Kutch and Delhi

This post has been waiting for quite some time to go up, partly due to lack of developed camera roll and mostly because of such a fatigued work schedule. I think when you take a month long break from work, you have to pay the price. Although, I don't really mind being in my room working all day, but this rush leaves you a bit old. Talking about the work break, I used my camera in limited amount and sketched only when I got the urge and boredom to. So, I have a few shots of Kala Dunger and White desert (the slushy white moon surface look a like where you can lose a foot at times deep into the mud beneath the salt layer) from Kutch. I spent one afternoon in the blinding sun and a night in the freezing car at White desert. Surrounded by so many barricades and concrete in our usual routine, the white desert footing was an unveiling of the surrounding cages, horizon was an endless thin line, not a jagged paragraph of buildings and dug up roads. The morning at Kala Dunger enveloped with an array of small hills and it's slowly disappearing shadows in the sunrise was saved warmly in the memory pockets. Here are some shots from Kutch - 

White Desert in the night time.

Kala Dunger

During the latter part of the travel, I left the camera inside and did a few sketches here and there. Since I packed very limited art materials due to luggage constraints, felt tip pens were my only weapon of choice.  I think the uncompromising yellow pages of my book tried their best to compensate for the little glamour. 

Samia at Jahanpanah City Forest

Hauz Khas

Baba

There are some other things that need to be blogged about too, hopefully soon. Lot of work to row through for now. 

Sketchcrawl 8, Lalbagh and Commercial Street

Thursday, 11th October
Nimmy and Sana hatched a plan to visit Lalbagh early in the morning at 6 o'clock to shoot a video for their travel scholarship and in this sweet little plan I was given a piece to chew on. I joined them early in the morning to draw the elders and the young ones jogging, meditating, laughing and gossiping for their healthy life. Although, my usual sketching areas have been crowded city market areas but denying the charm of twilit Lalbagh wouldn't have been fair. Covering our yawns and keeping our hopes alive we reached and soon got busy to our respective tasks. I climbed straight up a small hill to nestle myself on a stone to draw the huffing and puffing of the Bangalore crowd. Being a Thursday (office day), I knew that I didn't have much time to spend on elaborate sketches. Hence, swooshing around the photo inks was the best option for me and I didn't waste any time to get on to that. People are restless and when they have gathered with a purpose to be acrobatic in a park, then sketchers can throw of the luxury of neat sketches and better embrace the squiggly lines. I did quite a few quick sketches and spent a little more time on a couple of views. Here are the sketches of Lalbagh morning - 

Pigeons and pigeons.

A montage created out of composing quick sketches.

The moment before Sana dropped the ink on the stone.

We were there at Lalbagh for two hours and those were probably the best mornings I have spent in Bangalore so far and the blue colour stained hands were a proof. Yes, we spilled paint (honest mistake as Sana said) and while trying to clean it left it for the better or worse. Thanks to Sana and Nimmy for sharing this trip with me. 
photo credits: Nimmy Chacko

Saturday, 13th October
I remember when I had first joined Srishti, we were taken around on a small tour of the city where stationery, papers and other art materials are easily available. Commercial street was one of the places we visited and since then I have made numerous rounds of the commercial street and the neighbouring Ebrahim Sahib Street. Today, the roles were reversed and I was showing Commercial street to my colleague Kashmira. The clocks had turned back seven years when I was unravelling all the small branches and hidden shops on the street today. The whole street is a mix of old architecture dangling with billboards and giant store name boards. And this patchy amalgamation of old and new never ceases to fascinate me. Unlike the Lalbagh day, I spent good time on one drawing. I started pretty early on the sketch and by the time I was filling in details the landscape had changed drastically, the shop shutters had opened and a car got parked right in front of me to tinge the view. Here's a photo of the time I started drawing and the final sketch - 

And what better place to end the sketchcrawl other than Koshy's.

Mansapur

Mansapur is my nani's place (hometown of grandparents from maternal side) in Bihar. It is situated near the borders of Nepal and is close to Sehersa town. A couple of weeks back I packed my bags for Mansapur. The last time I had gone there was thirteen years back. I was in my seventh standard then and now I am out of college. A decade and more is a good amount of time for things and landscapes to change and I have a very vivid memory of my spent summer vacations here. It's like a map that has been preserved well in the shelves of my memory and as soon as I reached there, I unfolded that map and started checking the mango tree under which we sat protecting the mangoes from the thieves, the well in front of the house, the canal in which I used to play with my cousin and brother, the shelter for cows, the guava tree, the room with sitar, tabla and harmonium and many more fragments of this map. But the one thing I was really eager to see was my dad's Yezdi. I found it parked in the backyard and covered under plastic sheet. I uncovered it and stayed there looking at that old silver coloured bike. It still had the sidebox attached to it and the number plates still said 'Kumar'. 

Soaked with nostalgia I decided to draw the bike. Later I moved onto meeting the relatives and gorging down the simple food with mangoes as dessert. The many generations of the family are very tightly knit to each other and one can't escape making a visit to them. Even after thirteen years there were a few faces that didn't require an introduction. One of them was Dukha Mama and his wife.

Front facing side of the house

Backyard

There were many whom I would have loved to draw but once you have entered one house you can't leave without eating. Hence, a lot of food was consumed that resulted in hours of long sleep. The slow breeze and humid air helped very well in making the sleep thick.

The few days just passed away in a glimpse of re-brushing the fossils of past but it felt good to reaffirm how beautiful those summer days used to be. 

Sketchcrawl 7, Shivajinagar and Koshy's

It was around two months back when Russell Market, Shivajinagar suffered from a fire causing quite a loss to the vendors who have their business running from generations over there. I wanted to make a visit there and see what the situation is like but was hesitant about it because I was sure media people would have already crowded the market and adding to it with my presence, trying to mesaure their sorrows seemed a bit obtrusive to me. That's when I had decided to make a visit there in the next sketchcrawl. 
I reached the market around 9 in the morning and found the vendors busy setting up their shops. The flowers were getting a new drench of water, vegetables getting stocked and fumbled out of the big sacks. I tried looking for the left out signs of the two month old tragedy but the dark wires and wall corners didn't suggest whether the tarnished look came out of a fire or just old age. This market couldn't afford slowing down and I was quite glad to see it bustling again. I found a seating spot in an empty shop and my friend Khushboo joined too in the sketchcrawl. This time I decided to sketch with photo inks as it takes away a bit of your desired control of strokes adding that needed play of colours and line quality. Here are my two sketches done at Russell market and Bamboo Bazaar. 

Russell Market

Bamboo Bazaar

After two sketches, we moved to Koshy's for some plain good cold coffee. Koshy's one of the places were you will often find faces that you saw the last time when you came. The same old men would be sitting discussing politics, sharing household news, catching up on the well being of other friends...in the middle of this Mr. Koshy would be seen chatting with his regular visitors and friends. While sipping on the hot coffee (the waiter didn't hear the 'cold' in the 'cold coffee') I drew a few of those old familiar faces. Khushboo showed one of the sketches to the uncle I drew and we got his address to send him a copy. The men on the neighbouring table took a notice of what I was doing and asked me to draw one of the guys sitting with them, which I happily agreed to. I have his address too to send the drawing. Here are the portraits from Koshy's. 

Typoday and Bombay

The Typoday 2012 was hosted in the IDC, IIT Powai campus, Bombay. Bombay as a city has it's charm for a visitor in it's auto driver's willingness of going by the meter. But when you just walk out of the airport, you are a new species that has yet to disappear in the crowd. My very first auto ride left a bad taste in the mouth but then as I said once you are without the numbered luggage tags, you are ready for the regular Bombay ride. Thanks to my friend Aditi's company, I got to know the basic mapping of places in Bombay. I took the local and moved around in the old black and yellow premiere padmini taxi too. But the trip was planned tightly with little time to sit and draw the city. My fellow passengers were my subject again. 

There was one thing that I had planned to do in this trip that was to visit Mondegar for Mario Miranda's drawing. Although I had  gone to Mondies in my first visit to Bombay but this time it was meant to pay a homage to Mario after he passed away last year. 

Some of the work featured at the Typoday 2012.

A wall of all the Indian Newspaper publications.

The Typoday this year was centred around publication design but it also had a lot to offer on type design for various scripts, expressive typogrphy, book making, Unicode and Open Type etc. There were many elders from  the design background present over there and talking of elders it was difficult to miss on Mahendra Bhai's presence. Especially when he was walking around in his black and gold sneakers. It was good to see him still making conversation in the squirrel like gestures and keeping occasional rift alive with other elder design thinkers. Out of the many presentations, the two which really stayed with me were -
1. Ken Botnick's talk on how our mind works with the information when reading.
2. Bishwadeep Moitra's talk on the design history of Outlook Magazine. 
Both the talks made me realise that a lot of design research and practice is only thoughtfully worked for the grown up consumers. While the younger lot's mind patterns are still an unexplored area which makes it difficult to look and work with any guidelines when designing for a young audience. Mr. Bishwadeep Moitra shared an important insight on how children generally take the print media in Indian culture quite seriously. Therefore  succumbing to the use of loud colours and cute looking pictures for kids is not the most ideal solution as what the grown up mind imagines it to be. 
I think the April issue of Brainwave is going to be a balance of Robert-Crumb-inspired drawings and Typoday-learnings on design and typography. 
Now, I shall end this post by sharing a photograph of two matchboxes I got as a gift during this trip and a stop motion series of photographs that Hazel stitched of me sketching. You can see the stop motion on her blog - halfchai

Matchboxes from Prague, gifted by Aditi.