On desi-design bloggers, Khabar magazine, Feb 2012

Originally appeared in the Feb 2012 edition of Khabar.

Source: http://www.khabar.com/magazine/features/Desi_Do-It-Yourself_DESIGNERS

Living: Desi Do-It-Yourself DESIGNERS 

In the South Indian middle-class Tambram household I grew up in, “decorating” meant the frantic dusting of the center table before a relative stopped by for afternoon filter coffee. Sure, we had all the trappings of a typical middle-class home—a giant picture-tube TV, a wooden showcase of brown Formica with shelves stopping mere inches from the ceiling, a few brass lamps from my mother’s trousseau, and perhaps a stray souvenir from one of our many temple-hopping trips. But a centerfold for Better Homes & Gardens it was not. 

Perhaps our décor-deprived yet typical home was also reflective of our conservative, salt-of-the-earth sensibilities. Who cares how the walls look if you feed folks great food and supply enough gossip/intellectual nourishment to keep them coming back?

It’s this middle-class ethos that I now strive to overcome every day, as I incessantly rearrange potted plants on top of a kitchen cabinet in my suburban home in the U.S. Thanks to my web-browsing, I now know I am not alone in my amateur artistic pursuits. Some women, in fact many, have scratched this décor itch into successful blogs.

Take, for instance, Patricia Torres (coloursdekor.blogspot.com), who describes herself as an “ordinary person, a working woman, a mom, a wife, a friend.” When not at work at a multinational company in Dubai or tending to her daughters, she is busy at home “aspiring to see beauty in everything around me.” With a full-time job, she often wonders if she would have taken up design as a career if the opportunity had presented itself earlier in her life. It was a friend’s suggestion that she consider blogging about the million or so pictures she would take of things around her house that got her started. Her blog is her “design diary.” She manages to pull it off, blogging in between her day job, parenting and home-making.

As a teenager, Kamini Raghavan (saffronandsilk.blogspot.com), would spend hours arranging and re-arranging furniture, artwork, and flowers around her house, though she just started blogging about design in 2010. For most bloggers I spoke with, blogging is a relatively new experience. While some bloggers are professionally trained in design and décor, a few have successfully turned an amateur interest into a nearly full-time career. Kamini, who originally earned a degree in Economics, went back to school in the 1990s to earn a degree in interior design. She worked in the industry for nine years in the U.S. before moving back to India in 2006.

Sudha Sundareswaran (adesignenthusiast.blogspot.com), grew up helping her grandfather with his various woodworking projects, picking up carpentry skills along the way. Therefore, Sudha sees herself more as a design enthusiast than a decorator. She started her design blog more as a way to attract attention to her original blog on green/environmentally conscious living. As a result, she now juggles between three blogs—cooking, design, and green living.

Anuradha Varma (mydreamcanvas.blogspot.com) reminisces about decorating her own room as a kid, and being extremely possessive of the knick-knacks that she would randomly pick up. She started blogging in 2008 more as a way to chronicle her own experiences with design and décor. Her lifestyle blog, My Dream Canvas, evolved out of the countless hours she spent browsing through design-and-décor magazines and a desire to critique them. She blogs full-time and loves every addictive minute of it.

 Gagan (who blogs at Of Peacocks and Paisleys, http://gb73.blogspot.com/) quips that décor and design are part of her genetic makeup, since she is the daughter of an artist. She started her blog in 2010 when she realized that some of her comments on the blogs she followed were longer than the blog posts on which she was commenting.

A chance visit to any one of the blogs featured here will clue you in to the sense of camaraderie and bonhomie that prevails in the community. Bloggers regularly feature others’ blogs and posts, invite guest blogs, and organize frequent giveaways that mutually benefit each other’s blogs.

A good majority of the readership is drawn from the Indian community at large, whether from India, the U.S., the U.K. or the Middle East. Many bloggers have also tapped into the larger cosmopolitan global-design blogging community. Sudha’s blog was recently featured on apartmentherapy.com, the go-to blog for design inspirations.

Few bloggers seem overly concerned about readership. Blogging seems to provide such pure joy that many of the women I spoke to had never really considered developing their blogging into a business.

Travel essay on Costa Rica, India Currents, January 2012

(Originally appeared in the  March 2011 print edition of India Currents)
Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2012/01/09/of-blue-morphos-sloths-and-ziplines

Of Blue Morphos, Sloths, and Ziplines

 We were instructed to wear dark clothes, preferably all black. No flashlights, no camera. Just your self, your imagination, and more importantly, faith in the guide that was to lead you through a two-mile hike in the dead of night through the coastal jungles of Costa Rica. The guide would later casually inform us that the stretch of jungle we covered by foot was the natural habitat of the Costa Rican jaguar, an elusive, rarely seen creature, but in any event, not an animal that you’d like to cross paths with, with nary a flash light to shine on it in vain attempts to keep it at bay.

