4 weeks of uselessness

Hello friends,

Sabbatical comes from the Hebrew word shabbat (שבת) (i.e., Sabbath), in Latin: sabbaticus, in Greek: sabbatikos (σαββατικός)) which is a rest or break from work.

Although a sabbatical is a longer break, colloquially translating to months and months of break, I started with a 4-week break to understand my readiness for a sufficient swathe of time that was directly in my control. I did not want to impose a project on this break primarily because it would have ended up becoming a cause of stress for me and would have undid the very reason of this break in the first place.

While I am writing about my experience of 4 weeks of not ‘doing anything’, I am fully aware that taking a break this long at my age is a privilege I haven’t seen any woman around me exercise. My mother, in her thirty eight years of working never once took a holiday that wasn’t due to a health emergency or a health emergency in family. The prospect of her taking off on an extended break from work to ‘heal’ was neither in the landscape of thought nor was uttered as a passing phrase.

When she would have been the age I am, I would have crossed over from primary school to middle school. I would have exchanged our primary uniform of a mauve frock worn over a white cotton blouse to now a mauve skirt whose ascending lengths were proving to be an issue of torment for our teachers in our all-girls school. In my fifth standard, my mother was so struck by the domestic demands and her job that she told me flatly about her absolute inability to take the responsibility for my studies. I would now have to study by myself. Perhaps, that decision would have given some break to her?

Before I went on this break, I could feel myself spiralling down again. I was mentally exhausted and it showed every other day in some form of ache and pain. In the three weeks leading up to my sabbatical, I was popping pain killers almost every other day again. Every night one could see the wire of a heating pad dangling from where I would sleep and I would wake up nauseated. Things would settle down by the time of my work meetings and it would repeat all over again.

So immersed was I in the narrative of work and its meaning that I had never taken the time to disentangle my being from the productivity of my body and mind. In the last ten years and going back further, I had fully made myself believe that not working in an office for a job that was paying me would be the very definition of ‘uselessness’. This false construct of work as tied to the direct economic merit was not only going against my felt experience, but was actively dispiriting.

These four weeks were the first intentional break of my professional life thus far and I didn’t want to actively pass a judgement on it. So I have compiled a list of things I did in my 4 weeks of uselessness for you to form your own judgements.

  1. Went on a drive 423 Kms away from my place passing through the majestic western ghats

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2. Drew by the beach side for two weeks every day

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3. Documented the patterns of sand bubbler crabs

In sandy beaches of certain tropical beaches in Indo-Pacific lives a tiny crab whose feeding habits creates intricate patterns consisting of thousands of sand balls on the beach.

When the high tide goes off, these crabs start to nibble on the thin coating of organic matter on sand grains. Can you believe it? They nibble on the coating of organic matter on grains of sand! As they keep burrowing deeper into the sand, they keep nibbling and pressing the excess into a ball which they kick out of their burrows.

The result are gorgeous patterns of sand balls on the beach.

4. Saw the evening blending into night

All photos were taken a few minutes apart.

5. Re-read a book and drew a project from it

I am fascinated by words and love to incorporate it into my drawing work. While re-reading The Collected Schizophrenias, I highlighted text - passing passages, beautifully constructed phrases for a drawing project I will be undertaking on the book.

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6. Witnessed the great conjunction

A great conjunction is a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, when the two planets appear closest together in the sky. Great conjunctions occur approximately every 20 years when Jupiter "overtakes" Saturn in its orbit. They are named "great" for being by far the rarest of the conjunctions between naked-eye planets

I was extremely lucky to spot this event with the naked eye (along with some help from a star gazing app) The photographs from my phone didn’t come out well so these are the screenshots from the star gazing app confirming that it was indeed Jupiter that we were looking at.

12. FONDEST SUNSET

My mother has never been to Goa or to a beach city. We had made plans for her travel now that she is no longer working but 2020 came along and did what it did to everyone’s plans. One evening as I was strolling along the beach at sunset, I decided to video call mom. As I flipped the camera towards the beach, her excitement at seeing the setting sun was evident. So that evening, I kept the video on as she saw a sunset on the beach for the first time. As the sky kept changing colours, I kept showing her the waves, the sky and the last rays of the setting sun.

It wasn’t any close to what she would feel seeing the real thing - but the way she reacted on even witnessing it with me on a video call was extremely precious.

