Fact one: For all the fun times had dancing all night in our last 5 years, there are no places or no places with GOOD dance music in this expected to be great city of New Delhi. You know the kind of music you’ll have to change your plans for. Like you had a plan, but the music is so good you just can’t leave. Fact two: The most fun times I’ve ever had dancing ALL night were at house parties (as in – in a house) or in TC ( teenage) but the best in Italy & Spain, specifically in underground sub cultured basements lit with neon lights or in no stress Gay Bars. So if you’re out or in, its good to dance either way. Also, this doesn’t mean everyone in Gay Bars is gay. Not True. It’s just the most fun & unpretentious atmosphere you can find and people are there to go bonkers. So here’s a plan for this Saturday if you wanna dance.
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.
The initial sketch, in my delighted escape from the Delhi summer was cloudy, windy and stormy. The mausam of my soul. But the lady found it dark and depressing.
I had other ideas about the mural but I had only mentioned them in text and who can imagine a painting from a few lines of text? I did the second draft using warm colours. I never use warm colours. I don’t know why. I love the mystery of blues and greens. For years these are the only two colours in my wardrobe. Its natural that they are the colours I always pick for the pallete too.
But this is not my sketchbook, it is someone’s house and someone’s money and together this wall will become an experience for someone else who walks past it. Here is where it comes in. ¿How can you use your work to make people smile? It’s a naïve question, yes. But it’s also a fundamental one.
I always find myself between two points. I love realism but I also love surrealism. I love to see the sun break the sky into a hundred shades of orange red pink yellow and purple but I also value the hundred thoughts inside my head. What you see and what you think. Truth and humour. I don’t want to show you a beetle that I drew 20 times and have mastered. I want to show you all my memories. I want to show you all the things that touched me and I want to show you how I feel here. But that’s not it, I want to you feel something too. I want your thought that you carried in your mind to be forgotten when you see this wall. I want you to stop a moment and look a little closer. I want you to smile.
This of course will continue, the communication. Slowly the aesthetic will evolve, maybe it will get more cartoony, maybe it will get more realistic, maybe it will continue to sit right here in the middle.
now, now now 