stare

sand

an attempt in sand animation done last year

love bytes

love bytes packaging i did last year with eipe

golu

a short film i made in 2005, in my final year in college as a part of my class room project.

textures

soul fly

funny! is it?

post work

eipe at work

hmmm..

encounter

urmi

Front and back cover design for a DVD cover.

garba

flatmates

fish eyes

girl in the train

The Three Fish

I had painted the fish, the sun and the lotus to embellish a set design with prints and patterns to make it look artistically Indian.I dont know about the design as yet coz its yet to go through the approval process.But never-the-less, I have this composition.

Smit Shah

The old woman

This is something I had written almost six months back.Having recovered it from memory lanes it now deserves its place as a post.Read on.

Picture this
A Late after noon in a posh residential area in Bangalore, the weather is nice and the sun is softly warm. You are generally enjoying the weather and the walk along the wide roads next to the National Games Village Park in Koramangla, when an old woman approaches you in her 70’s. She is well dressed and speaks good courteous English.
Well!
With a smile she is successful in stopping you and capturing your attention. She takes advantage of her white hair and good manners and tells you how she is new in the city and has lost her bag and all and needs some money to call her son. She offers to keep your phone no. And return the money later.
Quite convincing! Coz it isn’t run of the mill husband and wife with a kid lost in a strange city.
But by then you are so captivated by her sad story and give a damn about some ten bucks coming back to you, because giving her just 2 rupees for the call makes you look cheap. What do you do then in such a situation?
I offered her to make a call from my cell phone!

Wow! it just struck my mind and lo! I thought I had found a solution to her problem.
She wasn’t prepared for that. She reluctantly took the phone. Typed some number spoke in English for some time, gave me back the phone, thanked me, refused to take any other help, walked away and disappeared. I felt very happy having helped an old woman almost the age of my grandma, who I hardly meet and rarely speak to. So it fulfilled that gap. Any ways I too walked on.
The next day it was not as sunny and there were clouds and it looked as if it could rain any moment I was too hurrying down the road wanting to reach home before it started to pour when a familiar‘Excuse me!” broke my concentration and stopped me.
The same old lady in the same saree was trying to impress me again .I too smiled and was about to ask if she had found her son when in an instance she blurted out the well rehearsed and time tested dialogues. I was shocked. I wanted to know how far she could stretch her drama. At the end when she asked for money. I didn’t want to be rude to her owing to her age so I politely told her that she had made a phone call from my phone just the other day. She looked apologetic said sorry and disappeared again.
From then on it became a regular thing to se her at the same spot, same time trying to speak to the pedestrians and then disappear and even I had started to treat her just like any other tree or a lamp post on the site. I didn’t know
What to do. Didn’t feel like complaining to police.
Then next day owing to Bangalore’s lovely weather and the splendid greens of the National Games Village park I decide to post pone my work for some time and enjoy the evening sun.
I enter park and who do I see there! It was the same woman but today she was not alone. She was sitting with a much younger guy and perhaps exchanging something. I sat there watching them for some time from a distance. She kept the coming in and going out at regular intervals .
A tenner gone from my pocket for her cause would have made no difference to my life but its just that I didn’t want it to end up in somebody’s booze. But then I was wondering if I would have been really cheated if I had given her the money coz I would have given them in the best of my intentions and it was her problem if she was up to some thing else. Any ways I enjoyed the sun and scene and came back home a little wiser.

Nano or No No!

The vision of Ratan Tata was driven with a pure business point of view-to identify a potential market segment and then to cash on the opportunity. I don’t think they can package it as a 'Social vision' for too long. I appreciate the effort and the dynamism with which the product was designed and manufactured with 34 patents to its credit. Kudos to Ratan Tata and his team.
In the wake of ever increasing pollution and carbon emissions doing irreparable damage to the atmosphere and the Antarctic circle, with temperatures recording an all time high and the well balanced eco systems now in grave danger of their sustainability we cant go ahead with manufacturing products that will jeopardize all efforts to save the environment and add to the ever increasing space crunch.
What would have earned more patents to the Tata Team (and their energies better spent) would have been designing better systems of public transport and coming up with technology which uses non fossil fuels. This is what Dr. Rajendra Pachauri meant when he said that we have all the technology right now to start using it to circumvent the climate change. It’s about time we started doing that.

Yes people are the centre of the problem and thus the mind set that sees owning cars as a status symbol and traveling by public transport as a shameful activity. Yes I agree that has got a lot to with the shape in which the public transport is right now, but that’s where the opportunity lies-To revive and revamp and replace it with healthier systems. That’s where the market is.

Every one needs to and is legitimate in dreaming and aspiring to rise above their current life styles. But I don’t think it can be done at the cost of the environment. This is the only planet we have got. If we mess it up no amount of our aspiring will get us anywhere. Healthy societies are not built on short term gains and narrow vision.

With “Singur” from its very inception to environmental and infrastructural concerns that Nano has brought up, I think we have got very little to cheer about. Well, we can congratulate Tata’s for their technological and design feat and marvelous marketing, but we can no longer afford isolate design from the larger picture of healthier sustenance and environmental restoration.

Nonsense

The other day I was searching for “nonsence”. Well I was but apparently I couldn’t. How can I search for “nonsence”? It’s wrong! It has to be “nonsense”. What a paradox. Even nonsense has to be spelled right. So much sense in nonsense! I abandoned my search immediately. There are only fake pretentious nonsenses in the world. The world is not ready for nonsence yet…

I mean even the Wikipedia definition of nonsense categorizes it in to four types! Hello! Leave the word alone!

Desperately seeking network

One of the every first thing that marked my entry in to Goa, apart from getting welcomed by Annie's dogs by their enthusiastically wagging tails and approving licks all over my face, was my search for the network.

