Punjabi society for long has been suffering from not only schizophrenia but also self-induced amnesia. We try to erase experiences that create dark shadows and traumas in our lives and make a world where we can pretend that these delusions never unfolded. To hobble along by cauterising memory, expunging histories became a survival tool. Years of a brutalised Punjab have left scars and bruises that bleed through the land.
In this devastated state lives a culture that is robust and joyous, that lends itself to a mythmaking industry that dressed its reality in a way where the ‘copy’ became more real than the ‘original’. A reproduction is usually a blurred image of the real; a simulacrum where fact and fiction get spiced and sweetened by a deadly poison. A liquid reality where the false becomes real, the image, the shadow; to pick and choose, accept or reject, from this whirring carousel.
