I had first seen a Van Gogh painting in Edinburgh, some 12 years ago. There, starkly standing on the white walls of the art gallery, the dark, wiry branches of his olive trees seemed to grow, swish and pull me inwards. I knew then, I would have a life-long affair with Van Gogh. So when an exihibition of 65 of his paintings and accompanying letters to Theo, his brother, came to London, I knew neither the 2 hour wait to get into the Royal Academy of Arts nor the odd raindrop pelting my shoulders could deter me from attending.

It's always been interesting to me how an European appreciation of art or literature is so closely tied into the life of the artist and writer himself. Tracing and documenting lives is a cultural ethos to the western mind. In fact, an appreciation of Van Gogh would be impossible if the canvas of his life didn't present itself as the backdrop for his art. His almost dour paintings at the beginning of his career in Holland change into a madness of colour when he arrives in France. Perhaps it was a bit imitative of what was going on in France in terms of the Impressionist movement but nonetheless, it marks his own personal journey from a man, devotedly religious, to one who forsakes austerity and lustily embraces life. His later paintings, when the artist finally comes into his own and yet is driven by madness into a mental asylum at Saint Remy, are eerily dark. The blue mountains and cypress tress grow into thick, swirling blobs of paint on the canvas, almost unrecognizable, but he no longer cares that people may fail to recognize them as such. His landscapes grow and grow while the people in them diminish to the point of irrelevance and, the dark purples and blues of his canvas here and there, yield to the odd splotch of strawberry-red or the yellow of butter-cup fields. He has relinquished all, forsaken all boundaries at this point. He is driven entirely by his own frenetic imagination, his relentless desire to express which remains inexpressible inside his mind and an inexhaustible energy to acquire perfection. In the 70 days just before he shot himself, he painted almost 70 canvases considered to be his most mature work.

In contrast we Indians show a marked lack of curiosity about our artists. We know a little bit about F N Souza's life, a situation in large part remedied by writer Vivek Menezes who shared a close friendship with the man in his later years, and Souza's own words survive to explain the inner turmoil of his mind and his political leanings. Yet, a robust documentation of his life story remains unresearched. Perhaps our greatest crime will be the treatment meted out to M F Hussain. So much time has been wasted hounding the man rather than getting to know the living legend; where he takes his inspiration from, his political views, his friendships, his loves, his muse, in short his life. It is a crime for which, future generations of Indians looking back over the shoulder of history, will not forgive us.

In the snaking queues outside the Royal Academy of Arts and amidst the thick, stifling crowds inside its dimly lit halls, I couldn't find a single Indian face. This didn't surprise me. I have never come across a fellow Indian in an art gallery. At a certain level the middle-class of our society is emotionally stunted. We carry the surrogated utilitarian dreams of our parents; a college education, job, marriage and parenthood. We view anything non-utilitarian with suspicion or disdain. So we squander away the potential of our youth, investigation and curiosity and never blossom into a higher level of consciousness. In our later years we wither into nothingness, purged of any creativity either in thought, dialogue or output, reduced to the banal utterances of a child. Is it any wonder then, that we have exiled M F Hussain into the deserts of Qatar to die the death of a Baddu?