Recently I was asked to come and attend the The Economist India Summit and create an illustration that would give a gist of the talks that were held. Standard Chartered and the Economist wanted to be able to gift a souvenir to the speakers at the conference. I’ve always been fond of sketching people and things they say, it’s a great way to practise drawing and observation. I have also been sketching the things spoken about at Typo Berlin as well as Think in Goa in the past but this was my first official reportage assignment.
It was really inspiring to listen to most of the talks and hear business leaders of the world speak their learnings and concerns. The Economist’s stellar journalists also asked some daring and interesting questions to the speakers. We all came out highly inspired from the conference.
We went through a fair bit of editing of text and fixed on a few key speakers with a quote each.
First version
Later,the team decided that they didn’t want to go with the faces as it might be offensive to some people to see themselves in a caricature! So we ended up with a no face solution:
All in all I had fun!
Here are some notes from the conference:
ARUN JAITLEY- Minister of Finance, Government of India.
– India must hold its own ground on the reform path, there is no end to the amount of work that has to be done. We must maintain momentum and not go backwards. There is no easy day – one day it’s Greece and the next day devaluation.
– For India to become a developed economy you need only one percent of the agricultural land.
JAY CHEN – CEO, Huawei India
– Nobody can ignore the potential and oppurtunity of India. The confidence is back in the telecom industry.
– Mr. Modi held a round table conference in Shanghai and many Chinese businesses are positively thinking of coming to India.
JUVENCIO MAEZTU- CEO, Ikea India
– More and more stores are a place of inspiration rather than just being points of sale.
– I’ve been sourcing from India for the past 28 years. 4 Lakh workers are involved with us in India already. 50% women employment is non negotiable at IKEA. Environmental responsibility, social responsibility and co worker rights are of the highest standard at IKEA and our labour is really happy.
– Telengana has a highly receptive govt. and highly competent and knowledgeable IAS officers.
– GST has to happen, there is a 95% consensus, we cannot lose time any longer.
ANANTH VENKAT: Managing Director, South Asia, Standard Chartered Bank
– Its no longer India vs China. Its India vs India and China vs China. We need to get our house in order.
– GST has to be resolved
– Improve the infrastructure: Roads, bridges, poer.
– Streamline the approval process
– Investment required in Infrastructure and Irrigation.
ADAM ROBERTS: Is there a gap between what you promised and you have acheived?
IAS karnataka to Juvencio: What are the top 3 things a state can do to get ahead?
IKEA: Stability (Sustainable over time)
Long Term Plan – Infrastructure is inevitable
Working together
Economy is about belief, behavior and attitude
Dont think of India when investing, think of the progressive states.
Jay Chen, Huawei: Improve the digital Infrastructure.
RAHUL BAJAJ: Chairman, Bajaj Auto and head Bajaj Group
The sheen is wearing off. Mr Jaitley is a competent parliamentarian and an emminent lawyer but as a finance minister he can do much better.
RAVI KAILAS: Chairman and CEO Mytrah Energy
Infrastructure largely left to private hands. At first everyone thought ” Will it even work at all?”
Yes, its working and its moving forward. No other large economy in the world has done this.
We have leapfrogged telephony. Skipped pagers and the analog.
KIRAN MAZUMDAR SHAW: Chairperson and Managing Director, Biocon
– India has never been at a better stage for investing
– India needs to invest a lot more in its own healthcare
– Without the Indian pharmaceutical industry, the global health industry would be negatively impacted.
HEMANT KANORIA: Chairman and managing director, Srei Infrastructure Finance
We have 300 billion tonnes of coal reserve and yet our power plants are not running and power cost is high AND you are importing coal! Reduce the cost of power.
PRASHANT RUIA: Director, Essar Group
To invest in India you have to look at India as a continent, through a regional prism.
The non regulated consumer oriented sectors are growing but the regulated sectors are stressed.
