The Recess is Over – The Blog Lives

Those who know me,  know that I like to reflect and reflect a lot. I strongly believe that we are a product of our own experiences and life gives us plenty of experiences. Life as perfect as it is, is very imperfect too. The imperfections are critical for change. When the imperfections go away, life will become stagnant, until then it is imperative that we enjoy life’s fallibility and learn from it.  You don’t need an extra ordinary moment to learn. Our daily interaction with fellow humans, nature and ourselves is a learning experience every moment of the day.

45 years is a long time to be on this planet. I have always enjoyed adding a year to my age for it is a privilege denied to many. images-10Today I am thankful that I woke up to see the love and blessings surrounding me. The past years have been rather interesting. They have tested my patience, my thinking and more importantly my belief in myself.  I was one of those who lead a simple daily blessed life. No curve balls, no nothing.. life chugs along just fine, until one final year, life looks at you and says, “Ok, you have had too much good, it is time to throw in some bumps.”  Try as hard as I did, I was beginning to lose until one final day, when the human core in me wakes up and says ‘Enough! Bring it on” and just like that, you turn on the will power switch and life backs off and I realized I am me and I am ok.

45 years old and sane on planet Earth. That is an achievement in itself 🙂

My top 5 lessons of 45 years on this planet:pronoia-587x330-411213b1c0a228327dc6aec67a8b2d25c

1. Be Unfuckwithable: This is very important. You just have to be one, there is no other option.

2. Belive in Pronoia: It is true. There is power in belief. Believe and the universe will work with you.

3. Travel:  In this daily mundane life, we (including me) almost always forget we the humans were designed to be wanderers. And here we are living a stagnant life behind a computer screen. Some of you might have read about my trip to Alaska  what most of you don’t know is that this trip was a necessity to start breathing again. When life beats you down, the only way to get up is do something that you have never done before and Alaska was just that. A frontier unlike any other and staying true to it’s promise Alaska allowed me to breathe again. Travel because you want to see the wonderful natural creations, travel so you can be the pirate of your favorite childhood story book, travel so life does not escape you.

4. Relationships need more than love to survive:  Love hurts, it’s true. Relationships need constant nurturing. Mother-child, husband-wife, brother-sister and any other relationship needs continuous nurturing. Relationships, ebb and flow through the ocean of life, creating their troughs and crests. The crest may be tall and high and yet we look at the trough and forget the crest. We need to train our brain to focus on the crests and ignore the troughs. The flow of life will minimize the trough.

5. YOU can make a difference: As alone as we are, we have the power to make a difference. I never thought I did, until recently. Our simple acts of kindness can become big acts of fortitude for another.

This blog has been my sanity for many occasions. To stay sane, I had promised myself that I will bring the blog back on my birthday, so here it is. The blog lives.

Life I believe is full of Imperfections. It is these little daily imperfections that culminate at the end of a day to make a perfectly beautiful life. That’s how my world is. It’s filled with shades of bright vibrant reds to melancholy yet calming blues.

How is your world?

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O My God! Its all the same.

OMG! A phrase heard one too many a time our modern lives. It is interesting how many “astonishment phrases” are connected to God; Holy Cow!, Jesus Christ!, OMG!, Hey Bhagwan (OMG in Hindi), Thank God and so forth, and yet as a society we claim to be rational and logical.  
As humans we claim to be rational, logical and analytical. If that is true, then how and why do we believe in an invisible entity God? Why is it that different religions of the world worship him in different forms? And more importantly, why do we call those who choose to question his existence “an atheist.” For isn’t logical thinking at the core of human existence.  
What is your take on this? Is God there? What is religion? 
To me religion is an inspiration, its in a sense my back up support system. When all else fails, I fall back on religion.  Boring, yes, but it works for me. When things go wrong, I tell myself, its happening for a reason and all will be well again. This simple sentence helps me move forward and the process of moving forward kick starts the process of thinking logically and things start falling into place again. 

I was born and brought up in India. The land that cradled civilizations from far never heard lands, is today home to 330 Million gods. Do we know all of them? Absolutely not, We all have our favorites.  One god though stands apart.. Ganesha aka to the western world as “The Elephant God.”

How he got his elephant head is a story for another time. But while painting this particular piece of art, I realized one thing, Ganesha is to the Indian mythology what Nutcracker is to this festive season.

The figurine of nutcracker comes in every possible size, color and act. Similarly, Ganesha has been depicted in every way.

This painting was an on demand project. I have never formally learned painting, but have always loved colors, the art of mixing them and creating something. One “just another day morning,” a dear friend, brought a 17 opening frame to me and said, can you make seventeen different Ganesha’s for me and gave me this frame. And that is how Imperfectly Perfect Creations was born.    

17 panel Ganesha frame. 

Details showing the use of micro beads. 

Each image is a hand made background. Some are store bought hand made papers from Paper Source  and some painted by yours truly.  I used acrylic paint and micro beads for embellishments and Swarovski crystals.

Are all these images figments of my imagination. Not really, the creative use of materials, yes, that is mine, but the images are a result of inspirations from seeing so many different images over the years.

Center Image: Copper Tooling, with 400 Swarovski Crystals. 

Having painted so many different images of Ganesha’s and seeing the cross cultural mythological similarities, I am convinced; It’s all the same. This realization was truly a OMG moment!

Do I have proof, no and I don’t need it; because “faith begins where logic ends.”

I hope you enjoy these paintings and if you would like to see more of my paintings, feel free to me at Imperfectly Perfect on FB!

Keep in touch. Its good to hear from you. Till next time, keep believing and moving forward