Madras Margazhi sunday

This year I have eagerly looked forward to the december music season, promising myself a lot of concerts. And so far I haven't let myself down. Sunday was a particularly musical day starting early in the morning. We went to hear Vedanth and Bindu sing songs based on Kabir's poetry. It started at 7 am at Nageshwara Rao Park. It was a beautiful morning and the green outdoor venue was perfect for the songs being sung.

Initially the audience was huddled in front of the stage but slowly as morning walkers and joggers passed by they paused, listened and the crowd grew on all sides of the stage. Here is one such mama in a veshti with a fanny pack who strolled by and decided to pick up a plastic chair and sit himself down near me. He stayed till the end and listened with rapt attention.

The concert wrapped up by 9 and a lot of people including me made a beeline for the canteen at Music Academy after which I went on to attend two more concerts there - a vocal by T.N. Seshagopalan and in the evening Ravikiran on the Chitraveena. One more sunday well spent :)

A Family sketchcrawl!

This sunday was a long awaited fun family sketching day. My parents, cousin and I went with our sketching bags to the Thiruvanmiyur temple in the morning and each found our own nook to settle down in and sketch. I chose the sacred tree of the temple. It's supposed to be the oldest part of the temple and has some old mythological link to the sage Valmiki's resting spot on his travels here. 

All large temple complexes have a sacred tree. This one is medicinal and called locally as the Vanni tree. It is very very old and gnarled and has been protected by a fencing. People go around the fenced enclosure praying. Inside the enclosure are very old black snake-worship idols. I don;t know the story behind that, I'm afraid. And on the eastern side of the enclosure where I sat there was another altar with seven more idols which are accessible to the public. These are smeared with turmeric and kumkumam dots.

There was a constant coming and going of worshippers on sunday morning. They would first go around the tree and then come to the eastern altar and either offer flowers or light a small lamp and pray. This spot was secluded from the main outer walkway of the temple compound. It was tucked away in a shaded grove of trees and I found a nice flat stone on the ground with a lovely brick wall as a backrest. It was bliss.

My cousin sat herself down on the main walking thoroughfare and had to persevere through bright hot sun and a lot of crowd. You can see her final sketch here. My dad (check his blog here) went into another shaded corner to sketch the gopurams and my mum, ever the quick one, did two sketches in the time I did my one. Then we met back at the car and went down ECR to tryst cafe in neelangarai.

The cafe has a wonderful display counter at one end with all kinds of breads stacked up in a tantalizing display but  it was crowded and we couldn't sit facing the counter. So we just cooled off, looked at each others sketches, drank and munched some stuff and sketched each other. It was so much fun!

Symmetry and Geometry

Akbar's Tomb in Sikandra on the outskirts of Agra is a gem. It was my clear favourite on our trip to Agra and Sikri. There is such a lot of hype over the Taj Mahal and such a mad tourist rush there. Compared to the Taj, I found Sikandra quiet and dignified as a tomb should be. The inlay work was exquisite. 

Some of the geometric patterns involving white marble inlay on red sandstone are mind-boggling. Considering I had to retry and erase several times before I got these to look the way they do in a simple line drawing, it's really stupefying to think of the work done centuries ago - the attention to detail and the sheer level of skill.

My sketch doesn't give a sense of the scale of these patterns. They are huge in comparison to the human scale and help make the towering monuments look less gigantic. It was hard enough to draw them separately that my courage ran out and I didn't try to put them on the walls of the building. 

The play of geometry is, of course, not just in these inlay friezes that adorn the main entrance gateways. They start with the arrangement of the spaces in plan, and the massing of the building. Cardinal directions and the spiritual axis give us repetetive 6 sided and 8 sided geometries in the arrangement of chambers, openings, flooring patterns and finally the surface ornamentation.  The layers of complexity are infinite and you can discover as much as you have time for. 

Buland Darwaza

This is the south facing public gate to the mosque at Fateh-pur Sikri. "Darwaza" meaning gate or doorway and "Buland" meaning high or great in Persian.  The scale of the Buland Darwaza needs to be seen to be believed. The mosque along with the palace buildings at Fatepur Sikri sit atop a ridge and the city with its people was to its south, sloping down to the plains.

While the mosque has gateways from the north, east and south, the southern gateway is the largest - the public gateway for the city. The ridge is scaled by a series of steps and standing at the base of the steps you can't see the rest of the mosque building. Towering in front of you are a pile of red sandstone steps with the Buland Darwaza and people flocking to it looking like ants.

