It is a big day for me today and I am super excited — almost as excited as I am on my happy birthday! It is my conviction that for any artistic endeavour to succeed and actually come to the point when it is ready to be shared with the world, takes an almost gargantuan amount of emotional, aesthetic, intellectual and logistic energy.

It has finally happened. The Lado Sarai art road was a bubble waiting to burst and all the bonhomie of joint openings on the same day and good ties amongst the gallerists and art watchers/buyers who would take the rounds of the galleries is a thing of the past.

If anyone were to ask me two things that endear me to Bengal, without doubt it would be the to-die-for detectable mishti or mithai like sandesh, rosogullas, mishti doi (all under one sub-head) and the other without doubt is the contemporary and traditional art from the state.

Once I was travelling by road to Ranchi from Patna and as is my usual practice, I fell asleep in the car. When I woke up, I thought I had died and gone to heaven for what I saw will always remain etched as one of my most cherished mindscape.

I am sure I must have been a peacock or a Malhar raga in some previous birth, for this weather is my absolute favourite. The green of the tree tops juxtaposed against the glistening skies laden with droplets of resurgence make my heart soar and like the earth bursting forth, my creative levels too touch an all-time high in this weather.

Once upon a time, there were no cameras. And people used to paint all that was needed to be recorded — be it landscapes or portraits of people or monuments.

It is marriage season in my family and nieces and nephews and even cousins are getting married this winter; some of them even getting married the second time – classic cases of triumph of hope over experience — but of that another time!

When my friend artist-poet Sangeeta Gupta invited me for her show “Lines of Light” that is being inaugurated by the former President of India Dr A.P.J.

I hate sequels and that is why I hate watching soaps on television. The way serials leave the viewer high and dry literally and metaphorically is not amusing at all.

Most of us have grown up listening to stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which were part of the story-telling repertoire of our grandparents and parents but are increasingly given the go b