I was also going to give my work away.

Which is why it's very cool to do stuff on paper rather than just staying within a digital format.

I have been trying to figure out how to go about the task. Should I just put up a tiny little sign? Should someone announce it? This all seemed a little cumbersome because all I really wanted to do was to draw and give the art away.

I think that's something that every artist wants to do: not necessarily to just create for themselves, but to give it away and have somebody else enjoy the illustration.

And there in front of me, at the cafe, were about six magazines, so I decided to simply leave an envelope with a drawing and a little message so that anybody encountering it could keep the artwork for themselves.

I'm not exactly shy, so it would be just as easy for me to give the artwork away in person.

Yet this methof is probably a cool thing for someone who doesn't want to attract too much attention to themselves. You can do a few drawings on the back of an envelope and place it in the magazines or in different places at your local cafe.

When I go back the next time, I'll see if someone has taken them. If you have any ideas about how I could place these envelopes, let me know. I'll be glad to hear from you.

The Greeks, love their desserts like most other countries. But what’s unusual about Greek culture is that every meal seems to accompanied by free dessert. Since we travel for about a month, that’s about 30 lunches and 30 dinners. Hence, 60 desserts.

If you happen to be staying at a place where breakfast is included, that’s another dessert showing up without fail. And I like to draw and paint, so I find a restaurant where I can have a coffee and sit undisturbed. And if the Greeks like you, and they happened to like me, you get dessert with every coffee.

When we landed on the island, we got to a cafe and I started painting. The Greek owner liked the artwork, so he invited me to come over the next day.

The problem was I showed up at about 9 am, and the place didn’t open until past midday. “No problem” he said, waving me in. There was no place to sit and draw at the hotel, so this was a welcome spot. Lots of light, no one around—no one, that is, except the Greek owner.

“You’ll have some coffee, yes?” he asked.
Once I’d finished one, he offered another. Then, came the invariable question: “Will you have dessert?” I was several hours away from anything sweet, but I come from a culture where you don’t disappoint the host. And so I nodded.

For the rest of the days we spent on the island, I drew, drank coffee and ate desserts at 10 am. I guess there are worse ways to spend a holiday.

P.S. If you’re reading this—you are, aren’t you? Well, take a look at the images below and ask me anything that comes to mind. I’d love to answer in a lot of detail.

That formula is: sit down for a tiny while after breakfast and do the smallest bit possible. That formula goes haywire if there’s an emergency situation. In most cases, chaos is just a doorbell away.

I started a storytelling course a few months ago and have had about 80 breakfasts since then. However, I’ve only done about 10-15 pieces of art since the course began. You’d assume that it’s the additional workload. After all, conducting a course means you have to look at the assignments every day and time is more compressed.

Yet, the formula doesn’t say: finish something.

It says: start something. And so I did. I started sketching again, forsaking the colour and only working in ink. It did turn out quite cool after all, but then a lot of stuff does end up a lot better than you think, only if you start. And the same applies to this post here. If I stop, I stop. To keep going on Substack, I need to start, because the finish will usually take care of itself.

Most of the images are from 2010, when the artwork was relatively simple. A little line work, some colour and that was it. At other times, just some sketches and a touch of colour.

The road to 17,000 cartoons is “after breakfast”.

In India, it’s common to haggle for a better price. To bargain with a vendor is almost part of the expected routine. However, there’s one exception to this norm. It’s considered extremely poor etiquette to bargain on the first sale of the day.

This first sale is called “bo-ni” or “boh-ni”. Because it’s the first deal, it’s treated as a sacred and auspicious omen that sets the financial luck for all subsequent transactions.

I feel this way about the first page in my cartoon diary.
Take the trip to Greece, for example. I drew, erased, drew, erased and yes, sketched yet again. And it’s the sketch that really matters, far more than the final version. I know for a fact that if I take the time to create a drawing that is interesting in pencil, I will end up with something I am proud of. And more importantly, it sets the tone for several of the pages that follow.

It’s not that I won’t have some “horrid” paintings in between.

At times, I will get distracted, or things may end up being a little “hectic” on our easy-going holiday. However, as long as I have a first page that works, that’s my “boni” for the rest of the book.

The first page of the diary is like writing the first line in a story. It’s super frustrating, at least for me. Do you feel the same way? And would you feel the same way if it were digital and not paper? Because paper is almost forever.

I was on the street, in Bishangarh, Rajasthan, when this young tribal woman called me into her courtyard.

She wanted to take a picture of her son who was probably a year old. The house she lived in was just a thatched hut, much like people would have lived in a few hundred years ago.

We were in Bishangarh for a whole week, and I’d been walking around the village taking an endless number of photos. And when you’re a traveller, you stand out. It’s likely that she would have noticed me walking around the village many times, which is why she called me in.

