Artist becomes live sculpture for awareness on farmers’ issues

The man in question is artist Paramesh Golad, who turns himself into a live sculpture, for a cause — to raise awareness about agriculture and farmers among urban population.

“People living in cities are so detached from villages and agriculture that they often misunderstand that farmers’ issues will not affect the urban population, which is not true. If farmers suffer, everybody suffers in one way or the other. When I transform myself into a sculpture, my trousers have social media symbols and my tie has signs of currency notes, indicating that we are so engrossed in things which are insignificant in the larger picture,” says Paramesh, who has been conducting this campaign for the last two years. 

Having come from an agricultural family, Paramesh has seen the struggles farmers go through and as an artist, turning into a live sculpture is his way of telling people that farmers’ issues can’t be ignored. Paramesh thinks people working in the IT sector can do a lot more for the welfare of farmers. “There have been instances of IT professionals quitting their high-profile jobs to take up farming full-time, but that’s not enough. They should use their expertise of their specialisation to uplift agriculture,” he says. 

Paramesh has already held such campaigns in Bengaluru and Kochi this year and says the response was phenomenal. “I’m not sure in what way it impacted them and how long it would last, it definitely touched them in some way,” he says. Paramesh is from Karnataka. When we ask his stand on the Cauvery issue, he says, “I represent the farming community from everywhere.”