My medium — collaging — found me late in life. Each collage is an imaginative expedition giving me the opportunity to explore possibilities of myself through my work.

As I map reimagined memories, narrating images and fragments of my encounters with the world, I begin to compose mosaics in shades of a familiar vernacular to find meaning. Collaging, for me, is not a means to interpret or evaluate the world, but to observe in a natural way. Negotiating an evolving conversation between the canvas and an abundance of materials and textures, I observe little bits of everything coalescing into unusual imagery. Making collages gives me a sense of wonder at inhabiting this earth, embracing alien geographies, grounding the self with all the sidebars and outlines stitched together, contradictions reconciled, paradoxes simply and ingeniously consenting. Collaging is a language and my job is to find the appropriate visual idioms and metaphors to chart and redraw the past.

Born in New Delhi, India to post-Partition refugee parents, I began my career as a journalist at the Press Institute of India and wrote articles for national newspapers in Delhi including the Times of India, the Statesman, The Hindustan Times and journals Caravan and Outlook. After some time in journalism, I veered towards academia and earned a Ph.D in Urban Sociology and Architecture from the Delhi School of Economics. In this capacity, I taught undergraduate courses in Introductory Sociology and graduate seminars with a post doc fellowship.

After moving abroad as a result of my husband’s work at UNICEF, I continued to freelance for newspapers in India and local newspapers covering the experience of diasporic communities abroad. I continue to write short stories and personal essays on these themes, in part to make sense of my own story.

My work as a journalist, sociologist and writer have all given me distinct languages to orient myself in a rapidly shifting world. Currently I am engaged in creating collages, which offer me a new language -- one that allows me to redraw life in a new format.