7. Slept for nine hours. Every single day!

Somedays, I would have slept for more. Who knows :)

8. Started running everyday

I am glad that I discovered running and that discovery happened on a beach. I started running early morning barefoot on the beautiful beach and loved the feeling. I used to be concerned about the impact of running on my already inflamed body, but given that I was eating healthy, was not stressed at all and was meditating, running proved to be a beautiful form of exercise.

9. Made my acquaintance with Ruth Asawa

By a stroke of luck as I was ordering a few books online, a book on Ruth Asawa caught my eye. I hadn’t known about her or her work and given that it was a weighty book, had decided to chug it along for my Goa stay. For the first week of the break, I was curled up in the life of Ruth Asawa, her questions on identity and her insistence on living on her own terms.

This is the book I was reading. Everything She Touched and would recommend it to anyone who wishes to make an enquiry into a gorgeous hand made life.

Image taken from ruthasawa.com

Image taken from ruthasawa.com

10. Spent an afternoon in an independent bookstore

When it comes to bookstores, I can never get out of it fully content. You can leave me for two hours or twenty minutes, I’ll only come out grumpy at all the shelves I couldn’t see. I absolutely have to scan almost every book before deciding to move on. Could it be a disease? May be so! So when I took an entire day to visit the Literati Bookstore and Cafe in Calangute. I didn’t have anything else planned for the day and given the size of the bookstore, was able to scan the collection twice :D

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11. Finished reading a book in two days

Because I have mentioned this in my highlights, you would know that this is important to me. Not for flexing that I can read through 300+ pages in two days but for the stretch of time and consistent focus that tends to slips so fast nowadays. It felt really really nice to not do anything but just sit down with a book engrossed in the story and finish reading it without any distractions (other than long naps).

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13. Discovered the quiet magic of flaneuring

In the apartment complex where I stay, every evening hoardes of neighbours come out for their evening walk. It is a small complex and people keep walking around in the complex in circles. Going in circles round and round sometimes for hours. I did that as well. During the lockdown, getting out was not possible but when it is now, I did understand it was a peculiar habit. There is an entire world to be discovered in the neighbourhood. New shops keep mushrooming and shutting, there are florists and fruit sellers on bicycles, houses with overgrown gardens and sounds and scents of varying degrees.

Why did I keep walking in circles? Why didn’t I walk in my neighbourhood instead?

I changed that in my break. Flaneuring is the act of strolling or simply a mindful wander. During the break, I started on long, sometimes solitary walks in Goa and around my house.

14. started a book giveaway and gave away 70% of my wardrobe

I have had a very patchy relationship with fashion. Growing up, I never really cared much about it and now as a grown up (aargh), I find it at best a functional obligation so far. Even then, I had a cupboard full of clothes most of which were not worn or ones that I kept for the time I was going to trim down. I just said goodbye to them and packed them for a giveaway.

My aim for my wardrobe is to limit it to 10 items per season. Given that I stay in a city which is summers the entire year round, I need to trim down my wardrobe considerably. I am still in search of a good capsule wardrobe to follow and would continue on this journey of simplifying this year.

With books the relationship is more love-love making it harder to part ways with. I picked up the books I had read and I was sure I wasn’t going to read again and started a book giveaway. Posted them on my instagram stories and just gave them away to readers in my city. Did that for 30 books so far and I have lots more to give!

15. DREW EVERYDAY

Drawings are still packed in the sketchbooks and need to be put into through the raging laser eyes of my scanner. Those would follow.

So yeah, this is the record of my useless moments over the last four weeks. I am leaving you all with two pictures - a morning and a sunset that I witnessed from where I was for two weeks.

I wish you a year that is intentional, deliberate and has room for growth. Happy 2021!







From the studio: The week of awakening

Hello to whoever is reading this :)

Last week on Sunday, I decided to go to a nearby hiking spot. I had only climbed a handful of steps that I lost sensation in my legs. It was bad enough that I had to sit out the entire time clicking pictures of the sky and seeing people huffing and puffing their way through to the top of the hill.

At that moment, I felt nothing but pity on myself and my body. To be sitting there, breathless and numb was very painful to admit. The days that have followed have not seen me operating in 100% capacity. I still feel fatigued, unable to sometimes walk for more than 2000 steps at a time and chained with nausea.

In times like these, it is the hardest to feel kind for yourself and to give your pain the acknowledgement it deserves. However, I have set myself a very small yet challenging-enough goal and I do end up ticking it off on most days.