On my recent trip to Agra and Sikri this was one of my two favourite buildings. Will tell you about the other soon. But the experience was marred a bit by the over-aggressive guides at Sikri. They started stopping us on the highway before we even entered Sikri, pretending to be officials collecting toll. And once we were stopped they tried forcing themselves on us. All the way up these steps we were hounded and harangued by scores of them who stood in front of you not letting you see what you came to see. We were probably part of the minority - independent tourists, not part of a tour group and not wanting a guide - and in India you always have to fight it out if you are part of the minority.

Discovering Vasant Vihar

Uma and I had fixed to meet up at the KFI on greenways road on saturday afternoon. She was familiar with the place having been a frequent visitor of their library. I, on the other hand, knew where it was but surprisingly had never gone in before. I arrived at three in the afternoon and walked in through a winding tree lined mud track and as I walked the traffic noises fell away with each step. Suddenly this beautiful white building came into view through the trees. It was fronted by a lush green lawn - such a rarity in my city.

On the lawn sat Uma, sketching away already. Although the building looked inviting, we had to wait half an hour for them to open after their lunch break, and the lawn was cool with plenty of shade so I sat down and spread out my things too. As it happens, we never went in. We just sat there and sketched. The sunny weather and the huge trees all around and that lawn was just a great place to be.

Vasanta Vihar, which is the name of this building, was the house in which J. Krishnamurti stayed when in Chennai. It now houses an archive and library and is open to the public. The grounds are large and have guest houses, a book shop and a lot of green space which is such a needed lung in the heart of the city. What struck me most that evening was how peaceful it was. Visitors came and went, but maintained a respectful silence, a few glanced at us sketching, but no one bothered us. The usual Indian curiosity wasn't there in the people.

The black and white sketch of the building is what I did there, and the colours and some details were added later. The sketch of Uma is a very quick one. Light was fading by then and there was a beautiful orange-ish glow on the building and lawns from the setting sun. You can check out more pictures of this here. Once again I really enjoyed sketching in company and we have lots of ideas of where to go next. 

Saturday sketchcrawl in Mylapore

No, I don't mean last saturday. This was actually 3 weeks ago and since then I've sunk into a bloggers black hole. Work and travel. But 3 saturdays ago I did something very exciting. I was approached through my blog by Uma, who is a fellow urban sketcher right here in Madras. We fixed up to meet at three in the evening and we were blessed with a cloudy day. 

Now all outdoor sketchers from other parts of the world will go huh?!! at this point but if it had been sunny we wouldn't have lasted half an hour at 3 pm. As it was, the shadows weren't crisp but we lasted 4 hours walking around Mylapore temple lugging our sketchbooks and paints around. We had fixed up to meet at the eastern entrance to the temple. The main doors were shut and would only open at 4 so we walked around the area and then realised that our first rendezvous point had a shady spot on the front steps of someone's house.

While waiting for the temple to open, the flower sellers were setting up their baskets and stalls, worshippers parked and went off to deposit their footwear in the booth and the owner of the house started washing her front steps making me jump sideways and mess up the perspective of the car.

Then the temple opened and in we went Again we made a beeline to a shady spot. The flagstones were hot even on a cloudy day and I did these two sketches from the same spot. By six thirty we were both thirsty and tired from the heat. Uma had the stamina for one more sketch sowe walked across to the other side of the enclosure and I just chatted with her while she captured the long dance hall on the southern side. Sketching with another person was so much fun and we hope to do more saturdays soon. I wish Madras had weather like Bangalore.

Fringeford memories

Today I was supposed to meet up with a fellow sketcher and spend the morning sketching outside. I hadn't blogged for the past few days with pent up excitement thinking I will have loads of fresh stuff to share by now. But waking up at five am I realised that it had rained all night and was still raining and our grand plans were all cancelled. Until next weekend then......

And so I fall back on some sketches that I made during a lovely relaxed holiday my husband and I had in northern Kerala. Wayanad is a hilly district and the place we stayed - Fringeford - was suggested by a friend. The first sketch is the narrow path through which the jeep drives in as you get your first glimpse of the house.

