The Look Book: when they saw us, and how!

My first review as the Mumbai correspondent for Art Fact, the newsletter for ArtsAcre Foundation, Kolkata I could stare at that Persian couple the rest of my life – really! Her hairstyle, their fashionable garments and footwear, his headgear, her direct gaze and his almond dreamy eyes – together they were celebs of their day...

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Spring is in the air ❤️ Really!

Breaking news from Nature: Spring has arrived! If you've not been aware, Spring slowly peeped in through the especially cold Winter of 2019 in a riot of colours... Well, Spring has always been around, about to jump on Winter and whisk her away 🙂 like those streaks of mischievousness in most of us which we...

What makes Indian Textiles so exquisite?

    A wide variety of beautiful textiles ranging from embroideried, woven, printed and painted comprise India’s rich textile heritage. For most of us, there is a familiarity with most of the textiles coming from all parts of India – like Banarasi, Baluchari, Chikankari, Kalamkari, Kanthas, Kanchivaram, Ikat etc. The skill of Indian weavers is...

Button Masala talks to the soul

Sukol, Derrida and Solitude It’s been a year that Sukol took his life, and his dreams and ambitions with him. A year in which we discovered his desperation to belong to a society he believed in. A poor Santhal tribal dark complexioned boy in his late teens who stood at 5 feet height had been...

The world’s nest at Santiniketan

India's first Nobel Laureate, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore wrote in 1929: I was brought up in an atmosphere of aspiration, aspiration for the expansion of the human spirit. We in our home sought freedom of power in our language, freedom of imagination in our literature, freedom of soul in our religious creeds and that of mind...

Am I “sic” enough for History classes :)

This is part 1 of my History class posts - no, don't worry, I won't teach History 🙂 I'll just share with you my experiences of teaching History to a very, very futuristic AR, VI & AI oriented generation. To the less initiated, like I was at the beginning of these classes, AR is Augmented...

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...

‘Varnika’ explained

Many friends have asked about the name of my blog and tiny firm 'VarnikaDesigns'. The name is borrowed from 'Varnikabhangam' from the Six Limbs of Indian Painting. The Six Limbs of Indian Painting is a set of cannons and guidelines that were assembled around the 6th century to guide artists for creating paintings. If you...