Groundhog day

This artwork is titled Groundhog Day, inspired by the iconic 1993 film where the protagonist wakes to the same day again and again, trapped in an endless loop until he begins to transform from within. The story is funny, philosophical and unsettling all at once, inviting us to ask: What if repetition isn’t punishment, but a mirror… a chance to truly wake up?

We’re told that time marches forward like a disciplined parade, but my culture whispers something more fluid, more astonishing. It says we live inside Maya… a luminous illusion where every experience feels convincing, yet everything is ultimately part of a grander, playful consciousness. Time and space, it says, aren’t iron chains. They are props. Scenery. Moving backdrops built to help the soul remember itself.

It’s a lot like flicking through TV channels. With one click you’re in an old John Wayne western, feeling the grit, the solitude, the dusty moral landscape. Another click and you’re soaring through the slick adrenaline world of a Tom Cruise blockbuster, wrapped in speed, ambition, survival and spectacle. Each story feels real while you’re in it. Each story absorbs you completely. But behind all those shifting worlds, there remains someone utterly still, utterly aware:

The one holding the remote.

That is the soul. Timeless. Unhurried. Curious. Watching us step into role after role: immigrant and citizen, wanderer and settler, doubter and believer, fragile human and defiant phoenix. Sometimes we replay the same emotional narrative simply because it feels safer. Familiarity can feel like home, even when it quietly limits us. But there is another invitation always humming beneath the surface:

What if we dare to change the channel?

What if we trust the unknown instead of fearing it? What if we stretch beyond identity, beyond habit, beyond inherited expectations, and venture into a life not yet scripted? The unknown isn’t darkness. It is possibility. Awakening is less about escaping the illusion and more about becoming lucid within it, recognising ourselves as both character and creator, dreamer and dream.

So here I stand, stitched from East African childhood skies, Indian philosophy, British city grit, Bollywood colour, and science-fiction imagination. I live inside Maya, but I wink back at it. I honour the loop, but I refuse to be hypnotised by it. Because once you know the soul is holding the remote, life stops being something that happens to you… and becomes something you consciously shape.

If life is a film, I want mine to stay surprising. To stay awake. To stay brave enough to move beyond reruns.

The soul already knows how to switch universes.
The only question is:
Do we keep watching the same story…
or are we finally ready to change the channel?