Go back to the drawing board and tweak. For a 1000MW power plant, if I generate power what do I do? I can’t store the power.
any many many many corrections and versions later does a website see the light of day. It’s unlike anything else I’ve made. There is only the computer (mostly) and the screen. Things you thought looked alright yesterday don’t look quite the same today – there is always room for making it better and better – there is always more to do. I feel what I used to feel when I began doing print layouts, it’s a puzzle but the base is logic not emotion as much as art. I find websites fun yet they require a clinical approach (compared to illustrations, sculpture, printmaking, music, cooking and writing in my opinion.) Here’s my first live website – there are a few more in the stages before going online. More websites coming up soon! Including a new version of the one you are reading! It’s still got some bugs and missing things but do check out 
hat an absolute delight to make fun things for people when there are very few limitations! Priya got in touch with me after being recommended by one of my friends. She’s got a tiny daughter and has just moved to Gurgaon from Bangalore with her husband. She wanted to commission artworks on themes and poems and text that she has been thinking about and wanted the artworks to be based around these ideas. At first, I went ahead and did iterations for each idea and while some were approved – others took a while getting there as it soon became clear that while she was open to some ideas from my end, she had thought about some images herself and wanted to work those out. So here we are after couple of iterations and to and fros and some artworks are what I like and some are in the middle and some are what she wanted – but all in all they make a happy bunch!
ullo everyone! Sorry to have not updated over a long few weeks. Busy days. As I move forward I am working on some assignments longer than others. Tight deadlines are always there but I have made it a point to involve some slow moving assignments as well. Things get to reach the quality mark as well as get the time they deserve. Here’s a painting I just finished. Acrylic on canvas, 2ft x1.5. I had a good time making this and as long as we are human, there is plenty of room to get better but we don’t beat ourselves up about that. We learn and we move forward with those points in our minds for the next time. It’s been lying in the studio so long, I am going to miss it.
an’t say what it is about old school frame by frame 2d animation. These days all I need is some empty time, a glass table, a clip-on lamp, tons of A4 sheets, a fine nib and ink. I remember enjoying this throughly in college and now here we go! As things are progressing now – all personal projects will be done with slow time and good quality. Will be back with more soon!
y first assignment of this year was a book by Arathi Menon. I just got to see it fresh from the press! Written with good humour and insight, this book speaks about a woman’s journey through the end of a marriage and her route to getting back to being the person she was. I had a good time creating this with constructive feedback from the author and the Pan Macmillan team. Below is a quick look-through of the cover design’s process. 
o many kinds of days have passed. The new year/holiday season does something strange. You are shedding an old skin and yet it is essential that you remember what it looked like. Age old lessons of routine, productivity and good humour will be put to use again. Every year somehow you are getting more aligned to that vision of your work and yourself. That’s the only way forward right?
reetings from a sunny December winter’s day at home! After a long crazy residency, a great successful show and a zipping trip to Nagaland’s Hornbill festival, here we are at the end of this year. New love for me this year is murals and ceramics. Also new on the cards is our artists’ collective 
can’t explain enough what a great feeling it is to have finished a big piece of work. A part of me lies all the way in Carballo, A Coruña, Spain. I have hope that I will see it again sooner than later. A lot has been learnt painting in this ENORMOUS scale. It’s addictive too! I bring lots of learnings back with me along with a ton of beautiful memories and proof that many many many many wonderful brilliant genius hard working & kind people exist. 
love storms. I love rain. I think a lot of people sweating it out in 48 degress centigrade in northern India share this love for rain, clouds and stormy weather with me. In my first sketch for the street art wall mural, I drew our dog Ajibo with me and Vaibhav flying out, away from the storm. For me this was an image to communicate how I was feeling with a new addition of this love-crazy puppy to our lives. That’s one layer of content: the personal. Then, this sketch was shown to the head of the city council of Carballo, Spain – who heads the street art project and is responsible for the funding, the production et all. Then the initial sketch was shown to the lady who owns the house whose wall I would be painting.
