously accelerated rate. Residential buildings, malls and office spaces are eating away the few spaces for culture that we had simply because the arts on its own cannot compete with the pressures of the market reality today. Thus Bangalore has just one Rangashankara and Mumbai just one Prithvi. While on the other hand since visual arts and Bollywood has suddenly made its mark felt in the Indian economy, galleries and multiplexes are mushrooming across cities. Unlike cities in the west, where the Mayor’s city policy contains a cultural policy, the governments in our cities have no concern for the growth of a vibrant arts scene for our urban spaces. Infrastructure for the arts thus seems to stunt the growth of the arts in our cities. The newly set up Theatre Infrastructure Cell at IFA (funded by the Tata Trusts) is an initiative to better the environment for performance in the country and has taken on itself to commission research, take out publications, advocate and actually support infrastructure projects that will help performances. We also intend to interface with urban development departments to make available spaces for the arts in the very planning of cities.

Another area of concern that I have is the diminishing role of the arts in our education system. The vocationalisation of education in this country is creating a generation of mediocre workforce. While we sing and dance about our new found bastions of the IT and the BPO industry, we forget that we are just glorified clerks and factory workers in these fields as well. We don’t produce creative new products, we just manufacture, at a cheap rate, what is already there. And even there China probably beats us. One of the reasons, I feel, we are not producing a generation of creative thinkers and doers is because there is no scope for creative growth in our education systems. The arts, which stimulates creative growth and makes a wholesome individual has been completely removed from education. I am not saying that it is necessary to produce more violin players and poets than engineers and maths teachers, but I believe that appreciation of poetry and music will make better and more creative engineers and maths teachers. Thus my interest in the arts education programme at IFA. Here we are trying to infuse the arts in primary and secondary level education through empowering teachers with the knowledge and tools that are required. This happens to be a programme in which I spend a lot of my time and energy since I believe that if one learns to explore, widen the horizons of one’s mind and opens oneself up for the arts at an early age, a lot gets taken care of later.

Being part of the student political movement in Kolkata very early in life, I have a natural pull towards the arts that challenge status quo, chronicle our conflict ridden histories and raise issues that concern our social political thought processes. Supports for such often controversial expressions in the arts are difficult to come by. They often cannot be programmed for support either, since their very nature is defiant towards traditional means of support. However, as individuals I believe we must support such expressions that question our ways of thinking and pushes us to reexamine our comfortable ways of being.

I have also realized over the years of working in arts funding that funding is not enough. We have to build many arts and culture institutions in the country that are not totally dependent on government or private funding. There is a need thus to build capacity within these institutions to use their core competencies to create revenues. They need to develop economic models for sustainability and diversify their sources of funding and revenues. The recent tax laws in the country has made this even more difficult since the arts now do not fall under ‘charitable activity’ and any income other than donations might be taxed. Thus the need to be find more creative means of survival. This seems to be the most challenging area to me and I work with organizations among IFA’s grantees and outside on various projects on sustainability.

So, my love affair has continued. I have learnt that the arts heal and bond, express and question, challenge and open new doors. I am one of those lucky ones for whom passion and profession is so entwined that I can happily say I live for what I do. My family and friends worry about what this choice of mine might hold for me ultimately. But they are also coping with the fact that needs, aspirations, dreams and destinies mean different things for different people.

But for me, my journey today is more meaningful in itself and I don’t really care about the destination any more. To quote Constantine Cavafis, a Greek poet from his piece Ithaca, “You arrive not expecting more wealth, than the riches you have gained along the way”.

Show me the money!

(Written as a speech for The Lead India Campaign by Times of India in 2007)

I had once heard an art auctioneer smirk at a funding organisation at a party and say, “I don’t believe in philanthropy. If the artist is good enough, the market will find a way to support him.” I wanted to point out to him that if that was the case we would never have heard of Kafka or seen the wonder of Van Gogh. However, the wine was too tempting and it seemed rather pointless to explain why the arts need funding, free of the market, to someone who thinks that building his own archive is a form of supporting the arts.

This argument is not a rarity though. In the years that I have been raising funds for the arts, I have heard versions of this argument many times. Some are blunt like my auctioneer friend who wants to leave it to the market entirely. Others, with a bit more empathy, ask why the arts need any more funds when besides the government there are today enough private corporations and galleries who support the arts. There are, however, a number of assumptions made and realities ignored in these statements.

