Untitled

Treatment with light, still working on the final
look

7 o' clocks of Littledom

Pinafores and stapled on handkerchiefs.
Books, exploding the seams of Mickey
Mouse bags. These hands held up tiny
Bata feet onto the aluminium and wooden
chariot.





Afternoon Board exams. Quiet streets, coconut sellers
taking a nap at courtyards of old family homes.






The chime of the bell is lost at busy streets.
Evenings, on the way to singing class, reciting the first
learned alphabets. The chronology is lost amongst the
fervour of growing up.






Sunday fish markets, in carefully plaited
hair. Sampling the samples, without being
offered. Sitting with grown ups in grown
up cafés. Hearing them talk about the
Movement. The movement is always on.





Learning all the punchlines of adverts on TV
so I can teach him what Surf really does. The stains
have special names on Television. They also
look colourful and un-stain like.





Dressed up for the pujas. A new shirt neatly
folded in by my mother. I am waiting to present
him a new year.

Spiked

The naked woman fell in love
with the Gold Flake man.
Undying loyalty had
sprouted up a plan.


She did not want sorrow
She did not want mirth.
She craved his eye
and his porcelain heart.









She wrapped herself
in dragon-wing gold
The plumage gleamed
on her alabaster mould






















she wooed him out
and they played the dance
Iridescent people
And an evening’s romance.


















As dawn, dawned
on the naked woman’s brain
the first drop of sun
would leave her naked, again.












She lay there, mortified
as the night sky waned
a latticework of gold
was all that remained.

"I have stitched on the glitter,
I have hemmed in the shine",
said she to the man-
"this is me, all of this, is mine".






The gold flake man
was a man of gold
he shed a sympathy,
and left the rest, untold.


 











Pretty young thing-floats like tinsel in the air.

Random Conversations

Tied to a Box

Someone, (name changed), I haven't been
acquainted with before, sent me a mail once:

"I loved your work in cut here.
I am an educator. What do we leave behind
was on the softboard, My 9 year olds loved
you for that one."

Some other people (Rohit, Mandakini, Eipe,
Kaustav, Ayush etc) want Tied to a Box back. I
dug out the ones I had and revamped it
because:
1)I hated that guy I created with a ball
point pen:












2)Let's face it, the humor is obscure:
I was probably on some unidentified substance
from the guy who also had goat dung strewn
around his courtyard.
So the art work has scope to be beyond a cute
golly wog.

3) I realized, since most of the humor is
related to our misery in living pigeon-holed
lives, I could actually use the metaphor of
a cardboard box-those boxes packing in our
expensive shoes, television sets, refrigerators,
ACs etc. Have you noticed the completely
non-commital graphics on those boxes, the FRAGILE
logo, the broken wine glass? I realized if I could
incorporate that visual language, I can give a
context to my readers. I also realized, that I hate
those signage type art work, so..

4) I got inspired. A trip to the Gallery of Modern
Art, got me face to face with Nandalal Bose, and his
art through a well done retrospective.I loved his
work on "Shahaj path" which had a graphic quality
to it, something you could rubber stamp on a box.











So anyway, this is what
tied to a box is about:

Aindri's Green Period

When my grandmother died
that afternoon, there was not
much noise made about it.
She was old, too old- and her
presence seemed awkward in
our daily routine of things to
do to embrace life.










Her absence filled her bed
with water. The windows
were left shut and below her
portrait the water swirled
with little bright specks
of light like you would find
in the deep of an ocean.









One day, while visiting her
silent room, I noticed that the
water had given birth to plants
that spoke in deep guttural
sounds. Being in the room felt
like I were in a water tank
trying to hear the world outside.
I stepped in. My feet looked big
and clean. My grandmother
smiled.







I lay on the bed like she had
once and raised my hands out
of the water. The plants
whispered to each other while
I explored their world. The
water had the sweet scent of
her hair. It was jasmine and
sandalwood and bright blue.








A catfish swam in circles
around me. I could hear
tinsel chiming through the
water. Sometimes the
plants spoke, most probably
of me-but they let me be.











I got up for a breath of air.
The drone of conversation
stopped and they were
looking at me. They knew who
I was, but they had not seen me
before. I, for my part, found it
difficult placing them
anywhere in my conditioned
mind.
They were living in a figment
of my imagination but they
breathed the same air as me.






When I touched one of them,
it branched out into a tree
of faces. I recognized my
grandmother as one of them.
It seemed like a family tree of
people so long forgotten that it
would be futile to start anywhere.
There was no hierarchy, just
relations popping up and
blooming into faces.







I plucked one of the squealing
faces and it spilled into a man
with a well ironed hair and
beard.
"Look at what you've done,
child!" he bellowed in a
baritone, "you have removed
me from my family! My first
wife wants me back!"
"Oh! I'm sorry" I said hastily,
from my own instinct of
apologizing.
"I did not mean to, sir, and
frankly, I am not aware of
what I need to do around
here!"

more aindriaindriaindriaindriaindri

Welcome to
"Welcome to Advertising, Now Get Lost!"









It seems ages back that me, Omkar
(the author) and this brilliant
typographer who I haven't met, Jezreel,
worked on this book. The word's out.
I am sitting here, wondering how the
book fared. Three different people
working on more than three cities
(I remember my frequent visits to
Delhi in the middle and working from
there as well, so maybe that counts)
on pittance, and somehow it worked
for the book amidst all that chaos.
The best bit was-there was no brief!
We read the manuscript, discussed like
adults and came up with what we thought
would best represent the content.

So this is a shout out to you, art
director, that please send us things
to read. The content maybe, not what
you think should be there in the picture.
Images are the ones that are read
between the lines.
When you send us a shopping list of:
a shoe
the author's portrait
a pregnant lady holding a family
heirloom, we wonder, if there is
an order to that madness. And most
illustrators LOVE reading!
Sometimes commissioned work takes
months to a few days, depending on
the illustrator's luck really.

But I love reading
manuscripts. Sometimes, words like
"digital", or "vector" confuse me.
I think they are pretty old fashioned.
Illustration is so out of the box in
that way. It's like asking someone
who does animation: 2D or 3D.
wha..?

When did the medium, get bound by the
medium? What is important to illustrators
I believe is to be clear about what they
are asked on for the project, and
questions really help. If you are looking
at 50s illustrations, is it Saul Bass
or Satyajit Ray? Sometimes, we don't ask
the questions. We nod.

Eyineyway..
here's the cover done by Jezreel:























This is what notcot.com had to say.





Green Period continues..

Scatterbrained.

An observation on our attitude to terrorism.

CAT FOOD FOR THOUGHT