It was a hectic week, against all plans to the contrary. But I have a fresh haircut, and there are spring flowers dotting the house, so there are reasons to feel optimistic.
WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING
1.
Saturday was intense. We left home at half past seven in the morning to make our way to Mehrauli to attend a heritage walk facilitated by Sohail Hashmi. And then came back to host a lunch for six. Amber cooked an excellent keema pulao. Lunch turned into dinner, and our guests only left a little before 10:00 pm. An excellent, excellent day, but gosh, were we tired by the end of it.
The lunch was in honour of Holi, and of Mayank and Tanya, who are visiting from Shey. We hadn’t seen them since they were last in the plains around this time in 2023. Harshay and Purneetha joined us four, and we had a quorum.
Last week, we had trekked to a part of the city I had never visited before in search of a halwai that we order sweets from. Amber swears by their mithai, and we went looking for them to try their gujiya and get some snacks for Saturday. It only took three hours, but we found their cloud kitchen (the pandemic has shut their proper sweet shops down) and brought mathris and gujiyas and kachoris, which were, ultimately, a hit. The Leh contingent was particularly into them since they miss this food back home.
The theme of playing host continued through the week as Mayank and Tanya came back to stay overnight on Sunday, and then on Holi evening, we invited my parents over for some homemade pizza.
2.
The last couple of weeks have been an exercise in managing my anxiety since I’ve had a lot of online meetings on the cards, especially with folks I don’t really know.
On Wednesday, I had a sweet chat with Pranavi, who had reached out to me a couple of weeks ago. It is nice to have another type designer in the city, and we spent a leisurely hour talking about how one might go about building a career.
Also on the calendar that day was a call with Bharath to discuss his fascinating finds of graphics related to the Indian railways. He had such gorgeous material to share with me, and pointed me to a lot of reading resources to build context around what I was seeing. It is a busy few weeks ahead of me, but I hope to dive into the material as soon as possible, and hopefully, Bharath and I will be able to work on them together.
Noopur and I spoke to the folks from the Underline Center to finalise the spot as the venue for my workshop in April. Things for that are slowly falling into place, and I hope to make the announcement for it in the next couple of days.
3.
Prateek and I took time out to discuss some development work and changes to India Street Lettering. The website has been dealing with low speeds and some spam, and needs a bit of TLC. While I was not in a position to do said cherishing, I did upload about two dozen new photographs from Panjim and Mapusa to the archive.
4.
I spent several soul-shattering hours catching up on all things tax-related.
5.
It was a bad week migraine-wise. I battled one on Saturday afternoon when the house was full of guests, and sat at the precipice of another one most of Monday and Tuesday. I was too worn out, as a result, to be up at 3:30 am to attend this week’s Provoking Type lecture. There’s only one week of the course left now, and in the next few days, I must finish up my final project.
6.
Despite everything that has been going on, I was able to prioritise a bit of play. I made a prototype for a new zine format I am experimenting with, that I hope to use for teaching. After a few failed starts, I managed to make some typographic cyanotypes. And I got started on a new LEGO letterpress print in Devanagari.