To begin with, most people talk about only the visual arts, which the market has favoured, indexed and completely seduced into its arms. Private entities – galleries and foundations – have emerged with unseemly haste to make hay while the sun shines. However, one does not see a plethora of such ‘private investors’ for other art forms that the market is yet to glance benevolently at. Not even to support those ideas in the visual arts which might find some difficulty in hanging themselves from a buyer’s wall. I was talking to a gallery owner who had turned down a couple of artists who wanted to do some experimental installations at the gallery not because she disliked their work but because she felt these pieces would not have any ‘sale value’, exciting though they well may be to ‘experience’ at the gallery.

Now, there have always been artists who have created for the market. But there have also been a set of artists who created for the sole reasons of expressing themselves regardless of the market. This group matters because their work critiqued and challenged prevalent norms, setting new paradigms for being. If the market decides all, this group will disappear.

One certainly condemns government funding and government funded projects for their red tape, lethargy and nepotism. I remember when a foundation wanted to support an outreach programme at a museum with the help of an art historian it took the director over a year to approve the project! However, has private funding really made much difference? Corporates only sponsor art that is celebritised and glamourised, creating favourable brand impressions among its target audience. This is also because the arts, not on their CSR agendas, are supported through marketing budgets.

So, what gets left behind? A lot. For example, theatre that is not in English, performances that have no screen stars, arts in small towns where the market is still not ‘rich’, dance that is experimental and bold, poetry that has a niche market and so much more. What is also not funded by these private investors is archiving and documentation of the arts which the public can access, systemic changes required in arts institutions, training of professionals to run them and long term initiatives that will enable their sustainability.

So, while private investment profits from the market, and the market takes care of its own, and the government still flies the same people to festivals abroad, and brands bond with their customers at cultural dos, and my art auctioneer friend counts the paintings in his basement, what is required to fill the yawning gap still remaining is private independent funding for the arts. Funding which has no vested interest except the interest of the arts at its core. Funding that responds to the field. Funding that frees the artist to create what they want to. Funding that comes out of a sense of shared adventure, a sense of philanthropy.

Making Friends, one at a time

(Publised in Raisor's Ask - South Asia's Fundraising Magazine, Jan-Mar 09)

The melting iceberg of the financial market has hurt everyone, including foundations like the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). Our reserves lie invested in financial instruments and our faith lies in what we can raise every year from foundations, corporations and generous individuals. Last week, when we were working on our financial plans for the year ahead, we realized that one of the things that might keep our morale afloat this year is donations that we receive from individuals whose passion for the arts may well overcome their caution in a tight, speedily declining financial tornado that we are currently subjected to.

However, organized fundraising from individual donors is new at IFA, started only about a year ago. The seed of the idea lay in the minutes of a Board meeting many years before I joined IFA, in the late nineties. A trustee had raised the question, “Why doesn’t IFA raise small amounts of funds from individuals who appreciate our work, have faith in what we do and would simply like to support us?” The idea always got paralysed with the question – but what do we give them in return? Digging up a question like that demands you find an answer to it. We searched for any research primary or secondary that could give us a clue as to what people expected from an arts foundation for small contributions. In a country where more than 90% of donations went to religious institutions, we found nothing that could help us.

At this point we came to know that one of our key funders, the Ford Foundation was making technical assistance grants available to its long time grantees to use it to upgrade their systems and processes and help with their fundraising. We applied for the grant for four different projects, one of which was to support a research across the country to be commissioned to AC Nielsen ORG MARG to find out people’s attitudes towards contributing to the arts and what they expected from it.

The study was done across middle and upper middle class individuals in 5 metros through group discussions and in-depth personal interviews. The highlights of the study had many startling revelations. The first of course was the overwhelming response that people did care about the arts and wanted to help in return for timely reporting on how their money was being spent and face to face meetings with the artists they were helping to support. Placing them on a matrix of their basis of engagement with the arts and their relationship with the arts, the study broadly divided the audience into three segments – ‘missionaries’, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘pleasure seekers’ (for want of better words!). The missionaries were those that had a serious and enduring relationship with the arts and believed strongly that they should support traditional and classical art forms helping them survive. The intellectuals on the other hand, while having a serious relationship with the art, were more interested in the advancement of the arts and believed that contemporary arts should be supported. The pleasure seekers had a rather casual and transient relationship with the arts and for them the arts were just a way of enjoying life. The study laid down the motivations for each of these groups to support the arts and made recommendations on how they could possibly be brought to support IFA.

