Presentation + Workshop: Painting the colours of your “chakra”

With the popularity of yoga, "chakra" has once again become a word that is heard sometimes. What can we learn about ourselves through the understanding of chakras? How can the problems in our lives be better tackled if we learn to balance these energy centres? We will create our personality colour-charts after we learn to evaluate our chakras. We will thus be aware of our negative and positive sides and be able to see many unknown links behind our traits that affect one another. We will explore colours in a new way touching upon a part of this ancient practice of chakra yoga.

Presentation + Workshop: Demystifying the Indian deities

Why is Saraswati in white attire? Why does Durga have 10 hands? Why is owl the vehicle of Lakshmi? What do the gods and goddesses mean and why are they so many in number? Can the deities be useful in our daily lives or are they just part of our rituals?  In a step by step manner, as we pick up the visual language through the understanding of colours, symbols, metaphors and personifications, we will gradually get closer to the secret messages the deities hold for us.

The India Studies: Course outline

To understand India it is important to understand its soul. This is a country with a strong spiritual core. When Krishna guides Arjun encouraging him in battle, he still discourages him in violence. Now this itself is a controversy that a mind which is not trained in this school of thinking cannot penetrate. This kind of controversy is in the lengths and breaths of India. To understand India, one has to train. This is a course outline for a design institute which could prepare its students with that stronger base.

The India Studies: My background, journey and realization

When the designers themselves grow without much understanding of India within the discipline, that fight continues leading to the fight of ideal within the country. In an institute like NID, which puts so much emphasis on understanding the surrounding, whose very root was set to empower India through the understanding of India as documented in the India Report by Charles Eames, one still feels that missing links and history. When I visited other newer institutes, this missing factor was even larger to the extent that it distorted the very purpose of "design".

The paradox of design in India

When a man needs nothing to survive, he basically is above a problem and hence there is nothing to solve. Is that the point where “design” becomes obsolete and useless for an individual? In a country with a background of such when we overthink the curve of a chair or the shift of a font it does somewhere clash with our own stories hearing which we grew up.