One of the biggest conundrums that confronts creative people, those desirous of making manifest an idea that has consumed their mind space, is whether to wait until things fall into place, until you can find the resources to realise a project, or whether to proceed anyway, absence of funds notwithstanding. Many of us, especially those not born with caste or class privilege rely on our ability to economise, to make do with whatever we are either handed or have managed to forage together while learning to swallow our understandable contempt and resentment for and towards those who are, in fact, given things on a silver platter without having to lift too many fingers. This predicament has moral implications for many artists and creative practitioners. Whenever I have been asked to speak to young art students or curators I always present them with this dilemma. What do you do when you have a fantastic vision and detailed plan for what you want to accomplish, but the only person eager to offer you luxurious funding, no strings attached, is a business person with multiple holdings, one of which involves making pellet guns that are used against Kashmiri dissenters, or weapons, like tear gas, used against Palestinians? Do you accept the money? Can you withstand knowing that in your desperation, you have made yourself complicit in “art washing”, morally corrupt business people’s method of profiting off the presumed nobility of the artistic endeavour in order to cleanse themselves off the guilt of extractivist undertakings?

Usually I am informed that the entire system is corrupt and pitted against the individual who seeks, genuinely, to subvert it, so what’s the big deal in simply accepting the money, goes the argument. I’m not suggesting even for a second that I am myself not complicit. I am not positioning myself as occupying a moral high ground. However, I learned, from almost ten years of working within the art world both in India and internationally, that if we don’t engage actively in critiquing the system, it’ll continue to perpetuate itself and be the norm. One of the most convenient ways in which the status quo gets perpetuated is when we assume there is no other way, that the corruption is so endemic that we must adapt to it.