New at Sweet Lotus Art

This is one of four graphics that are now available at Sweet Lotus Art. It's one of four drawings I made, originally in black and white, after visiting China in 1995, during the UN Women's Conference. I colored the drawings many years later and used them on greeting cards and mugs. I will eventually post links to the website where they're still available as cards/mugs. This is the first time that I've made them available for sale as POSTERS. There's watermark on the image here and at Sweet Lotus Art that won't appear in the printed version.

SWEET LOTUS ART

… and finally, after weeks of making excuses and developing allergies to keyboards and wanting to sleep all day, every day, SWEET LOTUS ART is a reality. 

And you know the best part? It was fun to set it up. The host site, FolioTwist, is highly approachable and easy to use. At every point, if I got stuck it was because I wasn't paying attention and/or I was so convinced I wouldn't be able to move forward that I got stuck just in order to feel justified in my beliefs. Incompetence is always the easiest of all options, right?

But Zac and Dan of Folio Twist are patient, helpful and more than anything else, really good at what they do. So Sweet Lotus Art is finally up and I'm feeling very happy about it. 

As some of you know, I've been exhibiting my edition prints for years so they're on view, as one might expect. However the new element here is that I've made many of those etchings/lithos available here as digital reproductions -- that is, something like a photocopy except that it's beautifully printed, through another web-site called ImageKind (they also sell tons of other art). I can afford to say "beautifully printed" coz I'm not praising myself here -- that site does really good work. I ordered a couple of prints for my sister and when she showed me the results, I was kind of blown away. The paper and the printing are great. And because they're reproductions, not "signed originals", they're also surprisingly cheap*.

I am also offering a large number of "doodles" -- sketches I made (and continue to make) while talking on the phone -- as digital reproductions. Some of them are in black and white, as they are when I make 'em and some of them, like the one featured above, started off b/w but I colorize them and make them into what I'm calling Digital Posters. I will gradually transform all the b/ws into digital posters (they'll continue to be available in monochrome too).

I am not offering the edition prints for sale internationally for the moment. I am not yet set up to do the packing, insuring and shipping. But if you're living outside the US and want to order prints from ImageKind, it should be easy enough. You'd just pay a lot more for shipping, of course, than you would in the US.

So … umm … what are you waiting for? GO VISIT. Send the link to all your friends. And if you're an artist, sign up at FolioTwist and start your own gallery. It'll be fun. Trust me.

*but you have to click on "unframed", when you're at ImageKind to see the raw, unvarnished price. At first glance you'll have a heart attack, because the price includes the frame, matt and glazing.

ELSEWHERE, USA

Finally! A new post. Yes, it's been a very long time. I've been all over the place, but I've also been back here in the US since the end of July.

I won't even try to recap several months' worth of activities. But there are two items I'd like to share right away. One is related to the above image. It relates to a column that's been appearing in the Saturday edition of Business Line (part of The Hindu newspaper network). I've been meaning to post this list of links FOREVER but … well … Anyway. Here they are now.

The column is a slightly fictional version of my life here. When I say "slightly" I mean that all the names are different, including places, people and the occasional animal; the events are mostly true but not all of them; and the sequence of events is not necessarily as presented.

So that's the first item. The second item is what will appear in the NEXT post, (i.e., it'll appear above this one, once I've finished posting), which is my first ever on-line web-site for displaying and selling my art-work. It's taken me a full month just to get around to posting the link! I've been working on the site for about eight weeks now. I can't explain why it's taken so long, because the web-site, FOLIO-TWIST is very well designed and easy to use. More about this when I get around to posting that link …

Meanwhile, here are links to 12 columns:

ELSEWHERE 01 -- Opening Doors 

ELSEWHERE 02 -- Shopping For One

ELSEWHERE 03 -- Greetings, Visiting Slave

ELSEWHERE 04 -- Coffee Emergencies

ELSEWHERE 05 -- Who And Why

ELSEWHERE 06 -- No Breeze, This

ELSEWHERE 07 -- Lights Out

ELSEWHERE 08 -- Day In The Aisles

ELSEWHERE 09 -- Jogging Along

ELSEWHERE 10 -- Day In The City

ELSEWHERE 11 -- On The Beach

ELSEWHERE 12 -- Stars And Straps

SUKI ONLINE / 2014 / 02

26th February 2014
Aside from not updating the posts at this blog, I haven't been updating my book list either. *sigh* Here are two links that I missed posting:
The paperback edition of THREE VIRGINS is available in the US. In India, it's available in hardback online from the publisher, ZUBAAN. Flipkart features a link to the paperback edition, which is not, so far as I know, available in India.