Now fringeford is not just a house or homestay. It was originally a cardamom and coffee estate which the present owner has allowed to grow wild. It is 520 acres of rainforest on hilly terrain with multiple streams and lots of wild animals running through it. The house is just five  bed-rooms, a kitchen and a verandah dining hall. We were very lucky to be the only guests when we were there - made us feel like the lords of the jungle... or something :)

You step out of the rooms onto a shaded courtyard with a mango tree and the ground falls away to this stream with lovely cold clear water rushing through it. If you stay for several days like we did and need to get your laundry done, they have one or two local women from the village who come by to help in the kitchen and these women take your clothes down to this stream and wash them on those stones!

There is no TV and no cell phone signal as the house is bang in the middle of all that jungle. What you can do instead is walk for miles and do a lot of animal and bird watching. The resident guide Shaji takes you on early morning and late evening treks that are customized for your trekking skill level (relatively low in my case) where you put on leech socks and scramble through jungle for a half hour or so before you come upon a breath-taking view, a gushing waterfall or a wild elephant.

The other fantastic memory from this place has got to be the food. Local, fresh, delicious and cooked in a wood fire kitchen in the old traditional way. Lots of coconut and coconut oil. The cook was an elderly man, again from a nearby village, and boy! did I eat a lot. Once done with a meal, we would totter out of the verandah into the shade of the mango tree in the courtyard and sit in a mild food coma in one of the lounging chairs. The best one was that hammock over there and the view you got was of the hill sloping up on the other side of the stream. It was thickly wooded and I tried sketching the trees the first day but was not terribly happy with that sketch so I gave it another shot on the last day again...

Kochi trip

Well, here's the coloured sketch of the flight back from Kochi as promised. The trip was courtesy the Metro Plus theare fest and we all stayed at the gateway hotel on Marine Drive. All the actors arrived a day early and on saturday evening we all assembled in Anand's room - 218 for a line reading. Only Karuna and Anish were coming in on later flights that evening and as Meena and Ravi their lines were easily skipped - so the line reading was essentially all the group scenes and songs.

The room had a cosy nook with a sofa around which the actors huddled as they ran through their lines and once again I was trying to improve my quick sketching so these sketches were done in a tiny sketchbook with a fat brush pen. Roughly five minutes a sketch.

Ultimately, though the show was a hit with the audience an uncanny number of lines were forgotten or goofed up. The gaffs were covered up with some quick thinking at times and with sheer fluke at other times making it a really hilarious show for those of us who knew what was going on.

Back from Kochi

Last weekend was spent in Kochi with Perch, where we put up Ms. Meena again. I did a bunch of sketches in a sketchbook but ever since I got back I've been so swamped with work that there's been no time to put the finishing touches to them. On my way out to Kochi I was so pumped up about sketching and determined to do a sketch in the airport even before we took off. I had loaded my hand baggage with sketching material and then I couldn't find a place to sit at our currently terrible Madras airport. On the flight I was at a window looking out at monsoon clouds.

So, feeling that lugging all those books and art material would be a waste I checked it in on the return flight. And then it turns out we're in a cute little dinky aircraft with only two seats per side and I got the aisle but had no sketchbook! Bummer! Some hotel stationery came to my rescue. The paper's really thin so I thought I'd share it with you before I try and put watercolours on it. Never know if the sketch will live thru that.

The show went really well and the Kochi audence gave us rave reviews. Will share the line reading sketches with you soon, I hope!

Salon self portrait

This is me attempting to draw me as my hair gets tugged at a salon near my house. What has always amazed me is how effortlessly these women (and men these days) at the salon get your hair to do their every bidding while back at home those same docile locks just rebel and do as they please.

This time around I was sitting in this chair for three hours while doing a very long drawn out hair straightening process which involves smearing some goop in your hair, followed by a waiting period, and then they smear some more goop in your hair. Then they wrap up your head in cling-wrap for a bit and you sit there feeling like a lettuce in the fridge. Now all this while I was not doing this sketch. I was correcting an electrical tender document, and managing rather well, all things considered.

After an hour they unwrapped my head and washed the goop away after which the lady started ironing my hair. It was at this point that I did the sketch. The ironing went on for a little under half an hour at which point the ink drawing was done and I put it away. Usually when I sketch in public places, its a good way to start off a friendly chat with the people around me, but this being an up-market salon (or so I assume because of the discreetness of the people working there) not one person said a thing to me as I sketched away. Several people peeked at it and smiled shyly and walked away.

I cam home and did the painting in all enthusiasm and botched up my face. Well, it didn't look like me in the first place anyway.

