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Footloose in Wonderland
EYE-CATCHING A reproduction of a painting of Guru Gobind Singh
It's over 15 years since I was a printer. I'm a happy print-buyer these days, making life difficult for printers. And it was in that capacity that I spent some time recently at a successful (crowd-wise) exhibition and conference organised by the Madras Printers' and Lithographers' Association. But after spending a whole day at the Chennai Trade Centre — where the Conference Centre's hall and facilities are excellent, to say the least — trying to discover what the future offered for print-buyers like me, I felt like Alice in Wonderland with the Mad Hatter lurking nearby.
Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg got honourable mention a couple of times, which pleased me no end, but at the exhibition it seemed as though we hadn't progressed very far from his age — comparing it with what was on offer at the day-long conference arranged by Printpromotion, an association of German printing machinery manufacturers who had never heard of Ziegenbalg. Let me explain.
I went to their conference lured by such discussion headings as "The future of the Print Media", "Solutions for the Print Media — Today and Tomorrow", "Trends for hardcover and softcover binding", etc. What was offered were not predictions, answers or descriptions, but hardsell for machinery that I don't think anyone in this country has and which is unlikely to be sought by less than five per cent of India's thousands of printers! No wonder, an awed audience did not have a single question at the end of each session!
Quite in contrast to this was what was on display in the exhibition halls. There were indications that Indian printing equipment manufacturers might be waking up, there was rebuilt machinery on display and on offer, and there were a host of suppliers of sundries, all, no matter how good, 50 years behind the times the Germans were talking about in the Convention Centre. Nevertheless, the exhibition was a more realistic appraisal of what the Indian printing industry's requirements were than the German view.
The only things that caught my behind-the-times attention at the exhibition were the several large inkjet printers rolling out yards of 10-foot wide pictures in glorious colour and faithful reproduction. It was in the largest of these inkjet stallholders that I caught up with the only thing at the exhibition that made my eyes sparkle. And that was the picture featured here.
At Ess Dee Nutek's sprawling stall that covered the better part of one hall, the Sharmas, father and son, proudly claimed family acquaintance with Tamil Nadu's Governor and narrated how, when he visited their stall, they had shown His Excellency reproductions of a painting of Guru Gobind Singh, the soldier-saint who created the Khalsa. They had scanned it from a calendar and printed it, offering in minutes one artist the opportunity of admiring another artist's work. The Tamil Nadu Governor Surjit Singh Barnala is an enthusiastic and talented artist, I have long known, but whether he appreciated art reproduced by the new technologies I have not discovered.
S. MUTHIAH
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