he more I work the more I think. The more I find myself realising reasons and systems within work, and the more I want to write – to make sense of all these mini AHA moments ( as they would say in Srishti, my design school.) Today, for instance – I was drawing grass blowing in the wind. I was thinking how some years ago I would have been very nervous. I would have put more detail and wanted every grass blade to be perfect and in that obsession missed out on the fun. I would have stressed about how the style or treatment of the image was too childish and cartoon- like.
at was it? What hit you? The light? The angels? The painstaking effort gone into making the perspective right? The fact that unicorns were mistakenly included in art inspired by the Bible because someone mistranslated a kind of a bull as a unicorn? That unicorns were being so fussy on Noah’s Arc that he chucked them out letting them drown instead – and that’s why they are extinct now? So many stories and reasons for happenings. I think it’s all cooked up anyway (no offense to believers) but one comes across many valuable life-lessons in art and in religious writing, which can be as informative and enjoyable as poetry and literature. Interesting metaphors and imagery articulate the goings on within our insides. Hieronymus Bosch’s work can pull out the rug from beneath your feet. If there was a rug at all or if you were standing in flesh next to a painting , it will probably make a bit of a difference (but not much). Netherlands in the 1500’s were under the Spanish crown – an answer I found after being surprised by the number of artists from the Netherlands in the national museum of Spain. Strange creatures, futuristic and contemporary images drawn at the same time Guru Nanak in Punjab, India was coming up with Sikhism! What a world of differences and what a variety of ways to address similar concerns! Between heaven and hell, good and evil lies in all of us and art has the electric magnetic power to arrest you and educate you, your soul – in a moment you can be transported to the depths of an emotion. El Bosco does that repeatedly all on the same canvas as hundreds of images form a whole. I can only sigh and smile and sleep dreaming sweet crazy dreams.
he brain can only take in so much. After some of the previous summer spent soaking in the Louvre and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris & the Uffizi gallery in Firenze it takes courage to step into a museum again. There is endless beauty; the light, the perspective, details , ideas, symbols and stories all demand intense attention. It’s interesting for me to observe my lack of knowledge about Western art growing up in the Indian art curriculum. We had a little book with about 30 tiny images of art from prominent Indian artists that we had to know about along with the styles and content of Indian miniature schools. But we never went to the museum as part of the course. If we wanted to find out more, we’d have to go on our own accord. Like all things good, information that is important for you will find you at the right time. Chiaroscuro was a word I heard in 11th standard in Kodaikanal from Mr. Adam Kahn our German art teacher at Sholai School who we shared with kids from Kodaikanal International School. I remember him showing us Lust for Life, Vincent Van Gogh’s story. I also remember an elderly Indian couple who visited our school and as a parting gift gave me a beautiful 1940’s booklet in French about exercises to practise light in drawing. I spent days making sketches of trees at night in the moonlight, in the misty mornings and in the sunny/cloudy afternoons. I was lucky to have all that time in a forest at the age of 16/17 because ten years later it’s hard to find time that stretches across the mountains till the horizon. One doesn’t really come across that feeling so often now, that time is as infinite as a single moment and you can stretch it as you wish. That’s the sort of mental state one needs to be in at a museum to truly benefit. Your life can be changed so you must open all the windows and dust that old brain as you doddle into the museum. Hieronymus Bosch was this visit’s discovery and I am pretty sure he’s started to change my brain cells themselves. I think I will write about him and a few more things next time around.
