A Curated Guide to Slow Living in India
One of our favourite botanical illustrators and authors, Nirupa Rao is out with a new nature and science book. Her latest tome, Hidden Kingdom, features botanical illustrations of fascinating plants native to the Western Ghats—from carnivores and parasites to flowers that smell like rotting flesh. You’ll encounter familiar species (like pepper) as well as the more obscure (like the colourless ghost orchid), all certain to make you see the natural world with new eyes.
Nature is the supreme artist with no limitations on materials. Be it the endless skies, nurturing earth, massive mountains, solid rocks, endless seas, merciless deserts, and magical snow, you can just imagine the endless series of props in a bag that she pulls out: magnificent works of art, which no camera can capture. These visual treats are random, phenomenal and never the same, and have inspired artists, brought to life by Turner or Constable, surprisingly distorted by Dali and interestingly simplified by Paul Klee.
“So in the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see…
You’re going to the Biennale. Breathe. You need to discover it, not catalogue it. It’s easy to run around like a headless chicken, instagramming and hashtagging, because, FOMO. But let me sum up the harsh reality—seeing everything is impossible. Some halls you might just…
How do you decide that something is right for you? You will never know. Unless you dive right in to it, head down, feet up. Five books led inspired me to at least think about a simpler life. Being a hoarder and being trapped in…