A Dab of Magyar Paint
When old friend Werner Fornos, recipient of the United Nations Population Award (for highlighting demographic issues) and currently president of Global Population Education, invited me to a conference in Budapest, I reflected on Hungarians who came to my mind. There weren’t many. There was actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, music composers Liszt and Bartok, financial wizard George Soros and, closer to home, the 102-year-old Fori, widow of B.K. Nehru, who resides in Kasauli, in Himachal. And, of course, there was the half-Hungarian, Amrita Shergil, widely considered India’s earliest and pioneering ‘modern’ painter, most of whose works are at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. So, when I arrived in Budapest, my first quest was to make a pilgrimage to her home. The guidebooks I had were of no help. Gauri Shankar Gupta, the Indian...
