This is my first political piece. I was in India last summer. My sister’s kitchen was being remodeled and there was a heap of discarded pieces of plywood. There were some thin trimmings that showed the inside structure of thin layers of dark and light color wood in parallel lines. Late one night I was looking at these pieces and thinking of a cityscape. I was listening to the Voice of America. Mr. Bush was giving a speech about how well every thing was going in Iraq and the world. Everything was just marvelous, according to him.

The cityscape turned out to be the same view that I had painted before of Manhattan from Hoboken, New Jersey. However, there was an empty area left on the right side of the piece, due to its longer size. I decided to add the Varazono Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, in the empty space, as you would see it from New Jersey. That meant the statue would be seen from the backside.

As Mr. Bush was talking, I was thinking of the enormous amount of money the U.S. was spending on the war at the expense of the economy. I was thinking of the millions of jobs lost in the U.S. and how quarter of a million of Indians had to return to India because of that. Mr. Bush was talking about the Democracy in Iraq, and there was a governor’s recall election taking place in California. Senator, Ms. Finstein, wanted to ban the student visas to prevent the terrorists from entering the country. As I trimmed the shape of the statue, I was thinking of the passage that is engraved on it, welcoming the wretched and the refuge of the world and how She stands with the golden light for them. As a result of these contradictions, I decided to put statue facing New Jersey as if it has tuned her back to the world, which was the reality of the times!