Mumbai, March 29 -- While looking at sepia-toned family pictures on his occasional visits to his ancestral home at Danapur, Bihar, Subodh Gupta says he is always amused by his consistent absence from them. As the youngest of six children, it was easy to slink away with no one noticing.

That's no longer the case of course.

The 62-year-old artist, one of India's most celebrated, is in a ruminative mood ahead of his big Mumbai show that starts from April 3. If Gupta perfected the art of disappearance from family photos, he also mastered the art of appearance at Patna's College of Arts & Crafts. "There was a college, there were classrooms and a large dormitory; but no teachers." His parents, he says, took comfort in the fact that he was at ...