Full moon

Monday was full moon night and I wanted to take a breather from overthinking and sit with the moonrise. Indigenous cultures have dedicated rituals around the lunar cycle and specially around the full moon. While I am yet to discover these beliefs of cleansing myself, I did discover that aligning yourself with cycles gives you a sense of mark making in time.

Just like celebrating birthdays that come once a year, a full moon occurs every month and can be a natural mark to stop in your tracks, reflect and realign with your intention for the next month. It is easy to imagine in the cultures where there was no clock, a full moon would mark a new beginning and thus, would call for a celebration.

I laid out fairy lights in my balcony and spent more than two hours just sitting with the moon seeing it rise in the sky. Here are a few pictures with Orbit enjoying her full moon ritual.

Exploring paper

This week, I started exploring making on different kinds of paper. I am a paper hoarder and find it hard to part ways with any nice packaging paper but when it comes to drawing, I don’t experiment often. I have been feeling stuck on that for quite a bit and considering only I could get myself out of it, I gathered a few papers around and just starting drawing on them.

  1. Golden cardboard paper is from a bakery used as solid base for pastries.

  2. From a sketchbook with a few pages left

  3. The packaging of a dress that my brother gifted me (I am the luckiest sister in the world)

  4. A butter paper that was in the folds of my dress

I thoroughly loved working with the fragile papers and felt a close connection with my drawing and the medium. I’ll continue this series as much as I can.

Reading

I am still reading Lust for Life (1934) a biographical novel written by Irving Stone about the life of the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his life and work. The book is a gorgeous biography and I also created a few pages of art journals based on the quotes in the book (which would have been taken directly from Van Gogh’s letters) and will write a separate post on the book when I am finished with it. Reading a book published in 1934 is a fascinating journey into that time and it helps to see what was acceptable during that time.

It does get easy to drown in the cultural artefacts of today, especially when it comes to reading choices but I’ve had a great time reading books that were published before I was born.

In the spirit of Vincent, listen to Starry Starry Night on Youtube :)

Listening

It had been some time that I heard the podcast ‘Art For Your Ears’ by the Jealous Curator. This week, I heard Danielle talking to Petah Coyen. Her work is big, bold and gorgeous and what I loooved hearing from an established artist was her journey. She tells about years and years where she was making bad art and how it was a battle of time with her full time job and her art.

I am going to have to hear that episode once again and make an attention map out of it. It was pure gold!

I’ll leave you with the four of the five panels I drew a while back.

Thanks for reading! Hope you have a lovely week :)

About the ‘From the Studio’

This is a letter that I intend to publish every Sunday. My wish is not only to look backwards in reflection but to use the reflection as a guiding principle for the next week. I am impacted by influences every moment of the day — literature, spoken word, cinema, fellow humans and my work. I am hoping to use this space as the vessel to share all the beauty I found in the world that week.

From the studio: The week of intention

I started 2020 with a big resolve and ambition. To not overthink and just create indiscriminately. At the beginning of the year, I was able to blog for 15 odd days when the reality of Covid hit all of us — indiscriminately.

For the longest part of the initial months of lockdown, I was turbocharged into the black hole of domestic work and just trying to survive with my cooking. I saw with my eyes, dust settling in crevices that I turned a blind eye to, some cob webs getting larger and small hillocks of dishes and unironed clothes got bigger.

Now, it is almost the end of this year and I wanted to pick up the pieces again and hobble along.

This is what happened in the studio this week:

  • My endometriosis flared up along with a continuation of the flu. I got tested for Covid-19 and while the test came negative, the healthcare worker conducting the test drove the swab so deep that it hit a nerve behind my eye and there was an additional eye to nurse along with my broken body. It was difficult sitting down for more than 20 minutes at a stretch, it was difficult walking, back and knee were sore and my spirits were really rock bottom.

    Its when I am completely down and about, there wakes up a part of me that wants to rebel against my own body. I usually crash early and wake up early and head straight to the studio table. This collage is a product of that rebellion.

  • Watched HillBilly Elegy - a movie based on a book I wanted to read but just didn’t get the time. The performances shook me and I did move back and forth from my childhood to the present moment.

  • Also binged on Dash and Lily. Am I ashamed of binging on teenage romance? Never!

  • I have been reading Lust for Life, a biographical novel written in 1934 by Irving Stone on the life of Vincent Van Gogh. I have a very battered copy of it and some of the pages keep jumping out of the binding no matter how delicately I handle the book. I find the writing lucid and find it hard to not daydream about the time when Vincent wasn’t the most famous Van Gogh.

