it started from my decision to have coffee at 3rd wave cafe outside KNMA museum. it is a may summer of 2022 and i am having a regular coffee and drawing out Highlighters ( refer box of 2022 loose sheets).

Then i decide to head to see Somnath hore wounded works, mainly etching and prints. I have seen only a few and Somnath directs me to a Lalit kala Garhi for which i keep walking outside the museum till the Saket District Lower Court. This is lower than the High court. An auto rushes me to the end of Garhi to the studios where i am inside the Graphic Arts Studio.

The Graphic studio triggers a phone number to ballimaran galliyaa at Old delhi. This is where a zinc plate is being sold at retail. The Aggarwaals call me and say the best one is for this rate and i should reach them in the evening.

This leads me to my mother hearing BALLI – MARA and she tells me the story of my dad who use to visit or visited once to buy metal for a DYE. The dye was used for making a product at his factory at Wazirpur Industrial Area. his own factory for which he left his job. He was a Mechanical Engineer who decided to quit his business and start his own business of making products.

He went to Balli mara streets to buy material for a dye. I think it was for a plug. She points towards the switchboard next to her.

I asked her, where can we get that original dye that he made.

She replies – he sold his factory and it is impossible to track the orginal dye now.

what did he make ? The Plug ?

Yes and cables, thick black cables for appliances at his factory.

I retreat to my room with this thought. What all dyes did he make? Can i have access to all the dyes and the final products he made? What were the machines he used? how were these dyes and the final products created?

Strangely had i not sat for coffee, then gone for the show and then Garhi studio, then graphic studio, then all of this may not have happened? I don’t think so. And yet my entire trail of activities is inward. I am thinking and doing. There is no external, or outwardness to this. Even the food i am eating. It is going inside me. You will never see i have consumed food outside me. I have to see you to consume. I see friends, family, chair, coffee and this desire to buy a zinc sheet to make Etching so that it is framed and exhibited is all coming from inside. I will not take the zinc sheet and use it as tyre for a car or take the tyre and put it under the Etching Press machine. No. I will not do such things but i just thought of them because it is all internal. It is how i think. When a process is told me. I think it has reached here because of it being a trail to something.

coming back to my dad. I think, hearing my mother and the dyes and the things he created has fascinated me and makes me revisit and see what was he up to in his factory at Wazirpur Industrial Area.