It's had some very positive reviews. Here are three:
Namita Gokhale in OUTLOOK
Mitali Saran in TEHELKA
Akhila Krishnamurthy in the HINDU

My latest illustrated book is WE ARE DIFFERENT, available from Flipkart India and of course from its publisher, TULIKA BOOKS.

I have also recently begun a fortnightly column with The Hindu's BUSINESS LINE in their Saturday magazine, BLink. It's an interesting and well designed magazine, well worth a visit.

Here's a link to the first piece: ELSEWHERE, USA. I'll post more links as I get them.

And finally, there's been a lot of activity on the Indian indigenous comic front.

Arul Mani in the LADIES FINGER! posted a very friendly review of Penguin India's DOUBLETALK many months ago and I was too sluggish to post a link here. Thanks to Amruta Patil, who very kindly sent me the link (realising that I would never otherwise see it or find it on my own)

At the Bangalore Lit Fest that I attended in January, I was the Mediator on a panel about graphic novels -- I really would like to write about this at greater length, so I won't say more right now. In a related development, SUKI made a guest appearance in PULP QUARTERLY, a lively new publication focusing on graphic stories and story tellers.

SUKI ONLINE / 2014 / 01

Notes:
1) Okay, so it's been TWO MONTHS. I've been traveling since the 10th of December 2013. Not continuously, sure, but enough that I couldn't settle down and give Suki her space.

2) The view is of the Trishul/Nanda Devi range (it's not properly centred, so Nanda Devi is kind of cut off, on the right) and I felt breathless and blown away and all of those things -- I've seen the view before, but never this clearly, never for five days continuously, never with the sense of being In The Presence Of Snow Peak Super Stars in quite this way before. I traveled to Sitla from New Delhi with E and A (by car. A driving all the way), intending to spend the two days before and after the New Year there. I've been to Sitla a number of times before and we've always stayed with wonderful friends, at their very special, very beautiful home/estate/orchard. The peaks have always been curtained away behind mist and haze. But this time, there they were just … there.

Just there.

You want to spend the whole day looking. And that's all.

3) I got back to my little hideaway in the US last Friday, after an extremely active trip. I feel as if I spent the whole two months running around. First to Madras, then to Sitla, then very briefly to Bangalore, for only my second Lit Fest, the Times of India's Literary Carnival.

I'll post more photographs in a later post, from the Sitla trip. Not more pictures of the range (because nothing really does it justice) but of quick blinks taken from the window of the car, of village markets along the way.

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / 08

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / #07

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / #06

Yup. We know. Delays"R"Us.

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / #05

(Uhh. Yes. It's been two weeks. But we're back. For the moment.) 

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / 04

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / 03

SUKI ONLINE / 2013 / 02

SUKI ONLINE/ 2013 /01

Okay. So this is an experiment. I've been wanting to revive my cartoon strip SUKI for many years, but have never found the right space and time. I don't know if I have the discipline to keep it going without a newspaper deadline, but my plan is to post one fresh strip every week, on Mondays. The strip reads downwards, in sequence. Please inform me of glitches.

Suki may respond to comments, but only if she is addressed directly in a posted comment (i.e., sending e-mails to me will not cut ice with her).

E.K. PADMA / PADMA PADMANABHAN: 1918-2013

My beautiful, feisty, high-principled, iron-willed Mum passed away today. In Madras, around 8 pm, surrounded by family*.

My Valkyrie Mum is what I'd like to say -- she was a true warrior, in the Carlos Castaneda sense -- but I don't think she would approve of Norse maidens and their rampaging ways. She fought by the rules, patiently and with dignity, for all the things she thought were right. But she took delight in worldly pleasures too -- she LOVED sweets and chocolate, she enjoyed a nice glass of sherry if it came her way, she had an eye for fine art and Persian and Afghan carpets (the only "real" carpets, in her opinion). Even in her final conversation with me, two weeks ago on the phone, the thing she exclaimed about was the new puppy in the house and what an absolute darling he was. She loved her pretty cotton saris, she used Ponds Cold Cream to keep her skin soft till the last and it was always a source of terrible annoyance to her that the skin on her arms and legs had turned to "lizard scales", in her opinion.