here wasn’t enough time to pack well or atleast pretend to. The visa takes forever and this time it came a few hours before the flight. The truth is one can never mentally prepare to go to a new place. Somewhere over the snow covered mountains in Afghanistan and the lake swamped forest covered Helsinki a smile was spreading across my face and has been more or less there for the last 3 weeks. The first thing that hits you is the light. Yes the fact that its sun up till 11:30 at night but also the angle the sun is at and the warmth of the colours, perhaps its the cleanliness in the air – I don’t know exactly what it is but the light is very distinct. The second thing is the language. It’s a peculiar feeling, realising the moment where the outside world moves further away than you are used to. You are now officially the outsider and the observer. Not unlike life but very much like life, hyper realism in a way. Then things slowly unravel and life begins to normalise, a new rhythm in a new land slowly trying to align back to your own rhythm of sleep and waking up. Tasting new food meeting new people. Seeing new things. Dogs are allowed beside their owners in restaurants and in shops. Mothers are walking with prams n toddlers everywhere. Fit mothers. New information: people have to pay 2000 euros to get a license here! But that’s not enough, I am not here on a tourist trip. Im here to work. To paint a mural on a wall for the people of Carballo, a city 30 mins from A Coruña, north west Spain- near Portugal. Now there is a purpose to this seemingly random information. It’s like gathering cues in a way, much like a detective would. All this new information has to be checked with my earlier beliefs and age old ideas that we all share in some way. Then sieved through criticism to arrive at an idea for the mural. Its great to see some of my old friends here from Firenze. I look forward to hard work and arriving at some sort of conclusion in shape of the mural.
veryday is slowly getting set to a pace. I have always imagined hitting 30 to be a time when you yourself will find a rhythm that suits you. All concerns will magically arrange themselves onto shelves in your brain. Much like Dumbledore setting back a busted room in one of the Harry Potter movies. Yes, I’m sorry if you hate the whole JK Rowling body of work but I can tell you I have seen them more times than is normal. Anyway, not to digress -I am aiming for this epiphany by the time I hit 30. Not that you can plan such things – but all we can do is try.You know the whole work – fitness balance thing. God knows artists and designers like many other people are always in studios, working away; as yoga mats, sneakers, skipping ropes and weights gather dust. Its not so difficult in theory – a pace, a rhythm, a routine but sometimes work will bring down upon you THE problem that you will have to sit with for hours hopefully not days. You will stare at it, curse it, have a tea, curse it again, leave the studio, come back and maybe see a solution. Its these times that are detrimental to the balance that is so important for our minds to work well and our bodies to feel fit. Yah, everyday is slowly getting set to a pace, its getting there. Im not saying there’s a permanent solution but I think I might have some tricks to help me. Perhaps they should be listed categorically.
ood things have been happening. I am now much more comfortable being a non office goer. I am happy to say that I did not die without routine. I thought i would wither into a corner of the world and quietly perish because I would be “all on my own”. I have been spending time equally on design projects, personal projects and commissioned illustration/art projects. Some scholarships are on the horizon, more about that soon! Oh but as always work is never-ending (in a good way) and everything is still difficult (in a good way).
o artist can predict what kind of work they will be creating in the next year. They can predict some aspects – like skill, colour, tone, quality etc all should improve and generally one’s graph should rise but content is some other game. You will also know what elements you use in your work – they will slowly become your language. You never know what is going to hit you emotionally (or hit you in the face) enough to make you think about it, sketch it over and over again until you fix on the correct way to create a visual representation to that thought.
ore than drawing these days my head is full of information. Information on music, information about the future, information on how to break my head free of all the dull things like errands and life in general. But its good to see a new development. Seeing something exactly and drawing it millimeter by milimeter of precision is one thing. And to soak in something and draw it later is another. I have been leaning towards the latter these days and its a great way to memorise and abstract.
ne cannot predict what will happen when travelling. Especially travelling to a place that is culturally very different. But professions are a good thing. You meet so many people who are working in similar fields. Its encouraging to know that they are thinking similar thoughts and facing similar problems. I have never felt the need to show my work – as an everyday practice. I see a lot of my friends in Delhi who are musicians and artists as well. We are all quite comfortable doing our thing at home or in our studios or in our offices and having a show once a year or less. But here in Florence I see everyone is putting their work up. As stickers, as one night shows and sometimes on the streets – carrying their amps and just becoming part of the landscape. I am happy to see so many artists and designers and musicians shaping the city – the experience of it at least. And I feel ready to join them, you are what your creative output is. And somebody has got to see/listen to these months and years and hours and thoughts you have been working on!!! Get out there!
now, now now 