PIMP MY RIDE is a portrait of Nagraj, a five-foot-long spectacled cobra that was my pet while I lived in Jaipur, Rajasthan on a Fulbright grant for painting in 1997-1998.  Jaipur is a rather hectic town in which the general populace is forced to hustle to survive.

Most of the constant stream of tourists that pass through the historic and colorful town are only there for a few days at most, so enterprising individuals must work fast on them in order to eke out a basic existence.  The schemes and cons are as numberless as the masses of touts, beggars, salesmen, Casanovas, and crooked cops.

I was destined to be there for months, researching and making Rajput miniature paintings, and although I grew out my beard and dressed in local clothing, I was still besieged by all manner of insistent proposals, requests and demands.  It seemed that every minute of the day I stopped to speak to a different person, explaining in Hindi that I would be there for some time and that I wasn’t interested in what they were hawking.  The very next day, however, there appeared another multitude to replace the crowd I had fended off earlier. 

I knew that if I had to continue every day in this fashion, I would soon be too drained to work properly.  So met the snake charmers and convinced them to sell me a cobra.

Although its poison glands had been removed, it still had its fangs, and it was quite frightening to many people. The locals, especially, hold superstitions about the snakes and believe them to hold spiritual power.

In the first days of owning a cobra, I didn’t yet have a tokri, or basket, so I kept it in my backpack.  When I was next plagued with aggressive crowds surrounding me, I instructed them in Hindi to “come closer, look, look here,” and when they got oppressively close, I pulled out my snake.  People ran screaming, and I immediately cleared a twelve-foot circle of space around me.  I wrapped the snake around my neck and continued to walk down the street.  From that point forward, I wasn’t ever disturbed again.