With the Parsis, there’s always reason to celebrate, to drink and dance, to twist and shout. There are always deliciously funny stories to be told about one’s wife, and tender, loving ones about one’s bike. And anything can be a feast if it’s "par-eedu (on eggs)!”
A little known fact about the community is that they are also great connoisseurs of the body. One winter’s evening every year, hundreds of Parsis throng to a dusty mid-town baug to celebrate the community’s most able, muscular bodies at an annual Zoroastrian power-lifting and bodybuilding championship.
(Top) Adi Patel, at 75 years, hangs upside down; (center) Viraf Panthaki, a former bodybuilder, now a judge, watches the show; (below) a rapt audience; (facing page, top): Contestants exhibiting their brawn; (below) a bespectacled muscleman gives a pose
Aparna Jayakumar’s lens visits this strange scene and weaves a narrative about the gleaming contestants and their cool spectators. Drawing on the community’s own inimitable humor, she presents an imaginative point of view on this vibrant, unselfconscious and very alive celebration of the Parsi life-force.
Using deliberately misguided frames, exaggerated tones and deep saturated color, Jayakumar draws attention to the gaze between the spectator, the subject and the subject-as-spectator.
While the championship is a fun-filled spectacle for everyone involved, it is underpinned by the dark irony of the community’s supposed decline. Jayakumar invents characters, follows a plot-line and uses the cinematographic shot/reverse-shot construction, making "Flex, Feroze!” something of a tragicomic movie.
Copies of the prints are available with Aparna Jayakumar, e-mail: aparna. jay@gmail.com; mobile: 7738379371.