RICKSHAW WALLAH

Rickshaw driver-turned-artist Bapi Das personifies this edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s focus on the marginalised. But it’s his work, not his background, that commands attention. A series of embroidered panels he created over many months peering out on his squalid neighbourhood in north Kolkata’s Narkeldanga through a mounted magnifying glass resemble the tapestry of life he observes in the circular rear-view mirror of his rickshaw. In the first frame, a child releases paper boats into the concrete road of a megapolis. In the last, a man stands under a lamppost with an auto rickshaw in the background. “From a paper boat to an auto… the dream ends,” Das says.