One hell of a Bangalore Weekend

I must have been to Bangalore a gazillion times but last weekend, for the first time I went with a group of close friends with no agenda - no specific family or friends to meet, no function to attend and no play to stage. All my friends had done this before, it was a first only for me so when we started saturday morning off with breakfast at Koshy's they all nearly fell out of their chairs when I said I had never been there before. It was decided then (though actually it was probably the agenda anyway) that we should spend the entire weekend visiting as many such cool hang-out places - pubs, restaurants, breakfast joints etc etc and we covered eleven over two days!!

I initially had grand hopes and plans of sketching in each place, but the second place where we went to was Hard Rock cafe and because I took a while painting there all the others were forced to buy a second round of drinks and there was much Tsk-tsking and genial pulling of my leg all around so I desisted from then on. The waiter at hard rock who waited at our table was a Sandeep who was a happy chirpy chap. If you asked him to turn up the music volume he would do so and then dance all the way down the aisles between all the tables and he was most intrigued by my sketch and then my little painting kit. Soon a bunch of waiters came and huddled around our table and as soon as the sketch was done (the paint was still wet) they asked to see my sketchbook and gave me many smiles. Altogether a happy place.

But our schedule was ambitious, we had to move on; I won't bore you with a list but we covered a lot of area and Tarun, Uk and John are planning to get a whole lot of bragging mileage out of last weekend. On Sunday we had a superb breakfast at this place in Indira Nagar called Daddy's Deli. It's a Parsi joint and the Akuri and different side orders and waffles were yummy. Big thank you to Sidey for not just putting us up at his place but for taking us to this scrumptious breakfast. From there we moved to a new place called Toit that everyone we bumped into was talking about and when we got there we realised why.

Its really beautifully done up. The resto-bar occupies four levels with staircases and mezzanines and bridges and double heights all within three stepping up pitched roof volumes. I decided long ago not to blog any photographs here and my decision still stands so I'm afraid all I can show you is one sketch but this was the top-most level where we sat in these deep-set divans at low tables. This level opens out into a terrace garden but the best part is the roof. You know the sky-light tile in the mangalore tile system? Well the entire roof here has only the slylight tiles so it forms a lovely waffled light-and-shade pitch roof and in the splendid Bangalore weather that light filtering down as we sat there was just amazing.

Disclaimer to all Bangalore relatives who read this blog: really sorry I didn't call you but it was a group pact, none of us were to call our relatives this weekend. But hope to see you in October :D

Steps to reach Gandhi

If you have ever fixed up to meet anyone at the Marina Beach, then the likely meeting point would have been the Gandhi statue. The Marina is actually a little over three kilometres long from the light-house at the southern end to the war-memorial at the north and the entire stretch has a wide major road of the city running down it as well as a promenade with many statues. This promenade at road level steps down to the beach which is also un-interrupted for the three kilometre stretch and is the second largest beach in the world after Rio - how about that?

So given its huge size and our immense population it is always good to plan a precise meeting point with friends so as not to miss them completely and wander around picking up long lost twins all evening. Over the decades statues of prominent figures from Indian History, our freedom movement, Tamil Literature and the Tamil movement have been placed as statues along the promenade but somehow Gandhiji is still number one.

Any marathon or walk, for a public cause, any banner holding, slogan raising get together on the beach, the morning laughing club, the VIP stand for the Republic day and Independence day parades - the starting point for all of the above is what you see above.

I actually find some of the other statues better (as statues themselves, in terms of the craft, the depiction, the idea) and hope to sketch a few more in the future here. Gandhiji is positioned at the junction of Cathedral Road and Beach Road so when I walk down from my house to the beach, then bang! - this is where I'm at.

The promenade was a simple side-walk for most of my years in Madras. Recently though, its been given a facelift. Some greenery, some meandering paths and mainly a lot of fuss around Gandhiji. These steps you see here are also pretty new, there's a huge curving oval set of steps cascading down from a wide landscaped plaza to the beach. At the point where the cascade meets the inner beach lane there's a set of funky huge granite balls (I'm sitting on one of them) serving to cordon off the pedestrian area from the parking lane.

Once again, it was quite an experience sitting in one of the most crowded points of the city and sketching and I was actually asked by a friendly north Indian if I was a foreigner!!!

