The Design Overture

  "The ability to feel, to see, to discover, to think, to build and model, communicate and to evaluate form the core of design learning..." M P Ranjan, NID, 2004 In July 2002, Suranjana Satwalekar initiated me into the blitzkrieg of Design. Bewildered and gawky, I started with thinking that when NIDians went for a...

Hamaara Sapna: another dream fulfilled

The International Museum Day is annually held on May 18th but the Jaya He GVK New Museum authorities planned to celebrate the entire week from May 15th to 19th as the International Museum Week at their beautiful space at the Mumbai International Airport popular as the T2 Terminal. There were workshops, musicial performances and on...

Creating a New Eye Opener Tour at the British Museum

I was a Nehru Trust Fellow in the summer of 2015 to research, understand and evaluate the Access Features at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. I also worked on a project for the Learning, Volunteers and Audiences Department (LVA) project of the British Museum. This project required me to evaluate the Eye...

Students’ Visit to ‘Jaya He GVK New Museum’

As part of a research and documentation field visit, the 4th semester students of Interior Design, ISDI Parsons, Mumbai, visited the Museum at the T2 Terminal of Mumbai International Airport with me and some faculty members of the Design School. This Museum is known as the Jaya He GVK New Museum,  and most of us...

The Santiniketan Express: to melody and peace

I took the train Santiniketan Express from Howrah at 10.10 am to go to Santiniketan, my parents' present home. It is a place where my parents shifted to nearly 20 years back from their earlier home of nearly 25 years, Jaipur. They decided to spend the rest of their life at this idyllic hamlet called...

The young boy who didn’t like going to school

Dear Arushi Wish you a very very Happy Birthday 🙂 many happy returns of the day. This post is about a young boy called Robi who didn't like going to school. He was born on 7th May 1861 at his father, Debendranath Tagore's house, in Jorasanko, Kolkata. He was born more than 100 years from...

A Maharaja’s vision and romance

Dear Aditya, Shashwat and Anushka Let me tell you the story of the place where your parents grew up, studied, met and fell in love. It is a city where you owe your origins to, any guesses for it? Yes, it is Baroda as the British called it and Vadodara as it is now known....

Akbar and Dyslexia

Akbar_Dyslexia The above is a link to an article written in 2008 in Housecall Magazine by Dr Asok Kumar Das. Most of us might be aware that one of the greatest emperors of the Mughal dynasty, Akbar, could not read or write. He maintained an elaborate taswirkhana or atelier where painters were commissioned to illustrate...