2019 has an exciting start!

#projectinterpret started 2019 with a tour of the nearly 2000 year old Kanheri Caves in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivali East, Mumbai. Easy to reach, through winding lush green path, spotting deers enroute, this cave cluster needs to be climbed by foot once a vehicle takes you to its base. Not for the...

Thank you for accepting #projectinterpret ❤️

It has been a very exciting 2018 for VarnikaDesigns 🙂 The biggest was an attempt to reach out to more and more people through launch of its venture #projectinterpret - a multi sensory, cultural, interactive and inclusive space With #projectinterpret we travelled, excavated stories, explored multiple perspectives and interpreted them through experiential tours to heritage...

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...

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...

Re – imagining Design: following M P Ranjan

M P Ranjan, India's foremost Design Thinker, said on 16 October 1997 at the AEP Bridge Semester, National Institute of Design: “Design is a responsible and creative activity that aims to understand human needs and aspirations in order to generate effective alternate solutions that can resolve these needs. By its very nature the process of...

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...

My Museum Journey Map with #projectinterpret

In class, while teaching ‘Museum Management’ I wrote on the board some of the Indian cities I have visited for their Museums. It helped me map my journey from my birth place Jaipur (where I was born of a Museum connection) to other parts of India. This map connected me to the students who belonged...

Bougainvillea Possessed!

Can't decide if one should call it 'Bougainvillea Possessed' or 'Bougainvillea Obsessed' - I love Bougainvilleas since childhood. That's it. Just before another post on this flower that makes Indian summers so much more bearable and beautiful, I had a curiosity attack (nothing unusual for me)! Realised I knew nothing about one from my 'most...