Contextual Contradictions

- By Our Glib Reporter

It is an undestatement to say that celebrity DJ Rashmi Kakkar's new designer home is a celebration of minimalist modernity. For it is much more than that. It is a statement of contextual clarity, and traditional purity. Rashmi herself clad in an all glass see through nightie greeted us at the glazed entrance looking radiant against the Kerala palm placed with a nonchalant ease against a backdrop of carelessly strewn children from her first marriage. The compositional clarity of the entrance itself was striking. What was inside and what was outside, was delineated with deliberate cold conviction. And yet, in many ways the entrance also reflected the duality of this side and that side in a manner that was both structural and confrontational. Structural because of the heavy almost wooden door placed deliberately between the two contrasting spatial realms. Confrontational because of the ease with which Rashmi stood as a distillation of the human condition - a fleshy construct, exposed, vulnerable and against the profusion of plant life, almost irredeemably provocative. Symbolically, out of context, the imitation Mahogany sofa formed a gravitational focus to the Bloplast chairs arranged off-centre to suggest the fragility of urban life. Given to underdeveloped sociological instinct, it could easily have led to programmatic misunderstanding and hence spatial and visual embarassement. But the interior designer was rightfully exercising his or her prerogative to determine the positive constraints of the Genus Loci. In so doing, the floor had been cleverly placed directly on the ground. Yet, it was clever without being smart, arrogant without a hint of self-righteousness. Further in, the juxtapositions got more violent. A period center table, part Bolivian, part Chinese, was turned at an angle to suggest an attitude of psychological disorientation and create a playful schaema that crossed conventional ornamentation bounds and just lay there mocking 'Try me, you bastard, just try me.' Fooled into believing that we were only pawns in this game of simulated multifunctionality, we headed unknowingly into the lyrical cadences of the dining area, where the ordinary needs of a construction science had met their match in a metaphysical balance of such complexity that it was hard to separate the delicate nuances from the standard subtleties. For there, in the midst of the room, topped by a table cloth generously stained by dal was a metaphor so utterly contemporary and volumetric, that it was hard not to be fooled into corruptive design paradox. Directly behind, was an old fridge, shaking vigorously in the summer heat, and through its actions making it abundantly clear that the deeper structure of the interior professes fundamental linkages to contemporary contradictions inherent in the ambiguity between barbaric functionality and emotive traditionalism, both of which were very close to Rashmi Kakar's heart. She removed her glass dress for fear of compositional disparity and we proceeded into the bedroom.

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