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...

Advertisements

Love, Pyaar, Amor @Bombay to Barcelona Library Café

The World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen 1995) declared that an inclusive society is a “society for all in which every individual, each with rights and responsibilities, has an active role to play”. 13 years later, this definition was changed by the Expert Group Meeting on Promoting Social Integration, Helsinki, to: “An inclusive society is...

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...

#projectinterpret’s 2nd quarter

In the 2nd quarter of #projectinterpret, apart from the guided tours some new initiatives have taken root. These are: Knowyourcity challenge: photographs are regularly uploaded on the VarnikaDesigns Instagram and Facebook accounts to quiz on some historical monuments/sites/buildings to help people connect to the architectural landmarks of a city. Most of us have passed these...

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...

Sandeep Sangaru designs dreams

“You will need to have a dream and then explore all its dimensions and details and then refine the offering through an iterative process that blends imagination with action in the real world.” Design Thinker M P Ranjan, 2011 For Sandeep Sangaru, this dream began at Kashmir more than two decades back when he went...

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...

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...