"This new bamboo shoot hangs over my neighbours wall - hasn't yet learned about boundaries." Satish Gupta
Whenever I land in Delhi, the first thing I do is go to Connaught Place and walk around until I find a newspaper wallah to buy a copy of the First City. It is a monthly magazine with listings of events and places to go, but nothing like the usual expat magazines you find in big Asian cities. More of an upmarket publication on culture and the arts for the people of Delhi, with some great columns and interviews. My favourite column is Satish Gupta’s Zen black, Zen white, a painting and a haiku (or sometimes a longer thought) perfectly arranged on a double page. Every time I get so excited to see what it is that I have to open the magazine as I hand over the money to check it out, and only then can I go to a cafe and read the rest.
Satish Gupta is an Indian painter, sculptor, writer and poet. While studying art in Paris in the 1970s, one day he walked into a second-hand bookshop opposite Notre Dame and came across a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Since then, Zen philosophy has inspired his brush, pen and chisel. Now that I am back in Hungary, repacking the things I have accumulated over the last few years of travelling, I found my diary from 2003 with the above haiku and his ink painting of a bamboo. And it moved me just as much as it did seven years ago.