“A little madness in the spring Is wholesome even for the king…” True that. Emily Dickinson’s advice aside, the onset of this pretty season is reason enough to shed our serious airs for a while and smell the roses. Quite literally. All of February, forget roses, I barely paused to smell the coffee […]
Art-stained streets, sprawling warehouses, quaint studios of varied provenance, wayside cafes, a fleet of autos marked ‘Art-O’s and a genial mass of people have come together in a spectacular manner to play hosts to about half a million visitors arriving in Fort Kochi from across the globe. The Kochi Muziris Biennale, the gateway of art […]
Two thousand years ago, the world witnessed a unique and remarkable flowering of literature in the Tamil country. Known as the Sangam period, it was considered to be the golden period of Tamil literature. Poetry of this period was broadly classified into Akam (that which dealt with the inside: human emotions) and Puram (that which […]
In 1644, in Agra, a solitary event changed the life of Shahzadi Jahanara Begam, eldest and favourite daughter to the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan. On a quiet, moonlit night, in the silvery shadows of a luminous tomb being built in the memory of her dead mother, the princess in a cloud of perfumed silk was […]
I fell in love in 1997. Ilford house on Woods Road in Madras, on a damp November afternoon, provided the perfect setting. I’d sauntered down the cobbled road that branched off the famous Mount Road. It led to an ancient stone and plaster building that had been restored without any loss to its old crumbly […]
Colour-obsessed as I am, it was so easy to run amok in the ‘city of jasmines’ — the enigmatic temple town of Madurai. Designed like the petals of a lotus, its interconnected streets bump into one other at quadrangles, with all of them leading to one of the temple gates. This is a city where […]
Once upon a time in Akola, an arid little village 60km from the iconic Chittorgarh fort in Rajasthan, a young boy from the Rangrez community was training to be a cloth dyer like his forefathers. Every day he was assigned a new task by his father, the master-dyer. One particularly sunny day, when his friends […]
‘Indian by choice’ is a line of clothing predisposed to rebellion from the start, since it was originally inspired by the civil disobedience movement. So, this season too, we take on western imperialism — albeit of a different kind. The fashion zeitgeist has been ruled by western colour names from days beyond recall. A designer’s […]
“If Bergamot be yours, then chamomile is mine…” Every so often to my surprise, the revolutionary sentiments behind ‘Indian by choice’ turn to serve as a throwback to our Raj past. There is the designer’s angst within me to straddle the two — the cause and the consequence — in my design sensibilities. So before […]
I don’t ever remember being little. In my head, I was always big. At two, I was big enough to be taken for a walk down the boulevard in front of Essendene- one of a triad of old colonial bungalows in Nanthancode, a residential corner of Trivandrum. At three, I was big enough to realise […]