Supported by the findings of this research, done for the first time in India, IFA conceptualised the ‘Friends of IFA’ initiative which was launched in February 2008. Through this initiative you could become a ‘Friend’ of IFA by donating Rs 2500/- a year (US$100 if you were abroad) in return for which you would receive the quarterly IFA e-newsletter, the biannual art magazine ArtConnect, our annual report and priority invitations/ discounted tickets to all our arts events. You could choose to contribute to any one or both of the two art funds we created – The Art Legacy Fund which would support the conservation of our cultural heritage and The Arts Innovation Fund which would support cutting edge contemporary art projects. We already had grant programmes that artists could apply to like Arts Research and Documentation Programme, Arts Education Programme, New Performance Programme etc., but we felt while these made sense to artists, the donors would require categories they could understand, realte to and support. Most grants we made could be divided up into the two categories we created - Arts Legacy and Arts Innovations. This we did keeping in mind the interest of the missionaries and the intellectuals that came through our research. We decided we were not ready to target the pleasure seeking of the pleasure seekers yet J

We have spent the last one year making a 100 ‘Friends’. Yes, the number is small. The universe of people who do donate in India is small and to find among them those that would consider the arts worthy of support is really small. However, we are now successfully creating partnerships with other cultural organizations to use their database to send out our appeals, making ourselves visible in various art festivals across the country and promoting this initiative at our own events, website and publications. Our current ‘Friends’ are championing our cause and slowly bringing in more ‘Friends’. So for us this is worth more than the money they have brought in – this means a 100 new people out there spreading our message and convincing more people to believe in what we do. To quote one of our ‘Friends’, Bunty Chand, The Excutive Director of Asia Society, India “Based on its stellar track record, I can count on IFA supporting first-rate and innovative work. IFA’s grants are a window to the energy and vitality of the contemporary arts scene.” When that’s how people believe in you, you just have no option but to keep your morale high even in troubled times.

So what's you Story?

(Published in Raisor's Ask - South Asia's Fundraising Magazine in October 2008)

Everybody loves a good story. It is perhaps the oldest of our art forms, the first human expression. Even before we learnt to read or write we were telling stories. In front of our bonfires, on the walls of our caves, through our songs and dances we were narrating stories of wars won, loves lost, new horizons explored – tales of the far and near. And like it was then, it still is now. We sit in front of the screen in a movie hall, or the stage in an auditorium or in front of the pages of a book, wide eyed and hungry, our hearts wrapped up in the sagas being told, journeying thousands of miles in our minds, living the legends ourselves. Our lives become one with those in the story. We laugh and we cry, we get angry and we seek revenge, and we see ourselves and find meanings for our own lives through living the stories that we experience. Such is the power of a good story.

However, when we believe in a cause and work for it and need to raise support for it - be it funds or volunteers - we somehow forget all about the strength of stories. We go ready with our presentations and pitches, with our vision and mission well articulated, our annual report and five year plans, with graphs and figures and various parameters of impact assessment. We aim to floor the potential donor with arguments for the absolute necessity of our cause, with how many schools we have built, or how many more health units need to be put in place – dry facts completely devoid of emotion – and wonder why we have failed to get our point across.

In my many years of work in fundraising, I have realized that people respond to people. They respond to the human condition. They respond to the difference our work has made to people - even a single street child or an abused woman or a poor cancer patient. They respond to stories.

Once I had gone to potential donor ready to overwhelm him with the staggering number of grants IFA has supported and I found him cold. But when I told him how a grant had enabled sufi musicians from Punjab to record and sell their music in the village melas and how that had changed their lives, I found him smiling. A similar incident happened with a corporate in Hyderabad. I had gone to ask them for funds to support a project that would document traditional designs of weavers in Andhra Pradesh. I met the senior leadership team and took them through the presentation I had prepared. They all nodded in agreement that the work we were trying to do was good, but still, there was no excitement in the room. A colleague of mine started talking about the people we were supporting, which communities they came from, what were their challenges etc. Suddenly one of the senior managers said, “Hey, that’s the community our factory workers mostly come from!” And in that instant the people we were supporting had faces, had names, were real and familiar for the team evaluating us. We got the funding.

In my various meeting I have seen people warm up to and listen to stories - stories that capture lives, stories that tell the tales of courage and inspiration, of struggle and strife, of success and failure. I have seen them respond to emotions more than any cognitive articulation of strategic interventions. People, end of the day, want to help others and to see how that has transformed lives. That is the story they want to hear from us.

It is tough to find those stories in the documentation and reports we do in our sector. Tough to find them in our offices where the essence of our work often gets suffocated in the dailyness of our business. We need to find them in the field. We need to look for these stories by engaging with the lives of the communities we support, the people who make our work meaningful. We need to go back to them and find these stories – stories of survival, stories of blossoming, stories of re-imagination. And if we can find even one story that moves us deeply in our hearts and makes us feel that just because of this one story our organization and our work is worth it – this is the story that we must retell to people who we ask for support and funding. This is the story that will make them feel the way we do about our work and some day soon they may even support us.

