Art and Crazy


My 7 year-old daughter has this habit of explaining how she drew something:
“You start by drawing a circle, then the ears, erase a bit of the top of the circle to make space for the hair…”
All such descriptions will always end with the word: “Simple!”.

After yet another (un-asked for) description of how she drew something, again ending up with that smug “Simple!”, I couldn’t resist responding:
“Obviously, it must have been simple. Otherwise, how would you have been able to draw it?”
Without batting an eyelid, she snapped back:
“It’s simple for me. It would be hard for you.”
~~

One time, as I tried to tempt her to watch something on National Geographic instead of her usual cartoons, I said:
“The host will challenge people to do crazy things. You interested?”
Her response was instantaneous… and honest:
“Yes. I am always there for anything crazy.”
~~

There’s this professional artist in our apartment who took art classes for the kids. Unfortunately, just when we enrolled my daughter and bought the canvases, paints and brushes, the lady stopped the class. So we ended up with all these unused canvases lieing around.

Over a long weekend, my daughter decided to give canvas painting a shot. The first attempt wasn’t too bad, and I told her she could do another one the next day. Immediately, she asked:
“Can I sign it, like all great artists do?”
Typical, I thought, she’s just done her first canvas piece, and already considers herself in the league of Michelangelo, Rembrandt and van Gogh. I dismissed her with an are-you-kidding-me look.

The next day, she did a much (much) better piece of the goddess Parvathi. And on the bottom right, she’d signed her name!

I guess my daughter believes in what Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper once said:
“It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more