My Truest Religion

I am known, among those who know me, as one whose tears quicken easily. Those who live with me have always had to live with this tendency, but few have welcomed it.

“Stop crying.”
“You cry too much.”
“You need to become stronger.”

But with every attempt to suppress my crying, to shield themselves from it, these people have awoken deep within me a pious, reassuring voice telling me to pay no heed. The pious voice knows a secret that they do not:

Crying was, and always has been, my truest religion.

We who practice this religion are oft-persecuted, but zealots that we are, we do it anyway. In the dark-ish and darkest moments of my life, when I have felt alone, small and unseen, my tears have kept me company. They are my guardian angels, little mirrors reflecting my pain back to me, so that I might know that I am seen. My sobs are my prayers. They reverberate through the air, through my flesh, in my bones, and back to my own ears, that I might know that I am heard. When I cry, I tremble like the supplicant who is touched by the divine and transformed.

Whatever my brokenness, however pathetic I think I am, crying makes my suffering sacred. When I tell myself the stories of the injustices I have suffered and witnessed, and then cry about them, suddenly my human frailty is elevated to epic greatness. Each battle for my own significance becomes enshrined in the mythology of me. And more importantly, I am rescued from oblivion. Crying is the great triumph at the end of the battle, when the hero prevails and proves, once and for all who are there (which is usually just me), that she matters.

Since my God is my self and I am everywhere, I can cry anywhere. But my favorite place to cry is at the altar of my bed. In every home I have ever lived in, I have had a shrine where I say prayers and call on the divine. But when I feel truly helpless, truly ready to surrender, I go to the bed. I wrap myself in whatever holy shroud is on it, and begin to weep. When time allows, weeping gives way to crying and crying gives way to sobbing. The shroud doubles as a vessel for the holy waters that flow. If I keep at it, if I properly humble myself, my prayers are answered, and I receive divine messages of my truth. The truth. I hear a voice which gives voice to what was voiceless within me, and the fog of powerlessness dissipates.

Because this is a practice which I began in my childhood, my bed has also become a portal through which I can transcend space and time. There is a simple mantra which I can use nonverbally to initiate this magic while I am crying: “Why?” Immediately upon recitation I am granted access to all the pain and suffering I have memory of, and sometimes more. And to the surface come images, clues, through which I can travel, inhabiting past selves in other places. And when I come out of this reverie, I better understand why I suffer today, now, and what I can do about it.

And this is why I will not stop crying. Why I can never cry too much. Why crying is what makes me stronger.

Eat, Pray, Love

You do not want us to worship your God.

Because we have taken your God, loved him, and put him on our shrine next to our he-Gods and our she-Gods and our they-Gods and we sing songs to praise them all, and this is not enough for you. You are not satisfied that we affirm your God, because you do not want us to worship your God.

You want to destroy our Gods.

You want to destroy our Gods until our children no longer know their names, until they can no longer pronouce their names even if we try to tell them, until they no longer know to ask what the names are, until there is no one left to ask. You will not rest until you have destroyed our Gods, and the blessings they have given us.

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Your children will curse you for it, just as, deep down, you want to curse your forebears.

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And yet, you want to eat our food and dance our dances. You want to wear our clothes, our hair, our skin. You want to eat, pray, and love with us. 

I am here to tell you that you cannot have both. You must choose. You can destroy our Gods and our cultures and eventually yourselves and the children we bear together, or you can eat, pray, and love with us. But you cannot do both.

Because Bhudevi is my home. Annapurna makes my breakfast. Krshna plays the melodies that soothe my aching heart. Nataraja uses my body to dance, and Ardhanarishvara is my love language. Everywhere in this world there are Gods loving and protecting the people who love and protect them, giving them the shiny gifts that attract you.

Our Gods are our cultures, and they are enough for us. But you do not love your God, so he does not love you, and there are no shiny gifts. Your God and your culture is not enough for you, so you come to take ours. You trap their shadows in glass cases like trophies from the hunt. You print their names on your product labels. But they do not work for you because you do not work for them. And sooner or later, you destroy them.

You destroy them and it is never enough. You still are unsatisfied. I am here to warn you, in your language, that it will never satisfy you. Moreover, your children will curse you for it, just as, deep down, you want to curse your forebears. 

Find your Gods and you will find your culture. Reclaim them. Forgive the ancestors who robbed you of them. And then, come tell us of your Gods and we will tell you of ours, and we can eat, pray, and love together.

No one ever told me that kolam is graphic design

No one ever told me that kolam is graphic design. 

I am an Indian-American visual artist and designer educated in the Eurocentric canon. Kolam has been for generations a daily art, craft, religious, domestic, and social practice of my ancestors, but I didn’t learn that in school. I didn’t learn it in art class, or in my International Baccalaureate Art program, or while earning a B.F.A. in design.

By studying and practicing kolam, I am reclaiming my professional craft not as something I do other than inhabiting my cultural heritage, but as a primary means of inhabiting that heritage. When I put kolam, I experience design not through the lens of white men whose names fill my graphic design textbooks, but through the lens of my maternal ancestors whose creativity and legacy were documented not in textbooks but in the fingers of daughters and granddaughters. As a child, I watched with fascination as my mother held a phone to her ear and doodled on scraps of paper, absentmindedly weaving intricate designs in and out of grids of dots. Putting kolam teaches me that graphic design is my inheritance.

I reclaimed kolam for its connection to my heritage, but it has reclaimed me as a visual designer.

Kolam is made as a sacred offering with edible and organic materials that swiftly return themselves to the land. Kolas are created as offerings to the Earth and its other inhabitants, and are immediately subject to the inevitable fate of a strong breeze or passing footstep. When I make kolam, I am humbled by my inability to control nature, and also my relative power over an individual ant in my path. Kolam is art therapy for perfectionists and egotists. It quietly insists that everything I create is ephemeral, forcing my reckoning with the ecological implications of the materials I choose or recommend to my clients.

Kolas are also highly site-specific, always designed or adapted for the particulars of space and architecture. It is hard for graphic designers of my generation to imagine how we would practice our craft without a computer screen, but kolam defies this definition. It is a whole body activity, including squats, core control, and fine motor skills. Kolam reminds me that I am a real live person, and I create things for other real live people. With real bodies. In a real place.

Further, kolam is deepening my technical craft as a designer and artist. In South Indian culture, it is a daily ritual, deeply integrated into a woman’s routine and the social fabric. Adopting the tradition makes manageable my goal to practice drawing every day, no matter what else is happening. It is scalable to accommodate the time and resources available to me each day. Finally, kolam requires me to draw from a sense of internalized geometry, as my body and fingers glide around the design. This deep intimacy with line, forms, and space is fundamental to the craft of graphic design. Completing a kolam is humbling to attempt and empowering to accomplish.

Putting kolam for me is both personal and public. I make sketches and research in private spaces, but practice in public, urban spaces. My works outdoors engage neighbors and passersby in conversations that allow me to tell my ancestors’ story and my story, and offer us all a glimpse of an alternate way of life.