So, you work from home?

No, frankly, I just pretend to. Really, all I do is answer the doorbell. Answer the doorbell to the cook, who, being trained in the offense-is-the-best-defense school of culinary arts, blasts me immediately for the lack of key ingredients.

Then I answer the doorbell to various couriers — for me, for husband, for neighbour and neighbour’s relative. Answer the doorbell to someone who wants to sell me multiplex coupons. Followed by someone, allegedly from the electric board, who wants to sell me an appliance which will halve my power bills. When the Art of Living guys ring, promising to bring calm into my life, I start foaming at the mouth. All I want to do is rip out their innards.

Finally, I plop down on my ‘office’ — the divan in the hall, a parking zone for crayons, earrings, kid’s underpants, notebooks and novels, left-over food and teacups. When you work from home, ‘official’ space and time are ill-defined. Inexplicably, you end up working longer hours and getting paid less.

For instance, while reviewing a long, serious book recently, I carefully wrote on notelets and stuck them in. I normally find sticky notes too wasteful, but this lot were an irresistible leaf-green and plum in colour (in a freelancer’s lonely life, things like nice stationery matter). So I really couldn’t blame my daughter when she opened the book which was lying around and spent a blissful 15 minutes taking out each note, admiring it, and using it to form a long green-and-plum snake. I mean, she’s six. She doesn’t recognise boundaries which are not physical. Colours are irresistible to her. Deep sigh. That’s four hours of my life I’m never getting back, and one needlessly late night to make good.

While working from home, your time is pretty much cut up and tossed all over the place like dhania in the bhel puri. It’s not fair on the kid either, because to a small child it’s inexplicable that mom/dad can be home, but not be available. Nothing says ‘I’m here, but just not for you’ better than looking into a laptop and typing busily while your child is saying something.

I should know — I’ve done it often enough. After six years of accepting my distracted parenting, my daughter finally said the other day, “You don’t spend time with me.” I started to protest and tell her about the hours I have spent shoveling food into her mouth. With the wisdom of her kind, she cut in, “And feeding me lunch is not spending time with me, ok?” For the record, if I didn’t have a chronic health problem, I’d be out there running for the VT fast every single day.

Because kids are small animals, they know it when you’re with them 100% and when you’re somewhere else in your head. When office-going parents come home tired, children, worshipful and huggy, are like balm to their weary souls. To us work-from-home types, kids are just another kind of doorbell. Cute, but still very much in the way.

Eight years back I read that Enid Blyton’s younger daughter had had an unhappy childhood because, apparently, Ma Blyton was more than a little neglectful of her own offspring. She was entirely focussed on creating magic for other people’s kids and on what we would today call ‘building her brand’. Then, my lips had curled in disgust at her cruelty. Now — except for the talent, the success and the wealth — I’ve begun to remind me just a little bit of her.

This article appeared in the DNA of Oct 24, 2010

In which, a lot was seen!

Just back from a holiday in Tamil Nadu. For a spell that was so hopelessly mis-planned and unplanned, I must say it ended up being great fun. Since Amit – calm, efficient, centred – is the producer and general go-to-guy for so many international crews shooting documentaries all over India, it’s logical that the one who plans and executes the family holidays should be me. The paranoid and anxious half.

This trip to TN, started, for some reason, by falling between the stools. I had thought we were on the right track - two days each in Mahabalipuram, Pondicherry, Auroville. Spaced out so my back wouldn’t give way. But then I got dire warnings – of major BOREDOM, among other things! Fearfully we went, and, as it turned out - thanks to serendipity and human kindness - we had a blast in every way, especially the visual.

Not only did we enjoy Pondi and Auroville, we met some lovely people in these places too. The highlights of the trip were the monoliths of Mahabs (for me the Mahishasuramardini cave which I walked in alone and the bizarrely wonderful sculpture college); Auroville and the Gump-a-lump Xmas party; and finally, the heritage walk with Ashok Panda of Intach, Pondicherry (later, getting gloriously lost in the Tamil Quarter, finding Choco-la, eating their rum choc and getting high under a hot TN sun), and later still, with exceptional luck, being allowed into Ananda Rangapillai’s house by his kind family.

A lot of what we saw and delighted in on this trip – the rock-cut caves in Mahabs, the street sellers sculpting little stone lockets and statues, the whole of the man-made forest in Auroville, the crocheted shoes they make, the cookies they bake, the houses and streets in Pondi, the plaster cast angels and Santas sold outside Samba Kovil, the beautiful beadwork done on Ravi Varma’s lithos by Ananda Ranga's great-grand-daughter-in-law – was about craft in one form or the other.
But the artist we engaged with the most was Saraswati, a ceramic miniaturist, who lives and works in Dana, the pottery community in Auroville. I’ve long liked Auroville’s tradition of contemporary pottery – as seen thru their mugs and cups and plates. Very beautiful, in a remote, still, cool, forest-glade sort of way.

So nothing prepared us for the liveliness of Saraswati’s creations. For its sheer lightness of being. Apart from coffee and some lovely dark chocolate, we were invited to wade through her studio housed in a two-storey house in the middle of the seriously wooded Dana. The studio was colourful, and everything there was small, even the impossibly flat tree frog that leapt across their painted walls. Amit went mad with the photos.
Saraswati’s work is busy, tiny, textured, and totally inventive. Like something out in a story-book-world full of whimsy. Since her pieces are mostly profusely populated miniatures, Saraswati prefers to work with white body clay, which is flexible and thin enough to make what she calls “small and smaller details”.
We can’t help but comment on her unusual colours and how they make the figures look delicate and other-worldly. Turns out that she uses commercial glazes from Russia. “I have got used to them since 20 years, and it’s difficult to break the habit of having really bright and translucent colours,” she qualifies.
Saraswati first heard about Auroville at 15 years. “Since then my mother had dreamt of coming here. It became possible only in 1998, when our country became more open and overcame the main post-Soviet economical crisis. But the final decision of staying here, I took in 2004.” Apart from working in her own studio called Have Fun Pottery, she also teaches at the White Peacock Center for Clay Education with her mother, a teacher and a ceramist.
The house she lives in is greener, wilder than most parts of Auroville that we have walked through (which is, admittedly, not much at all). The tree frogs, the grasses, the flying insects – you feel that it all sort of comes together and resonates through her work, in the many little creatures that she makes to populate her art. “If I were to put it in a hierarchy of values,” she replies, “I would put living in Auroville as a city of dreamers as the most inspiring thing for me. I feel I belong here. Next I would say the green, peaceful surroundings inspire me, and after that, living in Dana. For me it is very important to measure my breath with the rhythm of the big dream of this unique place. I would think that it was a coincidence – a beautiful joke of life – that the Divine put me to live in Dana, where most of the pottery-community live and work.”

There’s a story within each piece that Saraswati crafts, so that you can gaze at it for the longest time. In her kitchen stove series, all of the household’s gustatory needs are found on the stove (including a delicious-loooking fried egg which threatens to ooze off its pan). I loved the earrings and pendants, and her Christmas fridge magnets – a row of snowmen who look like they are in the middle of a good gossip session. Amit’s favourites were, I think, this rather stern, story-book-character looking lady, and this jug which has a world around it.

About her process of creating the pieces, Saraswati says, “Each piece goes through my hands, and this hand-crafting is the longest part of the process. Then it goes through the bisque fire in an electrical furnace for four hours. Then it’s glazed (by brush, all the tiny details are worked on and coloured here), and then it’s finally fired for another six hours. If I am not happy with the result, I may keep adding glazes and firing again till I am satisfied.”

You can see more of Saraswati’s work on her site.