How many Indian lawyers and judges started out being kids who just liked novels… and who wrote their literary masterpieces in the form of contracts, judicial filings, judgments? How many of our Nobel laureates are languishing in government offices? Is it possible that the little human parts that make up the faceless machinery of Indian bureaucracy are still contain creative spirits just need tending to?

Peering down into a pool of water Narcissus saw himself; Arjuna saw the eye of the fish. The painter, poet and physician Gieve Patel saw passing reflections of trees, banana leaves, clouds and sky. Patel documented these abstractions of passing time in drinking wells on his ancestral estate in his series “Looking into a Well.”

The view of the wells gave Patel a painterly pause: how to represent water with paint? How to represent transparency with colour? As he observed the water’s surface-level changes — the rising and falling with the seasons — he saw different objects, shapes, colours inside the well fighting for representation within the well. He saw the eternal renegotiation of the boundaries of coexistence.