Ep 441: Ravikumar Kashi Is in Play Mode

April 6, 2026·3 hr 36 min·3 clips

While other kids bought fireworks for Diwali, this future artist spent his festival money on paint instead.

What do they know of art? The cold open borrows that question and lets it bounce off cricket, England, history, and the human condition. Amit Varma starts with wonder, remembering a visit to the artist's studio where works in progress hit him hard just by lying around the room. From there, the conversation gets tactile. Paper, cloth, wax, metal: the artist keeps returning to the problem of how plain matter can carry an idea. He is not only talking technique. The harder question is whether another person can read the work, see it, feel what went into it. That took years. He says the recent work feels stronger because his hold on language, material, and image has changed. Paper, especially, shifts under the conversation. For almost two decades, he tried to make it strong, sturdy, almost defiant about its fragility. Then 2023 moved him somewhere else. With pulp painting, he began letting paper stay ephemeral and letting vulnerable images come through. He is wary of making that sound too neat. An artist does not simply decide to become vulnerable on schedule. One work may take two weeks, and also forty years. Books keep wandering in too, including one on transactional analysis, which gives him fresh ways to think about relationships, scripts, destiny, and how tangled people are with one another.

As heard by us

A slow, tactile conversation about art, reading, paper, and the decades it can take to find a visual language.

Ravikumar Kashi's conversation with Amit Varma follows an artist thinking through how art draws strength from the world outside art. Kashi speaks about history, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, and reading as ways of widening the artist's field of attention, but the episode…

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Why you'd press play

An artist who spent two decades making paper stronger finally let it be fragile -- then everything opened up.

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