drawing, Life, List, travels

And here we are in April

Life’s been a whirlwind, reader. So much to do, and so many things inspiring me. Grateful for the days when energy and good health can keep up with my intentions! Here are some drawings from the past few months –

A sunrise walk with the brown boy, who tells me that I steamroll across life with my overblown sense of purpose. Good to know that I guess. Anyway, who can be mad at him for long? At breakfast we caught up on gossip we couldn’t share in front of the little tornado (who was in school).

Font: Cantoni Pro

I’m always more prolific in April, maybe because I’m an April girl? And looking through old posts, found some of my favorites

Me meets me (2012)

Paris Cafe (2012)

The Body Rebels (2009)

Here are the original drawings on our wall. I sometimes catch the little tornado showing them to his friends and giggling. And my heart is full.

In April I always posted holiday sketches. Here’s

Rajasthan – Part 1: The Bikaner diariesPart 2: Jaisalmer (2008)

Rishikesh, lord of the senses (2014)

Sri Lanka (2017) – Part 1Part 2

and even, Space Travel (2011)

Birthday posts, of course –

Turning thirty which was my mid-life crisis and I decided to leave my very well-paying job and the lovely brown boy and go study in a remote country for two years.

Top 5 Best Birthday Gifts of All Time (2007) after I had just read High Fidelity.

Age Appropriate (2016)

Milestone posts, like

Our Labour Story (actually 2015 but posted in 2018)

Olinda App (2013), which is one of my favorite pieces of my own work and for which I got my first US patent

Masters Thesis (2010)

Noseburn (2009), when Ananya and Jedi rode off across India

and some other cute stuff

Getting Fed by chefs in Swedish cafes (2010)

Reasons to Live (2008)

Twitter’s taking over (2009) when I was OD’ing on it

and some inspiration (2019)


And this drawing from January – is there anything as wonderful as looking back on old journals? Austin Kleon agrees with me too.

For me they are a portal to return myself back to me.

When the world is hostile it’s wonderful to be welcomed back to myself.

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gutotales, Life, parenthood, sketchbook

A year of drawing Orin

One of the things of being a parent is that you have to spend time with your kids. Lucky for you if they are entertaining. As in years past, our tornado still takes forever to eat a meal so I use the time to draw. It’s great to have a living breathing human being at close quarters to draw from! Between mouthfuls, we chat.

Sometime in August I was making notes for my DesignUp talk, and thinking about “belonging” when Orin chimed in:

“You belong to your parents, but you live with us!”

“Do you know centipedes lived in the time of dinosaurs?”

“Do you know what a sundial is?”

I don’t know what he thinks of us…

Here they are watching the FIFA World Cup, and the brown boy thinks this is the best drawing of him that I’ve done since 2003. That drawing is actually hanging on my MIL’s fridge I think.

Here we were discussing our best movies/TV shows of 2022. The brown boy chose Better Call Saul, while mine was Dune, and the tornado chose Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

At least one of you drew me!

We’ve created a monster, I say…

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Life, Reflection, sketchbook

The days happy in their confusion, the world as it really is, but not quite

A typical week in my life, pretty sure so many millions of women across the world have these exact same days…

I’ve been thinking, I haven’t seen myself or people of my demographic reflected in mainstream media for nearly a decade now. While that frees us up to define who / what we want to be, that’s one reason I keep on documenting my life.

A century later there might be no record of what Indian middle class urban working women did, in all their diversity.

Luckily I’m not the only one – Women at Leisure is a great record, our friend Smriti is a prolific blogger too, and there are probably more such personal documentation out there that I don’t know of.

Good thing that women have always journaled, at least for the past few centuries. It’s probably because they have always been silenced officially and have had to seek out a way to express themselves somewhere.

My own great great grandmother Rasasundari Devi was the first Bengali woman to write her autobiography.

This was at a time, around 1810-1830, when even basic literacy was denied to women in Bengal, so she had to teach herself to read, and after nearly twenty years, to write. She started writing her autobiography in her fifties when her children were grown. Around the same time, social reform in Bengal had barely started in Calcutta, but she lived in a village away from all this, and so was completely self-taught.

With such precedents, we would be throwing away our privilege if we did not use a bit of it to bring about a collective voice for those not represented in the mainstream. I know we can do more, and I’m speaking from my very entitled perspective, but it’s a start. It’s a purpose – to stop whiling away time and channel it towards expression.

Title re-purposed from a poem by Jim Moore, American poet.

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drawing, Life, sketchbook

With our pack of memories slung slack on our backs

This video and the earlier one are how my day-to-day journal drawing takes place. I sit down with my book and try to draw what’s on my mind. Sometimes I start by drawing what’s in front of me – which is why there are so many drawings of Orin eating! At other times I draw the day, how things went, what I listened to, or read. Sometimes my mind is blank and quite often the fear of the empty page threatens to take over.

But the important thing is to show up, and get over that fear, the fear of not being good enough, the fear of not living up to your own expectations. And after some time, I find the flow, I start to commune with myself, and joy takes over.

Title from Joy Harjo, via Pome by Matthew Ogle

Looking back, some favorites from the last decade: Doing what you love (2013); Channeling the girls (2013); Life with Picasso, Art (2013)

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art, Books, illustration, Life, List, sketchbook

My best books of 2021

Last year I didn’t read as much as I usually do, what with one thing and another, but I ended up with some good ones. Here are the highlights.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman: Recommended by pacificleo, it was one of my best books of the year.

Voices of Dissent by Romila Thapar: This essay puts today’s responses to resistance in perspective, by charting out the history and evolution of dissent from the vedic times. A worthwhile read, even though the language was quite academic. (If you buy from Seagull, you can choose your version of the cover, designed by the brilliant sunandinibee.)

Among graphic novels, I read some beauties: Japanese Notebooks: A Journey to the Empire of Signs by Igort, The Winter of the Cartoonists by Paco Roca, Hostage by Guy Delisle, Leonard Cohen: On a Wire by Pilippe Girard and some more that I shared in Graphic novels by women.

Last year I also updated my perspective on feminism with We should all be Feminists by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie and Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria.

Some other books that I enjoyed were Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing, Daybook by Anne Pruitt and The Pursuit of Art by Martin Gayford.

In fiction The Startup Wife by Tahmina Anam was enjoyable and different, as was Crudo by Olivia Laing and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

Our best pastime was drawing with Making Comics by Lynda Barry that Guto and I used throughout the year.

I thought I hadn’t read much, but now I’m getting tired just looking at this list. Oh well, life is short, and my eyes won’t last.

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