She believed in facing towards the storm with her head held high, her long shapely nose raised up like the prow of a Spanish Galleon. She was unsentimental and down-to-earth, never had time for foolishness or squishy emotions. Or weakness. She was very down on weakness. When I was a child, Mum's rule was, "If you've done something wrong, I'll scold you -- but if you cry, I'll spank you!" -- This rule came into being because by then she had read Dr Spock's Baby & Child Care handbook, in which corporeal punishment was frowned upon. But both my sisters had been born before the Spock era and had been routinely spanked! So I knew she was capable of it and therefore learnt very early in life to withhold tears and tantrums, regardless of provocation.

I was never spanked, because I was very good at not "making a scene". But I'm not sure if it's been useful: I've seen how some of my lady friends can turn on the waterworks at immigration desks and bureaucratic offices thus getting their work done, while I am dragged off to the gallows, stony-faced to the end.

Mum had a BA in English Literature and believed fiercely in education and self-reliance for women. In her view, there was no question but that women MUST have professional degrees and MUST have their own independent sources of income. She thought she was an Ugly Duck but believed that a "lady" must always be conscious of her looks, be graceful and soft-spoken and of course VERY SMART. She despaired for me, knowing that I was an irredeemable pudding to look at, utterly disinterested in clothes and jewelry, clumsy around the house and awkward in society. She knew I was going to stumble and pratfall my way through life -- and I have NOT disappointed her in that regard! But in her later years, she did once praise me for being "very good humoured".

The incident that takes place in my short story MRS GANAPATHY'S SMALL TRIUMPH (Hot Death, Cold Soup, Kali for Women, 1996) is based on Mum and an actual incident that occurred in her drawing-room in Madras, involving a visiting friend boasting about her oh-so-eligible son to my Mum, who had a not-so-eligible daughter living right under her roof (moi, i.e.).

She had contempt for physical infirmities and for people who did not find ways to overcome them. When she began to lose her eyesight in her late fifties, she adjusted herself so well to Macular Degeneration that even though it was incurable, she carried herself as if she could always see better than anyone else. She often DID notice anything unsightly or unattractive that entered within her field of vision and she was always sharply critical of mismatched colours in clothing or interior decor. She never lost her lust for looking at things she considered beautiful and worthy of her attention.

Even late into her life, when she had barely 15% vision, she took a covetous delight in catching sight of the hibiscus blooms on a bush that peeked over the boundary wall from the neighbour's yard. At five o'clock in the evening, a particular private bus that plied down the road was painted a shade of yellow that she never failed to praise. She commented on the naughty squirrels that harassed the courting crow couples on the Rain Tree arching over her garden and she despaired over the grass in her lawn if it wasn't exactly as bright and green as she wanted it to be. Whenever my sister bought lilies for her room, Mum would exclaim about them over and over again (to me, on the phone), enjoying them for their fragrance, their graceful shape and my sister's gift for flower arrangement, which, according to my mother, she herself never had.

Her hearing dwindled more gradually than her eyesight, but towards the end she fought her hearing aid and could only hear the odd word or sentence. She had the classic broken-hip accident that is the scourge of the elderly, followed by a back surgery some years later. Both surgeries slowed her down a great deal. She did her best to remain active and mobile despite everything and would force herself to eat at the table three times a day. In the afternoons, after lunch, she would spend at least a couple of hours, poring over the newspaper, using a magnifying glass combined with her reading glasses and with one eye winked shut.

My father died in 1994 so Mum has been "alone", though surrounded by her own staff and my sister and her family living upstairs from her, for almost 20 years. She was a splendid hostess and her annual birthday celebrations, in December involved stacks of food and guests who came by all day. In her day, when she was an Ambassador's wife, she hosted and catered countless cocktail parties and glittering dinners of the kind where, at the end of the evening, the men go off to smoke cigars and the ladies withdraw to a separate room for liqueurs and tiny cups of coffee.

It is very odd to think that she's no longer there. Even though, in another sense, she is now free to be everywhere at once. I am glad for her that she is no longer confined to a weak and suffering body.
I will toast her life every time I eat a chocolate, dunk bread into a fondue and catch sight of a hibiscus.

