Bangkok Sketch Crawl

This time, on a business trip to bangkok, when my digital camera fell apart...i decided to pick up a sketch pad and have a sketch-crawl of my own.
Sketch crawl..for the uninitiated, is this phenomenon started by Enrico Casarosa, an sketchboard artist at Pixar. In one of my older posts I had mentioned about this sketching marathon, and now I hope I get to be a more active participant.For those interested about the origins of this event, read here.

Last Friday evening I had roamed all over Siam Paragon, one of the local shopping malls and raided this place called "Read and Write". This extremely helpfull floor assistant had helped me pick out cheaper but damn good quality Folio and a raphael mini water colour box.



The next saturday morning, inspite of planning a day trip to the city I ended up spending a few extra hours in bed, trying to recover from something I had no clue about.To add to the pain, my digital camera stopped working.It just wouldnt respond to anything that I would do.There were these crazy red lines across the LCD which tore my heart.It has been only 3 years since I have bought it. I sat near the window trying to convince myself to get up and go out for wa walk and jotted down the birds eye view of the Hotels entrance from my window...and watched the tour bus, which otherwise would have had an excited me in it, leave. :(

Later in the day, I picked up some maps and decided to venture out on my own.I took a 'tuk-tuk' and asked the driver to take me to the Grand Palace . Soon, the extreme humidity and heat took its toll and I had to take shelter near a temple dedicated to budhdha, called 'The Emerald Budhdha'.



Unlike what I had expected, no one registered any curiosity at the sight of me with my sketchbook, eaves-dropping the guided tour narattions and sketching everytime id get tired.
Finally I decided to call it quits.Too much of grandios is not exactly entertaining.After a point the lavish castle and the gold roofs began getting on my nerves.

As a reward for my brave attempt ( :) ) the crawl ended with a nice sprawled out buffet watching the boats sail by.Tremendously relaxing, with Nityisa, a tiny waitress who had gotten used to me insisting on sitting on the same table near the pier every time I came down for breakfast, refilling cups of warm fragrant tea.Tea, incidently, is an excellent soother of confused tummies that have been treated to too many alien gastronomic delights.

Footsteps

Over time people start forming associations between absolutely irrelevant things and the most important people.
Like footsteps.
I can recognise some people by their footsteps even when im half asleep.

From a flippity-flap sandal slap on the floor as my mom used to buzz all around the house , to the current drag-thump .
One bad knee ruining the rhythm.

February ...the month in which the palash trees bloom.

We used to have one right outside our house in bombay , and each year around my birthday it would be ablaze, a riot of red.
And as years pass, you forget the little trivial incidents, perhaps pack them up/put them away in small boxes in ur memory, making space for the new ones.

My dad says nothing goes waste, your mind forgets nothing
Everything you have ever seen, heard , tasted, smelt or felt becomes a part of you.
Its is you who forgets that you own them.

Whenever my parents are visiting, they draw the curtains aside from the window in my bedroom, at 6am.
Ma says, see how lovely the sky looks, switch of ur bedside lamp.
And I keep wondering how I never miss this soft early morning sunlight, the rest of the year.

A few seconds ago I was walking past the open window and I saw a palash tree I never knew existed...
next to the house in the paralell lane...full bloom.Without its flowers I could have never recognised it.
And then I remembered, it was still february.