har-ish

This piece grew out of my fascination with Nordic cinema, particularly the Swedish films I found myself watching and listening to. There is something about those landscapes that are so much white, so much cold, so much space…essentially sparse that seems to seep quietly into the people themselves. They often appear restrained and almost expressionless, yet there is an extraordinary depth beneath that stillness. Sparse Winter isn’t really an attempt to depict Sweden; it is more of a personal tribute to the feeling those films left behind: The starkness, the solitude, and the strange beauty of emotions that remain largely unspoken.

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I remember studying the lotus stem in zoology and botany, fascinated by what appeared when you looked inside it: aerenchyma, parenchyma compartments, vascular bundles and tracheary elements, all arranged in this strange little piece of botanical architecture.

But I also remember lotus stems for a completely different reason.
We once made garlands out of lotus stems, and, as fate would have it, I did it with my first crush.

So perhaps that’s why the lotus stem stayed with me. Somewhere between botanical anatomy and adolescent romance, it became one of those ordinary things that acquired a rather disproportionate place in my memory.
I learned its anatomy at sixteen.
I think I learned something rather different about it around the same time.

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I first encountered this level of anatomical intricacy when I was sixteen, in Plus One, studying zoology and the arthropods. One of our practical assignments was to examine the compound eye and dissect and lay out the mouthparts of a cockroach.

I was hopelessly clumsy at it. My dissection needle seemed almost comically large for the job of teasing apart and arranging all those tiny structures. The mandibles, maxillae and other mouthparts demanded a degree of precision I simply didn’t possess at sixteen.

I remember thinking that this was less like a school dissection and more like the work of a horologist tuning the spring of an automatic watch. In fact, at the time, I was convinced that laying out a cockroach’s mouthparts was even more intricate than working on a watch.

Looking at this drawing now, I think I was probably trying to recreate that feeling rather than the anatomy itself: The extraordinary complexity hidden inside something we normally don’t bother to look at twice.

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Perhaps the Soviet Union’s greatest piece of soft power. I would argue the Matryoshka’s cultural reach in India rivalled, and perhaps outlasted, what Coca Cola did for America or Hollywood did for American culture. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, almost every upwardly mobile Indian household seemed to have a set sitting proudly in its showcase.

For many of us, the USSR arrived not through politics, but through a little wooden doll inside another little wooden doll and books from Raduga and MIR publishers.

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A page full of seashells, and not a croissant in sight.

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