At first, I was puzzled. Tribal women can be notoriously conservative.

They use their saris as veils, keeping well away from men—and definitely strange men with cameras. Then I realised she wanted me to take a picture of little kid.

She wasn’t keen on the house as the backdrop, so she got a bright towel and we had a photo shoot in progress. And everything went just fine until I stopped clicking. “Can I have a print of the photo”? she asked.

I explained the best I could that it was just a digital camera and we couldn’t have a print. She was puzzled. It was hard for her to understand why a print didn’t just pop out from the camera itself.

We were at a sort of stalemate

I couldn’t give her a print and that’s the whole reason she’d asked me in. I fell back on a plan I’d used very well in my travels. I asked her if she could send me a message on WhatsApp. Phones and data itself is very cheap in India and over 300 million Indians use WhatsApp on a regular basis. But she wasn’t one of those people.

She was so poor that she didn’t own her own phone, and wasn’t sure if her husband had WhatsApp. I offered to give her my phone number anyway and she raced inside to get me a piece of paper. That’s when we realised she didn’t own a pen, either.

We had to call a kid from next door, who was on her way to school, and ten minutes later, we had a pen, but she didn’t have her photo.

Bishangarh is a tiny village

Perched to one far corner of the village is a warrior fort. It was built to keep warriors on the ready and was built about 70 km from the city of Jaipur. The warrior fort was an early warning system, and comprised of warriors ready to defend any incoming enemies.

Over the years, the fort fell into ruin and was occupied by bats, parrots and monkeys. However, the village still continued to exist around the fort. In the past three years alone, the village has grown in terms of modernity. There’s still no piped water and every drop of it has to be collected from a central water point. Electricity has made its way.

But the village has no restaurants and most of the stores are for everyday agricultural goods. There was no way we were going to get a print of the photo either in this village or anywhere nearby.

The closest place we could think of was Jaipur, 70 km away.

Luckily fast broadband exists at the foothills of the Himalayas, or in remote villages such as Bishangarh. To get this print, we had to send the file to Jaipur where someone would go out and get a print.

A couple of days later, that print was hand-delivered to the hotel. At which point another employee of the hotel took over. She would need to locate the tribal woman and deliver the photo because we were moving on to our next destination.

Two days later, the woman had her photos.

It took about four to five staff members, fast wifi and a visit to a photo store, 70 km away just to get a simple photo. But it made one mother very happy. Actually two—when I think about it.

I’d taken some other pictures on my walk around the village. And we figured if we were going to make one mother happy, might as well make two happy. There you have it–two happy mothers in Bishangarh.

Cool story, eh? Leave a comment (or two) about how this story made you feel. Did it bring up any of your own travel memories?

Well, you know what? He was right. I couldn’t see. To begin with, I didn’t know that the bark of trees were not brown. I didn’t know the sky was not blue. I had been looking around a lot, but not seeing.

There were other infuriating moments of discovery.
Why had I never seen red, blue, green, pink and yellow on something that was black? Where did all these colours come from, and how could I incorporate them into my work, without making everything look like a nutty rainbow? Well, luckily I found myself some software.

I say some because I bought three or four, but I use only a couple: One is called Waterlogue and the other is Brushstroke.

What the app does is let me see the colour for what it is. I’ll zoom in and hmm, who would have thought there was that shade of green, on top of yellow. Or who thought the yellow looked kinda-green?

When I want to do some quick work, I’ll avoid the app. But if I really want to spend some time, then it’s app time. I take a picture, run it through the app, and a whole new world opens up to me.

Apparently the teacher was right. To colour, I needed to see first.

Take this test: without looking out of the window, tell me the colour of the bark of a tree.

Without looking out of the window, tell me the colour of the bark of a tree. Don’t guess. Post what you’ve always thought the colour happened to be. Then, once you’ve written it down, tell me the colour you see. Of course, after that, get away from your phone (or computer) and look at the tree up close. Let me know what you find and if you’ve been seeing all along. Oh, and when you’re done with this long to-do list, get the app and start seeing :)

“You took such a big risk”, they say to me. I tend to disagree. The plan was to get to New Zealand, and give it time to settle in. Then, if things didn’t work, despite our best efforts, we could tour the country and go back.

Going back wasn’t something we’d considered, even with the obvious enticements.

Let’s start with Renuka, because her position was clearly more stable than mine. She worked for the largest fragrance company in the world. She’d just been offered a sizeable increase in salary, a short term US university degree paid by the company, and was to be appointed regional director. Which meant that we’d be posted to Singapore, and we’d be leaving anyway.

As for me, I was already quite well set in my business. I had work with ad agencies, architects, theatre, magazines, newspapers and even film stars. Would it be a hassle to go back? Maybe, but it would have not been more than a reset after a very long holiday.

