177. In Kolkata, all the old things are new.
the week's best lines from being home.
Dear reader,
It has been just over a week in my hometown of Kolkata. I have walked familiar streets, hopping over familiar cracks on familiar footpaths. The same fruit vendor sits outside our home, selling the same fruits. But he accepts digital payments now. This is good.
Tomorrow I fly to New Delhi.
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I spent time with my Nani (maternal grandmother) after a year.
We giggled over extended family gossip. We share a soft dislike for the same people. We will be at a family wedding next week, and we made a plan to sit together and raise eyebrows at everyone passing by. We will make the wittiest comments and give each other secret high-fives. It will be lit, as the children say.
We talked about the things we cannot eat anymore. Me, after realizing that my digestive system is no longer that of a teenager, and her simply dealing with life in her late seventies.
We shared stories of Nana, his love for travel, and his unfulfilled dream to take her to Switzerland.
Here are some things I noticed -
(1) her thinning but neatly tied hair,
(2) the way she revolves her thumbs around each other when her fingers are interlocked (I do it too)
(3) her restlessness is the same as mine, she is always looking around and getting up to show me things,
(4) she is sharp and cuts right to the essence of things.
When I showed her the drawing, she smiled and said I had missed her chin by 1 cm. And she is exactly right.
She watched as I drew with my Lamy Safari. Then she shuffled away to return with a vintage Wing Sung 233 - a durable and sturdy fountain pen from a Shanghai brand.
It was Nana’s pen when he was alive. It is still his. But I have it now. After a gap of many years, it is full of ink again and making beautiful lines.
Here is an interesting thread on AI art from a coder. As a person who has had the privilege of writing thousands of lines of code as well as drawing thousands of lines of art, I agree.
Also, witness this fascinating exchange on the essential difference between science and philosophy. I learned many wonderful things from Will Durant’s “Story of Philosophy”.
The trajectory of my curiosity has been similar. After many years of studying measurable, tangible quantities of the world, I became intensely curious about the intangibles.
Such is our obsession today with the former - because devices, statistics and analytics have crept into every sphere of life - that we forget the latter even exists.
So it can take a lot of un-learning to appreciate that the intangibles are much greater than the tangibles. Our world is made up of things we cannot measure and put into equations. Like matter and anti-matter.
This is good. This is where art lives.
The shop has been re-stocked with prints and books.
The next Insiders Hangout will be on 26 Feb. I will share sketchbook pages from this trip, and plans for resuming the podcast. To grab your free seat, sign up to become a SneakyArt Insider.
In a few hours, I am leaving for the great Kolkata Book Fair. To see what I see, follow me on Instagram!
I will be in New Delhi later this week. To join an (informal) Lodhi Gardens sketch-along, say hello in the comments.
Thank you, dear reader, for your time and attention. See you next week!
The gift of Nana’s pen, fitting your hand now! Precious.
hello - would love to join the Lodi garden session!