Bajji on the beach

Last Sunday evening, for the first time since I started this blog, I decided to go for a walk somewhere purely in order to sketch. I packed a little jolna pai with two sketchbooks, my Koi travel watercolours and my assorted pens and pencils and set off from home. It was around five and quite cool. I kept walking down R.K. Salai and didn't spot anything particularly sketch-worthy except the grotesque-ly ugly city centre building and so I kept walking till I hit Marina Beach.

The beach was teeming with people - merry-go-rounds of different sizes, hand operated and motor operated. Push-carts with street food, kids on a roller skating rink, hawkers, beggars, in short I didn't know where to start. I was also feeling a bit self-conscious because its been a while since I've sketched on location at such a crowded place.

I spotted a really colourful merry-go-round and was contemplating squatting on the sand to draw it when I realised there was a bajji stall nearby. The stall was a simple push cart with a really lovely display of hanging molagas - so typical. Lovely huge green chillies. I immediately felt like drawing the stall too. The stall was run by a young lady and another elderly lady and they had put out multi-coloured plastic stools. I guessed you had to buy something from them to get to sit on a stool. But sitting on the stool would give me a comfy vantage view of the merry-go-round as well as the hanging molagas so of course for this reason and no other (heh heh) I ordered a piping hot plate of bajjis.

I don't like the green chilly bajji and they had a lot of other veggies on offer so I chose a mixed platter of raw banana, potato and onion bajjis.  The merry-go-round sketch got done while I waited for my order. The bajji stall sketch was done while I nibbled slowly at my delicious hot snack. It was served with a small cup of green chutney which I didn't touch since we all know what happens the day after that chutney.

Very happy with my fried snack I handed the young lady a large note and she had to send it somewhere to get me my change. At this point the elderly lady plonked herself in front of me with a large tub of onions and started peeling and slicing them. Her speed was astonishing. This is a really quick sketch because she really went through a pile of a dozen onions in less than five minutes.

Meet Gypsy

I'd like to introduce you to Gypsy, our Dalmatian friend. He adopted Tarun, Tarun's family and anyone else who lived at 159 Santhome High Road, on independence day, 15th August 2004. Tarun was out, somewhere and his family called him in panic because they spotted this spotted guy sitting quite peacefully in their backyard.

Tarun's house is near the light-house and Marina beach. Every 15th Aug there are vast hoards of people who flock there to watch the independence day parade so at first they all thought that this dog had just gotten separated from its owner in the mileu. He had on a black collar and looked perfectly groomed. But over the next few days Tarun started walking him all around the locality asking various watchmen and security guards if anyone had come looking for him and no one had.

Gypsy settled down happily and the vet guessed his age at the time as two by looking at his teeth. Dog and master were (and still are) completely devoted to each other. Gypsy wasn't quite as hefty as you see here in the sketches. He was a normal young frisky dalmation, sleek and fast.

Then one day, Tarun had to go away to Delhi for a couple of weeks. He gave a lot of thought to where he could leave Gypsy for that time, and finally chose a lady living in Harringtom road, affiliated with the PFA, who had a large property in Red Hills where she looked after dogs. She agreed to take care of Gypsy.

As soon as Tarun left, she started calling him and saying Gypsy was un-manageable and she would have to neuter him. Tarun insisted that she should tie him up for the two weeks instead. Finally to Tarun's despair she actually waited till the day before he got back from Delhi and instead of holding out one more day she got Gypsy neutered.

The PFA might be conceptually against pedigrees and pure-breeds and the reason is sound but some of their methods of trying to curb the trend is cruel to the animal when it's actually the master's outlook that needs changing.

Anyway, the poor fellow was bandaged and despondent when he was brought back to Santhome. He bloated up soon after and has stayed this way since. Now he must be around nine and his legs are a bit arthritic. He still hobbles determinedly behind Tarun if he so much as leaves the room. Even at his prime he was the most gentle friendly dog when it came to people. I have never heard him bark to this day.

These three sketches are Gypsy's 3 most favoured sleeping positions. He acquiesced to stay in each position perfectly still and asleep for exactly five minutes apiece - just enough for me to get his outline right, but then I had to make up his spots.

New friends from an old school

In the year 2012, my college will be completing fifty years. To mark the occasion the alumni fraternity that is still actively involved with the school, mainly several professors, came up with the idea of celebrating all year long with various events and exhibitions. They soon realised that this is the ideal time to get 50 years worth of alumni re-connected and actively involved once again.

