This project really made me introspect over my experiences, both in Mumbai and New York and how I really felt about the two places. Every culture has certain culture specific icons. Icons of today’s Mumbai are not palaces, elaborate jewelery ,priests and babas, or flower garlands, nor are they snake charmers, henna tattoos or bangles, or for that matter butter chicken.
No, those are frustrating stereotypes.
I have lived in India all my life and I think the last time ate butter chicken was when I was two. Icons that today’s generation relates to the most are rickshaws, local trains, roadside food. To be more personal about it, the very motif of Indian icons today that i relate to the most are everyday objects like a cup of chai, sipped with my sister in the verandah of my grandmother’s house, the “fut fut” sound that old bikes make, bowl of fried chillis I eat with my dad, conversations with the “falafel uncle” who used to have his shop right outside my school and used to put extra chilli chiken in our falafel if we asked nicely. It is the irritating comfort of having my shirt soaked in sweat in summer, and the voice of my grandmother singing us awake with prayer hymns. It is the underrated magic of sitting in silence on the footpath outside your house, around midnight with your bestfriend and staring at the mosquitoes and bugs that buzz agitatedly, attracted to the streetlamps. It is the potholes on the street, and complaining passionately about them,and speaking with your friends and family, in three or more languages, sometimes at the same time. It is the feeling of sun on my back when i sat next to my now late Grandfather, and discussed the work of Shakespeare and he meaning of Indian Modern Art.
Its funny how people become icons or elements of a place, without realizing it. Even though Mumbai is where i grew up, my favourite place I stayed in is Bangalore. It was my refuge. I stayed there for a year last year and the place was a safe haven from all that was dysfunctional about my world, and only did what i loved, Art.
I am only just breaking into New York. I cannot try to talk about the city right ow and come up with anything that shows a cohesive, composite, well framed opinion, because i don’t know it that well. New York at this moment for me is a long rapid series of blinding flashes of colours, images and broken bits of conversations that, fragments of phrases that remained in the memory. All I know for sure about New York is, on the days that things are good, they will be extraordinary, and when things get bad, it will get devastating. I know that i get a rush off the energy on the street. In Mumbai I lived near a train station and a fish market, so the place was always crowded and busy. I missed the crowds in the village in Bangalore.
But I digress, I used the sketches and writing provoked by these thought and jotted down in my journals to come up with five comparisons between the two cities , and then sandwiched that between my memoir and my brief biography. I genuinely like the 5 concepts I picked , which is why developing them through illustrations was a lot of fun. Since we could make the cover page, however we wanted to while remembering to incorporate our thumb print and memoir, I really through myself into it and tried out different media once such as crayons, colour pencils, gel pens, abstract shapes out of newspapers and magazines,letters cut out from brochures and pamphlets that come my way, my thumbprint and illustration and editing the background on illustrator.
If you observe the cover, you will see upon laying the book flat upside down, that it looks like a bear breaking out of a black box and shards of the black frame and colourful shards flying everywhere. That was meant as a metaphor for me breaking free and coming into my own.
Outer cover spread
My brief biography
One of the inside page spreads.
