blogs

After next week, one has to wait for a few months to watch top class tennis. US open is taking place in New York since Monday. What a bonanza for tennis aficionados! I am following tennis for more than fifty years, from the amateur years to the modern days. What changes, from ordinary rackets to the graphite rackets, from endless sets to tie-breakers, from umpire-knows-it-all to player challenges. Unfortunately though, tennis has not taken deep roots in India.

தமிழ் and हिंदी!

One part of myself has fallen in love with the sona drawings (http://www.ikolam.com/node/6485
http://www.ikolam.com/node/6528
http://www.ikolam.com/node/7021)

This was supposed to have been written a week ago. Better late than never! There are several stories as to how vinAyaka was born. Of course, the most popular one is that of pArvati kneading a human shape out of the sandal paste on her body and breathing life into it and asking that male child to guard while she was taking her bath. In the mean while Siva appears there and was refused entry into his own house.

If you've uploaded any images that have no rangolis/kolam in them, please upload them in the Cafe area (post topics for them and attach pictures if you have any). We will upload rangoli and kolam images in the main site. The children's art gallery is going to move to the Cafe area too, in the next few days.
Thank you.

Commenting system is having issues, please bear with the system.

We are nearing the end of August. School is going to start after the summer holidays for the kids. And, so , we thought, it would be a good idea to visit the local beach before the change of season. Everyone knows how the kids love to play with the sand, building sand castles and running constantly to the shore to collect water in their pails. I always make it a point to do some beachcombing. This time I got lucky; I found some sand dollars too (no shells, since it is frequently visited by people).
My girls found it unusual to find a dead seal lying on the shore (with a hole in its body).
Anyways, we got talking about making this and that in the sand, and that's when I remembered mOhanaji's post about Sona drawings on the sand. Refer here to find out more: http://www.ikolam.com/node/6485 and http://www.ikolam.com/node/6528

I was surprised to find Mani try out the snake design. That was possible because he could access the site using his iphone - the latest smart phone that most people either already have it, or want to have (including me too). But, he ended up changing the basic design a bit. He made it into two snakes instead of one. The pictures taken from an iphone are not bad either; this picture of Sona drawings on the beach was taken using the iphone. Taking the picture was easy, but drawing good looking strokes on the sand was not that easy. Got to get better at it, like the Angola boys.

The idea of making an Ashoka Chakra comes from mOhanaji, and I've incorporated some of his suggestions mentioned in his comments: http://www.ikolam.com/node/6582

I have intentionally made this into an un-dotted kolam. A single spoke-design is shown on the left (a couple of more loops were added under the tip, and a layer of "S" was removed from both sides to make it slimmer). I have a habit of coloring my dotted rangolis on a brown platform, so I've shown a brown version of the finished design. You can also see that I've enclosed an uncolored and a colored blue chakra, and finally, the scaled down chakra placed in a flag. There are two more versions of this design that I would like to finish and upload later on. In one of them, the outer most loop would be connected (at the moment, I've only connected the middle circle. I want to retain this design to show the animation. For me, none of my dotted rangolis are finished, until I've shown how to draw, and typically a rangoli takes me one day to make from start to finish, all completed with animation ).
Placing the dots after this rangoli has been drawn is very easy (I meant on the computer, and would be shown later on). Comments to improve are always welcome, and would also be expected

The following is a guest post, by Aarushi K: