Home Sweet Home, Living and Dining...

Photography has never been one of my talents. I have this really sophisticated camera though, that I don't know how to use and I doubt I will master any of its features in this lifetime. We have a saying in Malayalam "Like a dog who has been given a whole coconut". Basically means to not know your a** from a hole in the ground. I don't know my camera on the same premise. I wanted to shoot my new home and I thought I would post pics taken with what I know of my severely under-utilized rocket-science camera.

As a painter, I have a fairly developed sense of light and shadow but when it comes to photos, that sense eludes me. I tired shooting pics in early morning light and with the bulb lights on ( I am allergic to tube lights. They make me feel like a lab animal ). Here's my Spartan living room. I have furnished the house in what glaringly strikes me as "Jaundice potty yellow". Gross but appropriate ( if you ever had jaundice, you would know what I am talking about). That's my new painting up on the wall. I got a huge blank canvas framed and then put up directly before anything was painted on it. I didn't start work till about 3 weeks later. Till then, it was called The Void ( my salutes, Yves Klein, Yoko Ono). Vivek went a step further and called it "Study in Black" ( the more unrelated and eccentric the title, the more intriguing the painting, he reasoned. Everyone's heard of Barnett Newman's abstraction Who's afraid of Red Yellow and Blue) . I waited for the curtains and furniture to arrive so that I could plan a painting based on the colour scheme of the room. I'll post a close up of just the painting once I get the camera figured out.

Here's the piano area of the living room. My piano is almost 20 years old.Looks as good as new even now. That is a painting of Vivek as a 3 year old, above the piano. Too small to see clearly in this pic but I shall put up a decent photograph of it sometime. The box hanging in the middle of the room is Vivek's silk shirt which he had been promising to wear for the past 5 years. So one day, I cut it up and made a Chinese Lantern. That's me. I'll ask you to wear the clothes that you have been putting away at the back of the cupboard. I'll remind you on a weekly/monthly basis. Then one fine day, 5 years later ( I have infinite patience as you can see), I'll cut it up into towels or lanterns or whatever I think appropriate. Beware...

I've always been a big fan of minimally furnished homes. There is something liberating about emptiness looking back at you. I like the breathing space. My real reason in furnishing my home Spartan style is so that I have less maintenance to worry about. The last thing I want to do is get up in the morning and dust the crystal and polish the brass. I have neither in my house. Die-hard homemakers who have interest in just keeping house please forgive me for saying this but 30 years down the line, I want to have more to show in terms of achievement than the fact that I dry-cleaned the silk curtains every 2 weeks and vacuumed the Persian carpet diligently. Again, I own neither...

I wanted the dining area to be a blast of Orange. Orange is the colour of vitality and life.



A close up of the piano.

Am yet to shoot the other rooms. We have three bedrooms, one of which we have converted to a TV/computer/bass playing/studio room. The paintings are yet to go up, so watch this space for pics of the rest of the house...