  • This week, I worked on an original drawing of an attention map made with my own words. After drawing a lot with other (wiser) people’s words, writing my own was fun.

  • To end, I am attaching a few pictures of another sketchbook where I spent most of 21st November with.

About the ‘From the Studio’

This is a letter that I intend to publish every Sunday. My wish is not only to look backwards in reflection but to use the reflection as a guiding principle for the next week. I am impacted by influences every moment of the day — literature, spoken word, cinema, fellow humans and my work. I am hoping to use this space as the vessel to share all the beauty I found in the world that week.

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Days 20-31: Being in the belly of the whale

Every day, at 9 PM sharp, my feet start losing sensation and my hands start losing any will to work. In the last ten days, I have carried on, absorbing my own chaos and matching it with the world’s.

Suddenly, April looks dangerously different. Suddenly, life looks dangerously precarious.

I read this piece by Dan Albergotti

Things to do in the belly of the whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

"Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale" by Dan Albergotti from The Boatloads.© BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008.

I am trying to do everything you said and a little bit more.

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Day 11-19 Eight days of looking back at myself

Have you seen Jojo Rabbit?

Elsa, the Jewish girl is hiding in a cupboard. The cupboard is dark and stinky. She is separated from her family and her love. Perhaps, she has lost her family and with the spite and anger diverted at her community, she is living through a loss that is almost unimaginably suffocating.

She is but a teenage girl, in the prime of her life and the world around her is crumbling down to pieces she can’t pick and make sense of.

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Children assume love to be the default mode of the world around them - their mothers loved them enough to not let them die of negligence and their fathers loved them enough to be around as an additional care taker and this normalcy of feeling, when tested tears to shreds the model of the world they’ve been weaving all along. Hate must literally destroy our cells, I believe. Was it destroying Elsa’s cells too?

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When you can’t hold onto anything, what do you hold onto?

Hold onto that thought. Being stuck at home isn’t the best thing to happen for me in the last one week - and in between work, cooking, washing dishes and washing more dishes, I am more irritable and tired as usual. It was surprising when I started looking back at my selfies from two years back.

It seemed a distance of a lifetime had to be crossed between that girl and the woman I am now. I seemed to be holding onto dear life - and barely so. I decided to walk the steps of these two years to meet her again - between today and that day. To hold onto her.

This is how the meeting went.

Day 4-10 Six days of drawing and collecting shiny confetti from the universe

A week flew by in the haze of news of Corona virus infecting the world’s blood streams. Fortunately, I was able to snatch enough time during my days to put my pen to paper everyday to make something that came from a deeper place.

I’ll be putting up some of the completed drawings up on the home page directly. Here are seven drawings I made in the last five days.

There is a story about a shiny confetti in this post.

During travels, it is impossible to pack along a long list of stationary items. I have also observed a long list of stationary items, even if packed, are instead a hinderance to creating something in pockets of time one gets while travelling.

In order to invoke the merciful goddess of creativity-under-constraints, I only packed a black notebook, two white ink pens, an adhesive tape and a glue stick.

On the first day of my stay while walking to the beach, I saw amongst the organic debris of twigs, dried leaves and tree bark, a shiny glittery coin shaped object bouncing off the Goan sunlight. I looked closely to confirm that it was a piece of shiny confetti that must have floated off by the wind and deposited in this absolutely random point. I thought to myself, oh, it’ll fly off by the time I am back - the wind will take it off and I’ll never see it again.

That didn’t happen.

I saw it wedged firmly on the sand the next day too. This time, I picked it up considering it a bright, shiny, glittery gift from the universe - a gift for my sketchbook. I pasted it on one of the pages and admired how it reflected the light as it sat firmly on my sketchbook.

Guess what happened the next day?

As I walked to the beach with my sketchbook and stationary pouch, I saw another one of this confetti landed just a few inches from where I found its sister the other day. I looked at, smiled and picked it up to paste it on another drawing.

The next day, I found another one, another one the day after that and another one the day after that!

For everyday I drew, I found this confetti waiting for me to pick it up, to be stuck along nicely in one of the drawings.

Today, as I checked out and walked towards the exit, guess what I found! Two confetti circles this time! Locked up in the same position, reflecting the Goan sunlight, hidden enough from the prying eyes of kids yet visible enough for my peering eyes.

Those two drawings are yet to be made. I’ll update this set of drawings here as a notebook.

Thank you universe, for sending me a reminder of a treasure everyday can hold — only if I look closely and have the courage to claim it for myself.