Wimbledon Finals at Santhome

Last night was the ladys' finals at Wimbledon and we went over as usual to Anu and Uk's at Santhome. Its become a regular routine. We all enjoy cricket and tennis enormously and they are just down the road. Tarun upstairs has a dalmatian named Gypsy and there are two cats (also black and white to go with the theme as it were) so we're a motley bunch.

Old Man

I suddenly unearthed this sketch while going through and sorting out some of my stuff. Its a quick one done during a Perch trip to Calicut in 2007. Fourteen of us had wandered all over Calicut for four days in search of ideas for sets, costumes, characters and genuine flavour for two upcoming productions.

This man was from the Moplah community of Kuttichera and wears the typical head-gear, a large white cotton handkerchief with a thin blue border and it's tied from back to front with a knot on the forehead. Kuttichera is a locality in the Northern part of calicut where we found a lot of what we were looking for. It's an old locality, dominated by a large water-tank with steps leading down from all sides. The water is clean and quite deep and used for bathing. For safety, a parapet wall runs all around the tank and a pavement along it. This old man was sitting on that parapet in the hot sun catching a few winks.

Weekend train travel

Took the Charminar Express to Hyderabad on friday evening. The colour theme in my coach was, surprisingly, brown! Brown seats, brown curtains and a really strange pinkish-brown floor.

So my sense of equilibrium was restored on sunday evening when I took the Chennai super-fast express back. Somehow comforting to see the trademark blue of the Indian Railways!

Line reading at Rangashankara

 

These three sketches were done during the first run of shows of Ms Meena at Bangalore in july 2010. Every morning the cast and crew would assemble at Rangashankara after breakfast at ten for a feedback session of the previous day's performance by the director. After this everyone would go up into the audi and the actors would start their line-thru.

Ninasam

Over the last year I've travelled a lot with my theatre group and almost always managed to do at least one sketch on location. This one was done at a theatre institute in a remote village in Karnataka last october. We were staging Ms. Meena as a part of their annual week-long theatre residency programme.

Ms Meena at the Museum

Last weekend, Perch had five shows of its latest production and being in charge of lighting I was there from friday till sunday pretty much from morning till night. The venue was Museum theatre in Egmore. Its a beautiful old-world venue for theatre, built in 1896. Below you can see the view I had from my lighting booth.

The play was "Ms.Meena" which we had already toured with extensively in the last nine months and these shows at the museum completed 23 in all. Compared to all other venues across India the audience turn-out in Madras was the poorest. In a way it is surprising since our group is from Madras and we've only done one single show of Ms. Meena before in our city and that was August 2010. But when you think about it, I guess Madras cannot be called a theatre friendly city. The more we travel with plays, to places like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi or even smaller cities in Kerala and Andhra, the more this gets impressed on us.

A hidden gem

I had to wait in the car today while John attended to some bank work at his branch in Kilpauk. As we turned into the compound and drove around the bank building to park in the rear I saw this beautiful building that is totally hidden from the main road.

It houses the Tamil Nadu Naval Unit NCC and was painted a lovely rich ochre colour. The louvred windows, the railings, trellises and eaves were a grey-blue and the plaster balustrades were white. I didn't get as much time as I thought I would since banks have become faster of late so I took a picture and hopefully will attempt a water-colour of this soon.

poolside doodling

Decided not to swim last evening and sketch instead. John took 24 minutes to do his 30 laps so I got to do two doodles. Sunday evenings are crowded at the Boat Club pool and I was quite entertained watching eager parents  prod their kids, lazy aunties gossip in the corners of the pool, seasoned swimmers navigate through meandering beginners and noisy teenagers show off.

IPL 2011

Last night was the first qualifier of IPL 2011 which the Chennai Super Kings won. We snatched the victory out of the jaws of defeat. What a glorious match it was! We decided to watch it at the Madras Boat Cub since they have a large screen up in the lawn on the river front.

Office and Home

I just realised its been quite a while since I blogged and I felt really bad! But recently I've started working from home  for myself and some big deadlines have invaded my evening hours so I've finally decided to cheat and put up a couple of not-so-current sketches. Continuing where I left off in the Sankriti post here's some more about my house which is also now my office. This sketch has been done sitting in my living room looking into our office room through the window.

Of puppets and shadowy characters

On sunday evening, all members of Perch were invited to see Rajiv's new play - a work-in-progress. The show started at seven at Skills and it was a near impossible task finding parking at Elliiot's Beach. After an animated fight with an agressive security guard and a docile policeman we squeezed our car in somewhere and arrived at skills to meet the gang.