Lunch with the FT: Old master

We had arranged to meet in his friend’s shoe shop in the opulent Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel in downtown Mumbai - which was somewhat ironic since M.F. Husain never wears shoes. But in a concession to convention, or the Mumbai winter, he is sporting black socks as he ambles to our restaurant upstairs, a sprightly 90-year-old, unmistakable with his white hair and beard and an 18-inch paint brush in his hand.

The socks and the brush, he says, are partly for effect - small symbols of a marketing instinct that, along with a prolific talent and boundless energy, has kept Husain in the vanguard of contemporary Indian art for the past half century.