Day 2+3/366 Balacing stones and painted beads

I saw a video about balancing stones first from Jonna Jinton - a Swedish photographer and artist who moved to a small village in Sweden that has 10 inhabitants. I have spent quite a many evenings after work and quite a many mornings with her videos getting inspired by her.

I have a small collection of stones of interesting shapes and colours from different beaches I’ve visited. They’ve been wrapped in various bags and kept in the recesses of various drawers so far. I decided to revisit them and see if I could change their form into something else.

So I did. Used a few drops of a fast glue and made these three tiny sculptures mimicking balacing stones.

On day three, I dusted my collection of wooden beads that I was quite fascinated with some years ago and decided to paint them to make necklaces. Turns out, I still enjoy the process of painting those beads tremendously. Sadly, I didn’t have any string to string them on and had to steal from the burlap string that my cat plays with (Sorry Orbit :P)

I have a feeling I’m going to go in the rabbit hole of making these necklaces again!

Now, I have to rack my brains on what to make for today! Off I go :)

Day 1/366 Embroidery Loop

I am sitting in the lotus position today, dutifully reporting on the first day of the Year of the maker rat. Before I start the day’s reportage, I just happened to browse through the Julie/Julia project to make a comparison of our projects (You’ll know me through this, I am competitive in weirdest of ways)

Julie Powell started on a similar project of cooking through 524 recipes in 365 days! Considering I’ve picked a similar number, I realise how utterly daunting this task is - however, I also am able to drive some strength from the fact that Julie was indeed able to finish her project.

What is harder? Making 524 recipes or making 500 arty things? We’ll only know with time.

For now, I call upon the compassion of this mother of yearly projects to bless me with the strength and tons and tons of ideas to make!

Now for the reporting, yesterday, I finished making this embroidery loop. I had started working on this over the last weekend and this was left unfinished when I squeezed a trip to Delhi and back. In the evening though, as I was surrounded by friends passing on information on the newest vegan protein powders, my hands kept moving in a state of trance to finish this piece.

* Year of the maker rat *

For reasons completely inappropriate to mention here - I have thought of making 500 art things this year. In any shape or form! Also, to be completely open hearted and sending them off in the world (hopefully not dispatch it to my mom).

I am known to myself as the girl who is extremely fond of keeping lofty goals and then kind of scoring a 60-70% - which she then justifies as failing honorably than not starting at all.

I have no clue how on earth have I got this insane 500 number! If this year ends the same time next year, I have 366 days (leap year yay!) to make 500 art things.

Knowing very well in advance of my historical failures in keeping up with these resolutions on social media, I have decided to just keep writing here (because no one is going to be reading my blog) and if I indeed realise the utter stupidity of this venture, I can crawl here one late night and delete the half baked 2.5 posts I would have posted.

It is 2020, the year of the metal rat - in the spirit of adhering to the theme, let’s call it the year of the maker rat - shall we?

Dubai Diary

Alo readers!

Last month, Wingify, where I work as a culture designer, took everyone (~170 people) on our annual 3 nights, 4 day vacation to Dubai. Since I was responsible for planning the entire trip and ensuring that everyone has an amazing time, it was less of a vacation for me and more of living a partial panic attack, but we made it back! yay! 

There were tons of people for whom this was the first international trip and seeing their smiles as they got their passports stamped for the first time was the warmest feeling ever! 

One of the moments firmly etched in my mind is of the first day when the music stopped playing on our Dhow and we were gently floating on the marina as the evening prayers rolled in from the nearby mosque. 

One could hear faint chatter but mostly the water rappling along and it was a sight to see. 

Floating on the Dubai marina on a dhow as the evening prayers roll in.

Although I haven't done travel sketching before, I was eager to try this time. So I took a cute notebook and some colours along. These are some of the dispatches from the trip and some pages of my diary that I managed to work on during the trip. 

We had our eyes set on Kinokuniya, a bookstore in Dubai mall and I specifically wanted a large roll of good black paper and was hoping to return back with a lot of colour sets and stationary. However, their stationary was sealed mostly and there were no pens and colours for trial. Even the sketchbooks were sealed and I couldn't touch and feel the paper. 

So I was more cautious than I would've been and hauled back these ones! 

Dubai Stationary Haul

There weren't a lot of pictures I clicked as I was busy sketching wherever we got some time to ourselves. But hey, no complaints! I was awake till 2-3 AM on most nights of the trip and that itself deserves a victory pat on the back :) 

Till next time!