tis true mate

#Profundity part 2

tis true, tis true.

i would vouch for it

if you needed me to.

You and me

#Profundity part 1

,

Chai without biscuit is like you without me.

Profound lines that were co-created during college years when we used to drink our 1.5 rupee cutting chai and eat two biscuits along with it.
Every day.
Dedicated to my pals Uditi and Divya

Score a boundary!

The minute I read that boundary was this week's Illustration Friday topic, like any Indian, an image of the green cricket pitch came to my head. Oh the joy when the team/player I am supporting smashes the ball across the field to score a boundary!

Illustration Friday- Boundary

Pappad Pacman

Chor Baazari

I recently visited Chor Baazar, one of the largest flee markets in India. Being a Mumbai-ite, it was shameful that I hadn't visited it after living here for so many years. I finally managed to go there a week ago, with some friends and was very glad that I finally did!

A few years ago, a friend of mine had given me this Beatles record as a gift as I love the Beatles. Since then I have been treasuring it in my cupboard and I'm hoping to frame it and put it up in my house sometime!

Many of my friends had already visited Chor Baazar and told me about the record covers that are available there. After a lot of walking, bargaining and rummaging through piles of covers, I found these. I think they are precious! I absolutely love some of this artwork and it almost makes me sad that analogue sound storage is dead :(

I paid about Rs. 40 for each of these covers and came back home and showed them to my mom all excited about them. She of course laughed and said, "40! You are paying to collect more rubbish at home!." She told me about all the gramaphone plates that used to lie around in my grannie's house and how they gave it away to the 'paper-kaaran' (raddiwalah or the person who collects materials to recycle). I sighed and asked her why they had given away the player and ALL the records! She smiled and said, why didn't you insist on keeping all the cassettes and our old tape played when we left our previous house?! The same way. In another few years, you'll probably pay this much, or even more to buy our own old cassette back from chor baazar!"

This is when I found out the fun fact that the goods in Chor baazar, as the name suggests is assumed to be stolen goods!

'There's a saying about this area, if you lose anything in Mumbai you can buy it back from the "Chor Bazaar"'- Wikipedia

Anyway, I still bought the pretty looking record covers and have added them to my 'hopefully will be framed soon and hung on my wall' pile.

Illustration Friday- Toy

One could argue that one is never too old for toys, but when I saw this weeks topic I felt so, well at some level. I still have all my kinder surprise miniature toys hidden behind my clothes in my cupboard but I don't end up building my castle and spending fifteen minutes trying to figure out whether the red mushroom and the little dwarf should be placed to the right or the left side of the castle. Being a designer these are the toys I come across sometimes. When I have to make 2D toys for other people! I can't decide if it is a happy or a sad thing!

Great Advertising!

I visited delhi recently and while walking to Jama Masjid, passed a huge market where the kitsch-iest stuff was sold. Some of it was awesome. Those jazzy belts with the big peace signs or silver doves, the rainbow shorts that had nike written all over or the ghastly women's 'nighties' which would probably scare away the general public at night were some of the delights. In the middle of all this though, I saw some great advertising. I was highly impressed when a watch wallah was promoting his waterproof watches this way. Isn't it awesome? Why haven't any of the fancy retail stores thought of this! I can't think of a better way to advertise for waterproof watches!

Finally Submitted

So, I am finally back, after graduating and travelling to Kumaun and Delhi for a fellowship and conference which I will soon be writing about! To sort out the backlog in life, I shall start with one of the eventful things I haven't written about. My sketchbook submission. As you all would have seen in the previous post, I was taking part in the Sketchbook Project 2011 and many other artists and illustrators around the world were too! The sketchbook was due in January 2011 and of course I started to panic about 2 weeks before the submission date. I had paid so much for this book, now, I HAD to finish it! Uditi and me, sat down for two full days and nights, drawing away, scrounging for idea after idea to fill in our sketchbook pages, each of which had a theme. Mine was 'Down your street' and Uditi's was 'Make mine a Double'. You can check her work out here, on her blog. So we scribbled away, non-stop, sitting at the same spot on the cushions in Disha's house. Some pages were funny, some childish and some down-right bad but in the end, we were so happy and proud and this was the first sketchbook either of us had ever finished entirely! I have so many of them lying around at home with the first half or the last few pages entirely empty. We posted our sketchbooks on time only to find out that the deadline had been extended by a week! I guess it was all worth it though. I would have never finished if I didn't have that tight deadline! Below are some of the images from the mad-mad nights!

Happily done and the one last photo before posting it away! This is followed by the cover, the back and some other random pages from the sketchbook.

