Being featured in Once Upon a Tea Time's online magazine

I have been following Priya's gorgeously curated blog on interiors, lifestyle, and visual prettiness, Once Upon a Tea Time for quite a while now. What I have always enjoyed about her blog is that in addition to feasting one's eyes upon beautifully-assembled and presented interiors and learning about various organizations and individuals creating unique and interesting products (I admire how she has consistently supported entrepreneurs and artisans world over and brought them to her readers' attention), I also appreciate how she thoughtfully intersperses these posts with personal meditations upon life and her constantly evolving interiors through features such as A Postcard from My Life.

One of Priya's recent posts was concerning Project Home - and I felt compelled to write in with my thoughts and pictures. She then later graciously invited me to contribute these thoughts in form of a short piece for the first issue of her online magazine celebrating her blog's fifth birthday. I was honored to be part of these birthday celebrations and associated with her blog...and looking forward to the magazine's subsequent issues!

I am reproducing the piece and pictures below here:

Blue Moon

 'Project Home', which was a thoughtful meditation upon what home means to different people, made me think quite a bit about what home means to me. I initially associated it with 'homelands'; 'Project Home'  made me perceive it in terms of physical sanctuaries instead. I must say that getting married, moving to a different country, and having a home of your own quite literally turns the definition on its axis. Now that I have a home, I am much more mindful of the elements that will contribute to making my home an enjoyable and beautiful space to inhabit and be surrounded by. I am still gradually building it up; as I am most likely to shift home in few months, I can't layer or extensively decorate the place as much as I did like to. However, it's also simultaneously impossible to live in a bare space and I am learning to strike a balance between minimalism and maximalism. My home at the moment therefore is a reflection of my present state of mind: I am in transition and yet, I need to populate my immediate spaces with little bits and pieces to call it my own.

Dressing the Mirror

Spilt Shadows

What are these bits and pieces? I have used miniature pumpkins and fallen leaves as table center-pieces; I decorate my shelves with ceramic bowls painted and glazed at a ceramic art store (his and mine). There is a pink framed mirror dressed with a Rajasthani leheriya dupatta and paper kites flying high on the wall above it. Above the dining table, a tomato red and saffron Rajasthani miniature painting depicting a bride travelling to her marital home in a palanquin (how fitting that it is a wedding gift!) looks down at us. Back in my old house, my dressing table was my stage of decor, containing my knick-knacks and some which have migrated from there to here: Moroccan trays, Kashmiri and Iranian boxes, Venetian Masks, and Omani bedouin thread key-rings.

Pumpkin Crisp

Venetian Drama

It's a home being put together and I would any day dress it with what Priya beautifully describes as the patina of life in her 'Project Home' post. It may not look like a photograph from an interior magazine or Pinterest but that is perfectly fine with me. As the evenings darken with winter's onset and I illumine the room, I feel a sense of cosiness and intimacy, surrounded by objects that I brought from my old home and which are now joining the others that my husband and I collect as we build our new home and life together.