Artist Jaikishan Tada on his series Time Stood Still

Artist Jaikishan on his series Time Stood Still

Destiny struggles to reassert itself, and sometimes happily it succeeds, wrote Dean Koontz in Lightning.

As a boy, Jaikishan Tada was so enamoured by the works of cartoonist RK Laxman, he wanted to be a cartoonist when he grew up. “I would have been in class seven or eight at that time; I was tremendously influenced by his illustrations. I wanted to become a cartoonist too.”

However, life took him in a different direction and Jaikishan became a software engineer, working in that field for more than 20 years. “It was in 2008, that I began to feel I had to do something that would bring me peace and happiness, something that would stay with me. Those thoughts re-ignited my interest in art and I began to paint,” says the Bengaluru-based artist.

“Whether it was destiny or not, I cannot say, but my wife Ranjitha Acharya, is also an artist,” he adds. “She’s been my teacher, mentor and first critic.”

Apart from Ranjitha’s inputs, Jaikishan says he used to pore over the works of great masters, studying their lives and works from their early years. “That was my art education — looking at their work in chronological order, learning how their art evolved and gleaning as much information I could from the internet.”

Jaikishan was so focused on his newfound passion, that he quit his job in 2009, to pursue art full time. “My sole aim was to hold just one exhibition of my work. We were living in Hyderabad at the time and our home was filled with paintings my wife and I were working on.”

For a person who yearned for one solo show, Jaikishan enjoyed four exhibitions in the span of two years, and despite going back to a corporate setup, the call of art was so strong, he opted for an early retirement in 2022. “I found it difficult to balance both my job as well as my passion.”