On this expedition (one of many in Costa Rica) we set out to observe the greenback turtle lay her eggs off the coast of the Caribbean sea in the Tortuguero National Park. As the nesting season for the endangered turtle had just begun, we were told to be prepared for a possible no-show. Having already experienced a bit of wildlife in Costa Rica, we were prepared for any eventuality, knowing that we would still enjoy the walk through the jungle.

We left our lodge and set out on a 40 minute hike through a trail straddling the edges of the beach and the coastal forest. When we arrived at our sector, we were asked by the spotters to enter the beach as they had just seen a turtle laying eggs. There she was, seemingly oblivious to a dozen or more scurrying human feet, laying eggs, one after another. She would have laid about 150 eggs that night. Her insouciance towards us humans was apparently a biological response. When the turtle lays her eggs, she gets in a trance-like mode. Our guide flashed the infrared flashlight on the nest, which the turtle had spent a good hour digging up. Different groups of tourists led by their guides would take turns gawking at her. I wondered how a human female would react were she to experience her birthing pains before dozens of squawking macaques or snorting pigs. I was glad the greenback was in a trance.


The turtle walk in Tortuguero was on day nine of our twelve-day trip to Costa Rica which included stops at Arenal and Flores, home of the Arenal volcano, to Monteverde, home of the cloud forests, Turrialba, where we went on a rafting expedition down the Rio Pacuare and, finally, Cahuita, your quintessential sleepy Caribbean seaside town.


Costa Rica figures high on the charts in adventure tourism destinations, and rightly so. There are plenty of adventures to choose from, even for a first-time thrill seeker, from white-water rafting to rappelling, to rock climbing, and zip lines. While most of these activities are popular enough to be found in most other travel destinations, Costa Rica’s lush rain forests and the sheer diversity of fauna and flora render these experiences particularly enjoyable. One can rappel down any mountain face or cliff. But rappelling down a 180 foot waterfall, in a thick central American jungle amidst luscious canopy is an experience of a lifetime. Or hurtling down the Rio Pacuare frantically paddling to navigate a rapid while keeping an eye out for a rare toucan and a even rarer Blue Morpho butterfly elevate this rafting expedition from others in less enticing surroundings.

The country’s national parks are well maintained, its guides are knowledgeable, and in general, there is a sense that the country and its people assume the mantel of eco-tourism seriously. I pride myself on being a naturalist—a lover of nature, ardent recycler, mostly vegetarian except when chomping down bizarre foods in the interest of adding to the been-there-eaten-that list. But, floating down the canals of Tortuguero National Park in a four-person motor boat on a cloudy, intermittently rainy afternoon, I realized I knew zilch about nature. Here’s a bit of trivia for you to mull over: there are  birds that hover around the spider monkeys as the latter are rustling branches on the trees looking for food to eat. The birds then scoop up any insects that the monkey unseats from all their scurrying. How is that for balance in the eco system? Or the theory that sloths (they defecate once every week) dispose off their waste in a hole at the bottom of the tree that they inhabit so as to return to the tree all the nutrients that the they used up. This points to the subtle checks and balances in the eco-system, something that we as humans in our ignorance upset, then learn rather belatedly about and finally scramble to make up for our ignorance.

Favorite books from 2011, India Currents December 2011

(Originally appeared in the December 2011 print edition of India Currents)

Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2011/12/27/these-are-few-my-favorite-books

THE HINDUS, AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY by Wendy Doniger, Penguin USA. Paperback. 770 pages.  $25.

The Hindus, An Alternative History is the latest offering from Wendy Doniger, a world-renowned Sanskritist. As the title suggests, the book is but one interpretation of the evolution of Hindu thought. This is an interpretation that seeks to read between the lines of ancient Hindu texts and tease out the voice of the subaltern. With the texts as a foundation, Doniger interprets recurring themes including the symbolism of animals such as the horse and the dog (representing power and impurity, respectively), the notion of ahimsa, the voice of women, and lower castes. 

Doniger’s thorough scholarship is evidenced throughout, whether in the systematic treatment of the history of the subcontinent or in the sheer depth of the comparative analysis, from the Upanishads to the Vedas to the seemingly arcane Periya Puranas. The Hindus, much like more recent and popular nonfictional works about 21st century India, also touches upon the idea of multiplicity and diversity. How else can one explain opposing concepts such as extreme asceticism, renunciation, and monism in the Upanishads on the one hand and opulence and the Kama Sutra on the other.  

The Hindus is no light summer-time beach read. At 770 pages it demands serious reading. But the crisp language, tongue-in-cheek witticisms, and an engaging writing style compensate for the length and, at times, heavy prose. A must-read for any student of Indian philosophy and thought.