First Love

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I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.

- John Clare

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Counting down to dusk...

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The attached picture is one of Mumbai's many famous landmarks. A neo-gothic wonder that rivalled anything the empire had back home- the Rajabai Clock Tower on the Bombay University campus. Rumour has it that they closed it off a few decades ago when it turned into a suicide magnet for students who did not fare that well in their exams. The maidan (field) in the foreground, now cricket central, was once the vast open areas the Brits cultivated around their forts to have clear firing range on any attackers. Ironically the university was built on the footprint of the fort's walls, and the expanse of open space, once Bombay's lungs and emerald jewels, has been whittled into irrelevance by generations of land grabs, corruption and negligence. Behind where I stand and take this picture stood a row of fine Art Deco apartments, now renovated into nouveau riche hell. I decided to let my legs take me around the City today and walked and walked for a few hours along familiar ...
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Dots and dashes: How artist Madhvi Parekh developed her own language to tell stories of her youth

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Dots and dashes: How artist Madhvi Parekh developed her own language to tell stories of her youth Entirely self-taught, the artist depicts fantastical creatures, fables and divine beings in a style often compared to the Spanish painter Joan Miro.  Share  Tweet  Email  Reddit  Print From a distance, Madhvi Parekh’s early paintings look like Kantha embroidery. Dots and lines add up on the canvas to form whirlpools, waves, a stretch of road. These guide the eye to focus on the fantastical animals, mythological figures, trees, and people that populate her work. A new retrospective of Parekh’s works,  The Curious Seeker , at the DAG Modern art gallery in Delhi has 70 works made over five decades, and at least as many examples of how the dots and dashes foreground certain elements and give cues on how to read the work. In  King of The Water , a work from 1980 made on paper with pen, ink and glitter pen, for example, the dashes and dots are...
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"Gather on the steps of stories..."

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I'm floating tonight... I just got back from an evening that I'll always remember. There are two authors I cherish, who weave words into the most unimaginably beautiful fabrics, who garden the universe with planets rich with stories, who make life become art, and their art becomes love... Jeanette Winterson is one of these two. Her books have been companions in the best and worst of times. She's a philosopher, and poet, and in my opinion a sculptor of thought too. She spoke of how important poetry is to make us human. She spoke of her life, and her past, and how precious the present is. "Love is art" she said, and you have to love the inside as much as the outside. There are only three endings in her opinion, "revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness", and if we all could accept and make peace with that eventuality, we could live the present with so much more feeling, beauty and meaning. My words do not do justice to hers... I got to speak with her afterwa...
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