Pictures and words

Yesterday after attending a meeting, tired, I sat at the oat of IGNCA for an event 'Ghumakkad Narayan'. It was a story telling session.A very animated lady from London was telling an Arabian story. Before that one lady told a story of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, an R.S.S visionary. It was late and it takes about an hour to reach back home. I decided to wait for the next session trusting on my intuition that the next thing will be fun. My intuition was right! trust is the best thing you can give to yourselves and also to your enemies. This was an old story, the story of Ramayana performed by shadows. The shadows were of the leather puppets performed by a talented family of Kerala. It was their 19th generation performing this art. Backstage. This is the 19th generation of the family performing this art. 'Tholpavakoothuis' a form of  shadow puppetry.

Andrews bar in calengute was once filled with hippies and tourists in the 70s and 80s. The owner, a charming Goan lady lost her husband, Andrews after five years of their marriage. She now proudly runs the bar, handles everything but is nostalgic about the bars golden period and her husband. Meanwhile she put posters of her favorite footballers on the wall.

I never liked the idea of selfies. All the selfies I took were mock-candids. Self-portraits are our fantasies. We all know the angle from which we look our best. The angle which can hide our fat face, our the double chin, our round nose, or our receding hairline. We hide  ourselves  behind a smile, a pout or a serious face. What if we do something completely opposite?

Delhi transforms itself completely after the sunset and this is what I love about it. Yesterday I had an adventurous company so we sneaked in the Lodhi Gardens at night. I've read about the gardens in 'Delhi noir', a collection of small dark stories of the city. The beautiful landscape changes drastically. It turns more mystique surrounded by a strange silence, like its contemplating about the things it witnessed throughout the day. It does witness a lot of things, Some of the darkest secrets of the jovial city of Delhi. Only if it was to reveal them someday to someone. The rain water harvesting unit of the gardens

Join some wooden pieces to make a frame. Stretch the t-shirt and staple/nail it. Cover it with cardboard. Paint to make it attractive! 

The season of internships is back and this is the exact time when thousands of freshly baked portfolios will be spammed to the already filled servers of poor architecture studios. I, another poor fresh graduate am sharing some thoughts on the portfolios. I am not an expert in this nor is my folio the best in the world. These are some thoughts which I believe can be helpful. You can take cues from them or choose a completely different path! 1. The shelf life of a portfolio is about a minute. Good offices receive thousands of portfolios for internships, they(mostly junior staff) quickly skim through the folio and shortlists. So make sure you have more graphics and less text. Because each page will get almost 2-5 seconds. 2.   Design according to the monitor screen.  Your folio will always be viewed on a computer screen unless you send a printed copy. So, make it in the ratios favorable and comfortable to screen viewing. This will allow the viewer a seamless view of e...

A month long journey which bent, changed and destroyed many of my perspectives towards social justice, inequality and life. I was on a scholarship by Spic Macay. It was one of the toughest journeys I have been on, so far, both from outside and the inside.  Sleeping in the park, bathing on footpath and drinking tanker water taught me the value of small luxuries of life, and I was not alone, there were 200 more people. It gave me strength. Little luxuries of life which we generally ignore like a toilet.  It was also a time when I made precious personal relationships with people so devoted to a change like Aruna Roy, Nikhil dey,  Shankar singh, Naurti Bai, Kavita Shrivastava and Gurpreet ji. Meanwhile Shankar Singh became Sankar mama and Aruna Roy became Aruna Nani and Kishan Singh became Kisan Kaka.  I met different brilliant people from all walks of life working towards a strong collective cause, most of them were the people who left high paying high po...