Call and Response

 From inside the apartment, I don’t see them, only hear them. But that’s more than enough. 

Thanks for visiting, 

RECAP 2025

 

In terms of creativity it was somewhat a fallow year. Early in January, I completed the final version of Afterlives of a Newspaper.  I had submitted information about it to Kolaj Magazine Collage Books who were kind enough publicize it in their weekly newsletter and on their Instagram feed. As a result, I got several purchase requests but unfortunately I could not fulfill them because of tariff spat between India and US which had caused India to suspend all postal communications between the two countries. Because of prohibitive cost of shipping, I am not mailing anything from India right now. 

I responded to a few photography and collage calls for submission which were not successful. I wrote a couple of book reviews for All About Romance but did not want to do it regularly  (that site will cease publication by the end of this month but its archives will be available). Last year was the first year since I retired that I did not participate in workshops or residencies or take any course. Perhaps, I have plateaued in wanting to learn anything new. Last year, I also injured the fingers on my left hand hefting my big DSLR camera photographing birds from the terrace. DSLR photography has been on hold since then.
The only thing I did consistently was responding to Are You Book Enough monthly theme-based challenges. I did complete eleven out of twelve challenges-not bad for a newbie! It was an interesting challenge and it did stretch my creative muscles. Check out my instagram posts at  Indiragovi for the artist books I created for this challenge. The image at the bottom of this post is a tunnel book created in response to the theme of SPACE.

The video above shows the book I made for the month of December on the theme COLORS. 

Watch it with the sound on. 

Thanks for visiting. 

Arichal Munai, Where Two Ocean Bodies Meet

 

There are several geological reasons why the Bay of Bengal is calm and Indian Ocean so turbulent, but when you are standing at Arichal Munai, Dhanushkodi, where the two water bodies meet, you can only feel its mystical quality.  Dhanushkodi on Rameshwaram island is an uninhabited strip of land but plenty of visitors come here. We went there early morning before the sun was barely up, the crowd sparse and spent a serene hour just listening to the sound of lapping waves and being caught up in the geographic wonder of it. This was two years ago and I am ready to go again. 

After Lives of a Newspaper

 

This book of collage/mixed media/altered art came about because I could not bear to chuck the daily newspaper, the Hindu, into the wastepaper bin after I finished reading it. Three years ago, when I moved to Chennai, after 40+ years in the US, I subscribed to the print version of the Hindu as a way to know and understand this city and its people. It was a revelation. I had not read a newspaper in its physical form in more than fifteen years. I subscribed and still do to the digital version of the New York Times (it is simply cheaper than a print version). Over this period, I had come to accept the increasing algorithmization of my reading interests. I had also come to expect  a barrage of articles suddenly appearing based on my web search on a topic. I had come to accept the ‘once read, gone forever’ phenomenon too. I recognize that on a daily basis, the print newspaper also exercises  a lot of editorial control in deciding what to publish. But it does give me the freedom to choose what I want to read, discover interesting topics on my own. I did discover that the Hindu put out many articles that caught my interests. Lest I give the wrong impression, the Hindu is not new to me. A newspaper of record founded as a nationalist voice against British rule, it was an important historical source when I was working on my M.Phil dissertation more than four decades ago. Ironically, I read it on microfiche!

I am aware that all online newspapers, including The Hindu, track their readers, use algorithms to place the right kind of ads and share user information in various ways.

As I got familiar with the paper’s contents (its long read articles, Thursday-Sunday supplements, book reviews in Sunday magazine), I began to feel that I should preserve these in some form. As an artist I wanted to more than just simply clip and put them in a file folder. Thus Afterlives of a Newspaper was born. It is a collection of artistically altered news articles using collage and mixed-media techniques. The original contents are not lost. They are just creatively repositioned, edited, enhanced and illustrated. Of the many art pieces I have made over the last three years, 30-40 of them have made their way into this book. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I had enjoyed making them. Many thanks to The Hindu for sending me off on this creative journey.

                                                        

 

Recapping Pandemic Year

 

I did this piece of collage as a memorial to that intense and compressed pandemic period when none of us could go out and do anything. This was a record of not only what I did or did not do but also how abnormal it was then. With the pandemic having completely disappeared from the rear view mirror, it is even hard to remember how life was like then. How short memory can be! 

 

Gaban, Chapter 1: Rainy Season

 

It is the rainy season- Savan, the fifth month of Hindu calendar…it is drizzling now and then. It is afternoon, but seems like evening already. Swings have been placed in the mango orchards. Girls and their mothers enjoy using them. Some are on the swings; some are pushing them. In this season, women’s childhood memories are aroused. It seems as if it washes away the worries of their hearts and replenishing their soul. Hearts are filled with hope. The green of the saris seems to bond with the greenery around. 

Munshi Premchand: Gaban (Embezzlement), 1931. Chapter 1. 

Digital Book illustration using Procreate. 

Illustrated Bookcover: Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie’s  groundbreaking Midnight’s Children was published exactly 40 years ago. On its 40th anniversary, it has been reissued with a new introduction by Rushdie himself. I did not read it when it was first published. I am reading it now and at 600+ pages the going is a little slow. But I will finish it. I don’t know if I will find it as great as it has been proclaimed to be. Meanwhile, I decided to design a cover of my own for the book, something that reflects the historical nature of the text.