He wants to be free, free like his flowing hair, or hair which he would love to imagine to be flowing, though its not much and hardly should worry his Chinese-born wife Chameli to the extent of taking up the scissors now and then. But free he wants to be to create anythng he likes, even himself. Not stripped of the frills of the transcient forms of the material that for many is an intrusion into reality. But all wrapped in its laces and beads of green weeds and blooming vines, and covered in the pollen of flowers of the brightest hues that earth can offer. Yet wearing a chuckle amisdst all that, while complaining that many people miss the humour in his art.

In his self-portrait, he is the creator seated like Brahma with a brush in one hand, a pot of water or oil in the other, a rainbow in yet another and a long stem of a lily in a fourth one. But his self-important posture, reflects amusement at the creation, the creator and perhaps the spectator.

He protests in his introduction about the bias against what is derogatively called `ornamental' and says defiantly that he is all for it. And the tribal women of Rajasthan walk all decked up for the mela, arrow in hand, to choose their men at Baneshwar.``Indian art has to have an aesthetics of its own. And being decorative is part of it,'' he says.

Meanwhile his bronze tree, stands in the most enchanting shape of female form, her clothes almost a vision woven with flowing vines and blossoms. The earth again is a female form standing atop once a tortoise or a fish. The entire collection of works on tribals in Rajasthan tells a story of intimate experience of the artist among a group of tribals, their chief Dhowraji, their deity Ramdev, their flowers, their belles in the desert terrain of his fancy which has been his inspiration and favourite haunt since the early seventies. The works are all subdued by the understatement that is provided by the chuckle of the omnni present artist now seen as a holy cow in the temple, now as a bee." Many people miss the humour in my art,'' he complains.

He is god now not because he can cure all ills but he is cured of all ills, after a session with a tribal, as he says in the introduction. The ills being the artist's presumptuous burden of being a god, above humour and above the need for butterflies and the nectar of the earth. Hence he sings with his paint the Gita Govinda of the bees and insects and not of superhuman figures like Radha and Krishna. And ends his introduction saying: ``I was cured. I never painted `politically correct' paintings nor cut my hair short again''.