India, Nov. 4 -- Your book Art is a Voice celebrates art as "a tool for dissent". When did you become aware of the political and social functions of art, alongside the aesthetic?

In 2002, when my parents were accompanying me to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, for my entrance exam, a mob stopped the taxi that we were in. They asked my father to step out, asked him a few questions, and then let us go. At the peak of the Godhra riots, we managed to escape unscathed. The 10 days of being stuck on the college campus due to curfew was the time when I first began to probe, in my mind, privilege and religious identity. While we remained safe and well-fed on campus, the city around us was burning. Prior to this incident, I used to ...