Alannah, my friend made me a shrimp last week. It looks like this, is dressed in pink, hides comfortable inside my red log book and only sticks its head out to warn me when I am not working.

Acrobat- Illustration friday

Acrobatic Germs

Got my sketchbook!

Receiving a package is so exciting, always :) I got my sketchbook yesterday through mail and am very excited to get started on this project! Hope to start filling up the pages soon. I will be uploading my pages on the blog as I finish them.

http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject/rules

Bunny Suicide

My friend Vishnu decided he wanted to get us sweet looking Lindt Easter bunnies as gifts. The bunny looked so cute I didn't have the heart to eat him and kept it him my cupboard for 3 weeks. Sadly he was going to expire soon.

So, with great difficulty, I opened him up after deciding that he would rather die in my stomach after being well appreciated. Munch munch munch...

R.I.P bunny. You were yummy.

You can see the post that Vishnu has written about the various sizes of bunnies he got on his blog!

Illustration Friday- Star Gazing

There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds

- David Bowie, Starman

I had a really cool pair of binoculars in school. I used to run to the terrace of my hostel after dinner and zoom in to spot stars and constellations. That is the best sky I have ever seen (even though its all the same sky!). So pristine. Unpolluted and clear. Even now, when I visit school with my friends, we lie down in the open football field and stare at the stars. I keep a watch out for the starman.

Village life come-back

I always think I should not make up lame excuses for not-updating my blog, but sadly, looks like excuses are an integral part of life. First came the summer, which is time to laze around and now we are working on our diploma projects till December, which obviously takes most, actually ALL my time. Hence the sloppy- no updates phase, even though I seriously don't want this to die. So, I finally did something that I can put up here. Ok, so I am working in a village in Pavagada Taluk (Andhra-Karnataka border). I keep visiting the school there and coming back to bangalore to assimilate my data. More on my diploma project blog. http://www.whosebehaviour.blogspot.com/

Please do visit it and let me know what you think!

I realised that village life is so blissful. Calm, quiet and serene. It was almost surreal for me as I used to drink my morning coffee with cool breeze in my air, facing the mountains, in the field with cows and goats roaming around me, or on the terrace of the house I was staying in. The terrace was my retreat. It faced a bunch of houses and an old temple. The rest of it was just green. I used to go there to ideate and would end up sketching, staring at the cows eating banana leaves at the bottom of the house, watching the dog that had climbed up another small roof in front of me or just enjoying the cool breeze and starring at the greenery. Also, this was the only place in the village I got full signal on my phone, sadly an essential. Overall, I kind of used to live here after work.

This was the first time my visit was long enough for me to walk around in the evening and document the water bodies in the village (something I wanted to do for my work). Here is where I met my new friends who showed me around the village. I went to photograph the open well where all of C.K.Pura gets its drinking water from.

Here I met Mounica, Asha and Siri, three curious little girls who had come to take drinking water back to their homes after school was over. I went upto them and asked them if I could take a photo, in my broken Kannada. They obliged and asked me what I was doing there. After I told them, they decided to take me around the village, since it was play time anyway! Mounica graciously lent me her cycle (one that the government had provided her with to go to school) so that I could go for a spin as well!

I asked them about their school and home and what their parents did. Asha insisted that I go to her house and her mother gave me ground nuts that she had harvested. It was all very overwhelming! We walked on the bund and they showed me the 'kere' which practically had no water in it. It was a beautiful view though. They told me that we wouldn't be standing where we were if it were raining. The water would overflow till it reached the fields. This water was mostly used for agriculture. They even showed me the marked stone which showed them how much water there was left.

On the way, the showed me many plants and explained to me, what they do with it. They were not aware of the names of the plants, but they knew the uses.

"These are the thorns that they use to pierce their ears and noses in the village" said Asha, pointing to her nose.

"These flowers are squeezed. There is some liquid that comes out. The make soap out of that!" said an excited Akhila

Asha uses these long stemmed plants as her skipping rope, something she plays with everyday.

After this, we visited the Kalyani, a tank they have a bath in before they visit the temples and on festivals. They also swim in it occasionally. Akhila poured a few pots of water on the new cement slab they had built for a god's statue. The water from the Kalyani was pure and clean, she said.

I sat one evening to draw the kalyani, while I dipped my feet in the icy cold water. The same water that these kids swam in and had a bath in before going to the temple.

Asha loved what she saw in my log book and insisted that it was 'very beautiful'. I thanked her for it. She wanted a picture with what I had drawn. She told me she loved to draw, but they did not have art classes or paints in school. I promised to get a set the next time I went.