Awarding achievement is easy, recognising and encouraging potential takes heart. We at Toto Funds the Arts know what it’s like to be young and driven with a passion for the arts - music, writing, photography, drama - and yet feel hesitant to take on the world. We know this hesitation and risk marks the art of the urban youth particularly. Much of your art is neither classical nor folk, not national or regional, its form is hybrid, of mixed origins, influenced as much by the local as the international. This means that you must strive harder to gain encouragement and validation for your creativity, because you are contesting the categories that have been used, traditionally, to judge the arts. It also means that your art presages India’s future.
The exuberance of this future was embodied in Angirus ‘Toto’ Vellani - in his love for music, literature, cinema, theatre, criticism, in the energy with which he participated in these fields, inspiring others of his generation to find their own way, helping to mould their perception and taste.
In a tragic accident in 2004, Toto passed away. TFA is the memory of his love, and of the pleasure he took in art, in people, and in creation. Welcome to Toto Funds the Arts.