Good for the Goose, not for the Gander

(Published in Raiser's Ask, The South Asia Fundraising Magazine July 2010)

Different donors have different reasons for giving, and deserve reports customised to their needs.

We human beings are good at showcasing ourselves in different ways. When we meet, for the first time, the parents of the person we love, we try our best to make them see that we’re honest, upright, have decent jobs, warm families, and will keep our partners happy. Bumping into a potential boss at a party before the actual job interview, we floor them with our passion for our work, our track record and belief in hard work. To the investor who has bankrolled our company, our words sound like the sweet ring of the cash register. In short, depending on whom we’re talking to, what our relationship with them is, what they expect of us and how deeply involved they are in our lives, we choose to highlight different aspects of ourselves in order to gain and build trust.

Distinguish between your donors

Why is it, then, that when it comes to donors, we lump them under a ‘Funder’ category and generalise their expectations? Building accountability towards our donors is also about building trust, and how we report on our spending of their funds forms a very significant part of that trust-building exercise.

I have raised funds from many kinds of donors – foundations, family trusts, corporates, individuals who live in India and NRIs. They have given funds to run programmes, underwritten specific projects, added to our corpus and supported fundraising events. In the process of meeting, discussing proposals with or just chatting over coffee with them, I have discovered one thing – each of these donors worries about very different things. Their motivations for giving are different, as are what they look for in an organisation they would like to support and the information they want from us.

Customise your reports

Precisely because each relationship with a funder is unique, building trust with them involves a different set of exercises in reporting every time. It wouldn’t be fair to generalise the expectations even of the various categories (foundations, corporations or individuals). While figuring out the specific needs of the donor is something that we do as we build the relationship, there are certain patterns I have noticed.

Foundations, for one, are keenly interested in the content of the grant. They want facts and figures, and in my opinion, probably understand the language of the development sector the best. They know the field well - therefore, they’re more understanding of challenges and shortcomings.

Corporations, on the other hand, need to understand what kind of mileage they might get from doing their good work. So, they would want to know how you gave the project publicity through media or your own newsletters. A report to a corporate donor would benefit from using less development-sector jargon, more corporate speak, and visible acknowledgement that reflects their brand image.

Individuals, however, prefer a more personal approach to the report. Often, individuals funding a project are also looking at educating themselves in the process. Hence, they would like you to go into interesting details, nuances of the projects and lessons learnt. Human stories work really well here, because the individual donor would love to know how his or her personal involvement has made a difference to someone’s life.

Audited financial data, however, needs to be a part of every report for every type of funder. All donors want you to be transparent about how you have spent their money. They want to see supporting evidence where possible.

Think out of the box

We often think that ‘reporting’ to our donors means producing a written document with required details and sending it to them at mutually-agreed-upon intervals. This, of course, is a necessary formal process. At the same time, I have often seen that informal ways of ‘reporting’ work well with various types of funders.

Phone calls to announce a new milestone crossed in the project, a chat over a drink to discuss a challenge that the project is facing, or even a quick email to say that everything is going just fine, make the funder feel that you consider them more than financial investors in the project. They feel in touch with what’s happening. It builds trust.

PS: Use common sense

Keep in mind, of course, that the approach you take with each funder will depend on where you are on the relationship curve with them. It’s a relationship like any other – you don’t want to scare away a new one by being too earnest, or let boredom creep into an old one!

The 10 Commandments for good report writing

1. State clearly why the funds were given and what they were supposed to achieve with specific reference to deliverables agreed upon.

2. Mention all the terms and conditions laid down when the funds were given.

3. Indicate the period for which you are reporting with dates and whether this is an interim report or final report.

4. Against each of the tasks set, report clearly what you have achieved and how.

5. Mention openly what you have failed to achieve and why. Indicate the specific challenges you have faced.

6. Always give correct and audited facts and figures. Also attach a financial report.

7. Unless given a prescribed format by the donor, use your creativity to make the report interesting with pictures, tables, graphs, story insets, appendices which are clearly marked, media coverage you might have received for your work, testimonials from your beneficiaries, quotes from staff monitoring the work, etc.

8. Check report for all errors in language, grammar, spelling and formatting. Make it easy and pleasurable for the donor to read.

9. Add your future plans at the end. You never know, the donor might be delighted with your report and want to fund you again.

10. At the end, acknowledge people who have helped you, evaluators, volunteers, specific staff members and the donor you are reporting to.