The Shape
of Seeing

The paintings did. In 2020 the world went silent, and I found myself standing again before a blank surface. One afternoon I took a piece of cotton string from a kitchen drawer, dipped it in pigment, and pulled it across the canvas. It left a shuddering line I could never have planned. That accident became my method. Soon I began writing alongside the paintings: short notes, reflections, fragments. Not essays, but echoes. The book grew from those echoes. It is my attempt to give language to what the paintings were already saying.

It grew. I set out to paint, and the writing followed the way a shadow follows a line. First came notebook phrases like “resistance yields grace” and “color is the body of time.” Then came blog posts, then longer meditations. Over time they formed a personal theory of abstraction, lived as practice rather than written as doctrine. When I gathered them, I saw they belonged to one rhythm. They were never a collection. They were a continuum.

Representation comforts; abstraction confronts. Representation shows; abstraction reveals. In a representational painting the eye recognizes and moves on. In abstraction the eye lingers, searches, questions. It cannot escape into story, so it has to stay inside the act of seeing. That is what I most wanted readers to feel: abstraction is a way of meeting reality without illusion. Perhaps abstraction is simply what happens when words run out.

I grew up in a house where silence was never empty. My father wrote about the Indian modernists, and Souza, Raza, Husain and Swaminathan came to our home and talked for hours about form and spirit. My mother, a professor of English literature, lived by the rhythm of language. If my father taught me how to see, she taught me how to listen. The book lives in the gap between image and word that I first noticed in that house. My father used to say that every great painting begins where language ends. This book begins there too.

Dip, pull, release. The string carries paint unevenly. It trembles, twists, and resists prediction. I can guide it, but I cannot command it. Each line holds both decision and accident, and once it is drawn it cannot be undone. Unlike a brush, the string carries memory. It remembers every hesitation in my hand. Working with it taught me that control is not mastery but conversation, and that conversation runs through every chapter.

They ask one question from two rooms. The Shape of Seeing asks it from inside the studio: what happens when we look slowly, through the body, without needing to explain? The Unalgorithmic Self asks it from inside the age of intelligent machines: what in us cannot be modeled? A machine can generate an image, but not an impression. Both books defend the same thing: attention, and a life that has an inside.

An invitation to slow down, to stay with what resists immediate understanding, and to trust the intelligence of attention. The rhythm of seeing does not belong to artists alone. It belongs to anyone willing to look, listen, and remain present long enough for something to reveal itself.