After the tenth grade, I decided to persue painting as my lifetime goal. I enrolled in the Fine Arts Program of the College of Arts and Crafts at the University of Lucknow in India.
A crucial aspect of my artistic expression is desire: sublimated, unfulfilled, suppressed, unspoken, or made manifest at great risk. The images in my paintings - birds, flowers, beautiful women, the tranquility of quiet rooms - typically belie a suggestion of loss, or danger, or quiet suffering. While growing up in India, I painted this beauty/pain dichotomy because I saw it around me, in a close-knit, conservative society that often demands adherence to ancient traditions at the expense of personal choice. I think that perhaps the freedom and openness of American society is accompanied by, or comes at the price of, the breakdown of family structures and the consequent isolation and loneliness.