Hugs and happies, Mum! And thanks for all the fish.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*I wasn't there. My passport is at this moment stuck in the Italian consulate in Boston, awaiting a Schengen visa, with crossed fingers. I won't know about the visa or the passport for a week yet.

An UNUSUAL LIFE

I read about Dr Helena Wright in today's newspaper. A pioneering presence in women's health issues in the early 20th century, she was also remarkably forward-thinking and compassionate. Not to mention discreet. By employing the services of a Man Called Derek she enabled some 500 married women to conceive in the years after the end of WW1. This was done with the knowledge of their husbands, many of them rendered unable to father children following their wartime experiences.

It's a wonderful and oddly heartwarming story. Apparently a well-kept secret! Derek's surname is not revealed.

A DELICIOUS AFTERNOON

This afternoon, I and a friend had the most delectable fusion-cuisine lunch at New Delhi's Indian Accent at The Manor Hotel. The hotel as well as the restaurant are such an aesthetically satisfying experience that for me anyway it was like being fed at many levels at once -- sight and sound plus taste and scent and whatever specialized sense is associated with non-intrusive-friendly service.

We hadn't made a reservation, but were easily accommodated at a table with a pleasant view of the room and its lush green exterior. We both chose the tasting menu, vegetarian for S and non-v for me, but got a tiny nibble right away, in the form of two miniature naans, stuffed with blue cheese. When I say miniature, I mean, really teenie tiny, like the smallest size of Nivea tin.

We each had non-alcoholic drinks: Lavendar fizz for me and unsweetened Lime soda for S. Then began a gently rolling tide of single-bite events. Pea-soup in a slender cylindrical "cup" -- so narrow that the word cup hardly suits it -- affording perhaps two swallows of soup. A single marble of crisp-fried potato-shreds that melted with a delicate crunch in the mouth, leaving a whiff of pani-poori flavours, a tiny spear of watermelon to set it off on the side. A spicy shredded chicken that smoldered in the mouth. Three bites of fish, so fresh that it felt almost immoral to eat something so recently alive. Followed by a single rib of pork, still sizzling, sweet on the outside, melting on the inside.

Each item was served on a different, artistically distinct dish. One came on a dimpled white plate, the next on a smooth black slab of stone-ware, the one after it on a curving strip of pure white porcelain. Strips of fresh green banana-leaf set off the food. We each had different crockery for each course.

The main dish for me was a black pepper prawn, served on a deep white plate, with a small meat-stuffed kulcha on the side, plus a single serving of black-dal and raita. S had a paneer "barrel" -- thin sliced, rolled and then lightly batter-fried -- with pickled-accents poured around it. Both dishes were perhaps six bites deep, so that we could finish them easily, without any sensation of heaviness.

But before the main dish arrived, we had a palate cleanser in the form of a conical section of kulfi-flavoured sorbet. From the corner of my eye, I had noticed other tables being served something that looked like small black iron claws -- but when it came to our table, I saw that it was minute replica of a coal-fired iron, with the cone of mulberry pink sorbet nestled inside it! Loved it.

Dessert was three separate items, a pistachio-flavoured crème brûlée, a tiny glass of frosted lemony ice-nuggets and a slender wedge of treacle pie. As a finishing touch, there was a tray in the shape of doll-sized string-bed, on which there were four small bowls of sweet-savoury treats.

Are you drooling slightly? That was my intention entirely! The Chef's name is Shantanu Mehrotra (I hope I've got this right; I didn't write it down though I saw it embroidered on his jacket) and both of us complimented him warmly at the end of the meal. The whole experience was playful and flavourful, both at once.

I forgot to take photographs while I was there, so the mushrooms featured at the top of this page are a red-(white?)herring, because they have nothing at all to do with The Manor. Instead, they're from my drive-way, growing on the old bougainvillea in this rainy season. What amazes me about them is their pure, fresh whiteness arising out of the old gnarled wood of the creeper. My picture does not in any way do them justice, because I've not learnt to get the lighting right. Fortunately, they keep growing, so I'll keep trying. This picture captures all three stages of the mushroom in one glance -- the extreme youth of the rounded knob, the proud umbrella of the mature phase and the drooping grace of the spent spike.