Although I was born in Baroda, Gujarat – a city that has been a centre for art-practice, teaching and cultural exchange, it was only during my days as an art student in Delhi that I built an identification with it. Growing up in Dibiyapur near Kanpur, I was an average student when it came to academics and my school text-books were used more to doodle and draw, creating markers for an imaginary world. I was the happiest when I was either playing cricket or while I was drawing. My introduction to the world of art was through a local publication called Chaman Kiran, which were books with tutorials on the basics of drawing and painting, portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, based on populist academic techniques. I joined the Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi to pursue a degree in art education, a programme that would both train me as an artist and equip me with teaching skills. It taught me a methodology of approaching, formulating and interpreting my own and other visual languages. The city of Delhi, the art events there and my educational programme expanded my understanding art and art-history. In addition to this, a 6-month stint at a traditional Tanjore painting workshop benefited me greatly in honing my painting skills. Initially during my college years I was drawn to the study of nature. The impressionists’ approach to capture light and colour by painting outdoors was influential in my manner of painting. The study of nature- animal and plant-life in my immediate surroundings became a subject that led me to paint the series Mera Gaon.  I have an interest in Hindi literature and Sufi poetry. A casual incident of buying a book of Premchand stories on a train journey a couple of years ago, brought back memories of other stories I had read as a child. My own experiences of growing up, leaving home to pursue my education and my observations of a metropolis with all its complexities lying bare to be encountered everyday, made the realism of Premchand’s literature extremely appealing to me.  An unconscious engagement with psychology must have occurred in the course of studying art education and it has become an important factor that has combined with my interest in realist literature, pertaining to our social realities and landscape as a visual territory. I arrived in Baroda in 2011 to dedicate more time to studio-practice. The culture of sitting at street-corners for a cup of chai, the wedding processions and other such sights that are emblematic of this city became images that I felt like developing in my paintings. Whether it is the push-cart (laari) or a street dog, cow, etc., they become extensions and reflections of human nature which have their own symbolic significance.