We’d decided to leave, so we weren’t taking any short measures.

I printed postcards, brochures, bookmarks and little giveaways all in a cartoon format. Then, there was the task of a business card. For that, I needed a New Zealand mobile number and a post box, in advance. All of this nit-picky planning meant that we were not taking a risk. We were setting ourselves up for the best possible chance of success, even if we’d never been to New Zealand before.

When I got to New Zealand, all of this promotional material didn’t matter. When you get to a new country, one of the first tasks is to establish credit. If you don’t have credit, you don’t get a credit card, loans are close to impossible.

Hence, a job was necessary.

Since I got to Auckland at least a month before Renuka did, it made sense to find employment. If you’re just a freelance cartoonist, the banks don’t look kindly on you. However, a job, any job, seems to get their approval. Which is why I took the first job I could find: as a web designer. Back in India, I’d briefly studied Adobe Flash. It was the first move towards vector animation on the Internet. Back in 2000, the Internet was slow, hobbled by the dial up modems. Video was painful, but vector art worked just fine. I happened to be a cartoonist and the only one in the office who knew anything about Flash.

And so, I was hired.

But that meant I couldn’t use all of the material I’d so lovingly crafted and brought across. It also meant that I was trapped in a job. In all my life, I had just three jobs. All in all, I’d probably worked less than two years for anyone. Now, I was in an office, with office working hours and extremely boring colleagues. Worse still, I had nothing to do. When I say nothing, I mean nothing. I’d get to work at 6:30 am, even though work started at 8:30 am. It ensured I got free parking and anyway, what would I do at home all by myself?

I was hired in March, fired in June. That June day was one of the happiest days of my life. Now I could use the postcards and brochures. Now I could dance for real.

When I left India for New Zealand, I felt I needed to make an impression in a new country. I’d never been to New Zealand, not even for a visit, and here I was immigrating — leaving my hometown forever.

It wasn’t scary, it was exciting.

However, other, less exhilarating thoughts crossed my mind. Would I get work in Auckland? How would I show a potential client my illustrations? Was there any way to get a foot in the door when I was a complete stranger?

Which is why I created a printed portfolio. Part of that portfolio was characters I’d run into along the way. People who worked for a living. I was always obsessed with working people. Today, I have over 50,000 photos of people at work, but back then, cartooning was the only medium I had.

Back in 2000, print-on-demand didn’t exist. If you wanted to print a postcard, you ended up printing a thousand — because it cost almost as much to print fifty as it did to print a thousand. I stacked several drawings on a single sheet and got about 200 postcards each.

It was such a joy to hold them. Yes, I already had a website — which was rare in those days — but there’s nothing quite like paper. Even today, you can show people your work online, but the printed piece always gets a gasp. It’s something tangible.

Paper is heavy. The postcards, brochures and books I carted across to New Zealand weighed about 200kg. That’s the weight of two baby elephants. I’d packed them in tin suitcases — don’t ask. They split on the flight and arrived in pieces. Most of the printed matter survived anyway.

I could start anew in New Zealand. I even had a theme song: Now I can dance.

What would you like to know about life back then? About India? Or New Zealand? Or how things were when I first started trying to get work? Post your questions and, yes, comments so I can answer them in detail.

P.S. There is an entire set of these postcards. These are just a few. Want to see more?

“Draw what you’ve experienced in your day” is the advice I often see.

Fair enough. It’s the same advice I’d give to anyone who really wants to improve their thought process and their art. However, sometimes my day isn’t that great. So I use the diary to grumble. Which is fine if the entry is about some random person I’ll never see again. It’s trickier when it’s a family member. With my watercolour book lying around the dining table, it’s possible for a family member to pick it up and start leafing through it, only to find I’ve written some “oh-not-so-nice” things about them.

So I write in French :)

I am able to keep my entire diary entry “secret” because no one in my immediate family knows, or would bother to translate the text. I could keep the book in open sight of everyone, and it would not reveal its gossip.

However, sometimes I write in languages because it’s respectful.

Let’s say I’m travelling to Morocco and someone local asks to read my book. They stumble upon the titles in Arabic and their eyes grow wide. “You know Arabic?” they ask excitedly. Of course I don’t.

The fact that you don’t doesn’t dampen the enthusiasm. They are extremely pleased that you took the time to express yourself in their language.

To be fair, it’s hard work writing in a foreign language, so I didn’t even bother trying. There’s always the chance that you’ll get something wrong even when you’re copying the text with a great deal of diligence. Or maybe it’s a saying, and you’ll finish it, only to find you missed something along the way.

