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Indira Chowdhury

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

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International

I visited this Museum with my four and a half year old daughter, Rohini in the summer of 1992. I was at that time, a PhD student at SOAS, London. Rohini used to love going to the British Museum - especially the Egyptian Gallery where look at the Mummies and call them with great seriousness, "the mothers that are dead". She liked Museums but the day we visited the Van Gogh Museum, she had had more than her fill of museums - we had spent most of the morning at the Rijks Museum and now had arrived at Van Gogh. I was wondering if she would just dig in her heels and protest because she was tired. I wondered if I would have to rush through the viewing of my favourite painter. But I was in for a pleasant surprise. She stood mesmerised before Van Gogh's Irises. She would not move. She just looked at it with a fierce intensity for almost 20 minutes, then said I could go and see other paintings, but she was going to just see this one for the whole afternoon. We spent most of our time in front of Irises and saw the rest slowly. But she just couldnt stop telling me how beautiful this painting was. When we came back to London she wanted to know more about Van Gogh and I think we got some library books. After a while, she composed a song about Van Gogh and asked me to write it down for her. She used to sing it very solemnly. Here is a photo of the page on which I wrote the song for her along with my notes.

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