I immediately took out the phone and roamed around the house. I looked like a freedom fighter, desperately looking for the network from one corner to another in the house and out side, with the hoisted phone. I failed to get it in the balcony, in any of the rooms, near the window in the dining hall where it’s more popular for getting network. Neither in the kitchen nor in the garden out side! And this was nothing new. My last visits to this place, when I failed to get network, resulted in putting the blame on my old, second hand, less than basic model phone. I used to retire assuming that perhaps it the inability of my phone to detect even the minutest of signal strengths. But now, that was not the case. With my almost new, sturdy and more than basic phone I was expecting not to face the problem any more since all the other phones in the house receive strong signal strength with out any hassles.

Why me then? The questioning got the better of me and I became more introspective. Searching for network I found my self searching for the self. I felt like on of those mystics who transcend the physical space within and outside their body to find that network of self. So I sat down to meditate and ask my self ‘Who am I’, ‘What is my purpose in life’, ‘What am I doing here’ etc. Hoping that by answering these questions I will get closer to the self and hence the network. I sat under the tree, near the windows, in the rooms, any where and every where I felt I could get closer to the superior energy.

With the phone in my hand and determination on my mind I set out to seek. Annie and Anjali, oblivious of this new found search of mine, continued with their daily chores. But I continued in my own silent way determined to seek the network.

And finally my prayers began to be answered, in measured quantities though .I felt closer and closer to my self and seemed to find answers to eternal questions that kept mystics occupied for centuries. I was happy that with much lesser effort of criss crossing the country bare foot and finally retiring to the cold environs of Himalayas to seek, I was getting close. I felt blessed, I felt elated and there was a sudden surge of rejuvenation in me. I felt the energy and could make the connection. What a great experience it was and the perfect time to open an eye and look at the phone to check if all the soul searching experiment was helping me get any network.

I cannot explain the level of happiness and excitement when my phone by some magical account was showing two faint bars of network connectivity out of five. My effort was paying of and led me to conclude that there was definitely some certain connection between soul searching and network searching. The display of the bars was a testimony of that. I was still reeling under the celebration of my discovery when I found that my distraction was getting me away from the connection. The 'whatever little bars' I had painstakingly gathered had withered away. I had lost touch with my self and therefore with the network.

I wondered it’s so much easier to find network in big cities. I guess we city bred are closer to God and our selves in big cities. God comes to us easily there and I wonder then why do hundreds try and retire to forests to seek answers and God. Ha! Disillusioned people!

Any ways, I shut my eyes again and prayed even harder. Don’t ask me how I did that or what does it mean to pray harder but I did. I tried to plunge in to the deeper depths of my subconscious and float in timelessness of within.

Right! The time had stopped, so did the air, the physical space, logic, reasoning, every thing and I found my self sucked in to this unfamiliarly known vacuum. It was even more heightened experience than the earlier one and I was basking in the happiness of having felt at least 2% of what great seekers like Shri Vivekananda ,Shri Aurobindo , to name a few from recent past must have felt like.

I felt like God, I felt connected and a strange oneness with him. I realized this is what must have prompted Gautam Buddha and Mahaveera to renounce their worldly pleasures and became great seekers.

I decided to return to this experience once again but after only having checked its effect on my network .Thankfully I wasn’t so overwhelmed that couldn’t open an eye.

I was amply rewarded. All five bars out of five! I was on the ‘Right path’. The harder I searched for my self the more network I found. I was sure of the connection now. But with in seconds the bars flickered and disappeared. I had once again a lost connection with my self and my network and therefore plunged in the darkness of ignorance.

I realized I couldn’t do both the things simultaneously. And hence concluded that’s why the great mystics did one thing at a time. Either they chose to search for the soul or the network. And as the history tells us they chose to stay with the soul searching.

And here was my call. Either I depended on the feeble transmission tower and wait for the flickering network like all futile human beings or transcend my self in to a seeker, as I had just tasted, to find the greater network.

I chose to stay with the first one as I had loads of work to finish and calls to make, determined to come back to soul searching some time in my life or go back to Mumbai where God comes to me easily.

Near Birth experience

Have you had a near birth experience? Well, I went through one. Quite literally in a jam packed Mumbai local train. So tightly packed that all bodies, all human beings , all sensations thoughts and emotions had become one mass of flesh and the train seemed like a womb where this piece of flesh, spawning with life, twitches, turns and moves and evolving with the passing time and stations, corresponds to the spasms of the train. Each time a station comes it’s like the time of a rebirth, as if the womb contracts and the vaginal door spews out some mass.
The real struggle begins from inside. The contraction and the contraption. The collective effort of the homogeneous mass to be born, to see the outer word after the gestation period of a few minutes seeming like an eternity. The muscles make an effort. They pull and they push, like a disciplined coordinated drilling exercise. Even you have to make an effort to be born and it’s not as easy as it seemed. It’s like you are only lucky to have survived the ordeal and made your way out. And you are only lucky to be born at the station you wanted. Sometimes despite the collective effort one is stuck right at the door and couldn’t get out at the holy one tenth of the second when the train decides to move ahead. You fee like a baby with a slightly bigger head stuck right at the pelvic bone as it doesn’t accommodate its passage. You request and pray and at another holy second and not so divine place because of another push, one more collective effort and the desire to be born and live and breathe fresh air, you are pushed out.
You are lucky if you are out this time. Sweating and puffing and panting drenched in the amniotic sweat and suddenly into this open expanse called the world compared to the tightness and warmth of the womb.
The umbilical cord is severed and so is your wallet and phone sometimes. But now you are on your own happy to be out and still contemplating how it would have been for yourself and your mom when you were actually being born, now having remembered noting of it. I can only imagine and draw nearest examples.