Remembrance

Sudipto and I were partners in work and life for 35 years, until he left suddenly over a year ago. 22nd of September 2019 to be exact. He left as if he were leaving a party, suddenly remembering some small thing he forgot to do – maybe put off the gas or something similar – and rushed off. I like to think he went home. He didn’t get to say goodbye, but that’s who he was.

For both of us work was very much part of who we were and are. It’s not actually what we did, but how we thought and felt. We literally grew up together in the work itself and collaborated for most of our professional lives. Even when we worked on different things, we checked back with each other frequently. We argued, tore apart, analyzed, dissected and examined minutely together. This extended to all aspects of work – the logistical, the professional, career, the philosophical and the aesthetic. He was as much my teacher as I like to believe I was his. Perhaps the universe was our teacher.

Its been more than a year – a year of disbelief and grief. But also a kind of hardening and strengthening. He is still around, though inside and through me. He is still arguing, but now, more often I win. At the core, we agreed, and that is what makes me enough, makes me represent this joint thought that we built over a lifetime. Externally we are not similar, but internally, we are two sides of a coin.

When I first met Sudo, he felt like some kind of mad genius. He didn’t read much, but was able to connect and put together things with the kind of sophistication that I rarely encountered in more ‘educated’ people. He worked with tremendous energy and sometimes missed the mark, but rarely cared. The outcome was not important. I was the more professional, ‘designerly’ one, who focused on getting things completed. Sudo was the quintessential artist.

Professionally we had a mad career together, we did so many crazy, wonderful things – we were both curious and dived headlong into all sorts of projects together. And we learnt something from each experience, which we used in the next. This is probably because we ‘reflected’ together all the time and we could extract something from the bleakest work. We had dry spells of course, when there was no work, or we were bored. Sometimes we took on stupid or bad work just to keep going. But somehow we never worried about money.

Sometimes I worried about not doing ‘meaningful’ work, but never Sudo. He made meaning out of everything, or didn’t do the work at all.