Well, I was always a bit nervous about goofing things up, but then I realised: ‘Hey, it’s watercolour”. I literally reach for clean water, dampen the brush and then “erase” the entire text. It’s a little tricky, but it’s very doable to remove the paint and start all over again.

Writing in another language is difficult, but it’s super-cool to go back and look at your work. It doesn’t transport you to a place, but also to a font, or the curvature in the text. Yeah, I know I seem to be drooling over these mundane facts, but it’s really a treat to see your work in a different language. And a bigger treat to see the response as someone suddenly stumbles on the page and recognises their language.

As the saying goes:

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."

Would you do that? Would you try writing in a different language? Or have you done it before? Leave a comment. I like “likes”. I like comments a lot more. And feel free to leave it in another language too.

For over a year, I’ve been doing something bizarre: learning three languages simultaneously.

Every morning I wake up and go through my routine of French, Spanish and Greek. Why three, you may ask? It sounds insane, and it possibly is. Especially since language has tons of idioms, grammar and a mountain-range of vocabulary to tackle.

However, this crazy method of three arises from watching chefs at work.

Chefs understand this instinctively.
In kitchens around the world, a chef manages a menu of thirty to fifty items for two hundred people on any given night. Nobody hands them one dish at a time and says finish this before you start the next. Everything is in a completely different level of readiness.

The same concept applies to my watercolours.
One page will be almost blank with faint pencil notes at the top. The second may already have a drawing, possibly even a light watercolour wash. The third may be rich with watercolour, but lacking any words on the page. The entire Moleskine diary has this “three burner” system in place. At any given time, I’m doing not one, but at least three separate drawings and each is in a completely different stage of completion.

There's a solid psychological reasoning for this behaviour too.
When you’re working on three things, all in different stages, you stop fussing over one. The people who call themselves perfectionists are usually hovering over a single illustration, a single project. In this case, when working on three, you simply choose what you’re going to tackle next. The pressure seems to re-distribute itself. You add a little to one, move to the next, come back the following day and find the first one easier than when you left it.

Having illustrations in various stages of completion is also practical.
When I sit down to paint, I have my watercolour palette, brushes, books and a whole lot of stuff cluttering the desk. Yes, I can take all of these with me when I go to the cafe, but it’s largely impractical. Hence, I can do some of the “paint” work at home and only take what’s needed. Most of the time I have my ink and the nib—and that’s it. It’s highly portable and I’m not lugging weight around.

There are times, however, when I want to be the ‘extrovert’.

I get tired of sitting down at home, and want some “external people energy”. In those cases, I know the sight of brushes, paint and drawings will get someone to start a conversation. Hence, going out with all of this paraphernalia is very important. I am looking to draw attention, clearly seeking human conversation. I will also take two diaries with me: a completed one, and one I’m working on. That way, I can hand over one to the person, while I keep working. This method doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes the world is too locked into their phones, but often enough, it’s a real treat to chat with strangers.

At times like that, I might do an elaborate watercolour painting while outdoors (on the Moleskine diary), but most of the time, I restrict myself to the pen and ink. What’s important is that I’m not blank when I sit down.

There’s always a burner going.

P.S. I also write articles this way. I have three articles for Substack and at least half a dozen articles for Psychotactics.com in various stages of progress. The same applies to a book. I’m currently writing a book called “Teacher vs Preacher” which is about how to train clients (and kids) better. Once again, I’m not working on a single chapter, but many of them at the same time. All burners on! :)

It was my first day of work in Auckland, and I was in for a shock.

I’d moved to New Zealand, and within a few weeks started my first — and only — job in this country. On the very first day someone suggested we head out to a Malaysian restaurant for lunch.

As we settled in, something strange happened.

The waiter started taking orders from every person at the table. Each person was choosing a different dish. When it came to my turn I had no choice but to follow along, so I ordered something too. Then, when the meals arrived, they didn’t go to the centre of the table. Each dish was placed in front of the person who had ordered it. Eight of us, eight separate meals, each one marooned on its own placemat.

It made no sense to me at all.

I remembered going out for an advertising shoot back in Mumbai. Eight of us for lunch, and I was in charge of ordering. I ordered eight dishes. “You don’t order eight dishes for eight people,” said my art director. “You order six, and everyone gets enough to eat, because we’re all going to put the food in the centre. Who orders eight dishes for eight people?”

Exactly.

Growing up in India, every meal — whether lunch or dinner, at home or in a restaurant — was a shared experience. One person would take suggestions from the group, and once the dishes arrived, everything went to the centre of the table. One person usually paid, then the next time, someone else would pick up the bill.

In New Zealand, almost every experience has been the opposite.

After the meal comes the careful accounting. “I had the beef rendang with rice and the milk tea.” “Mine was the mee goreng.” Each person pays for what sat solely in front of them.

“It’s fair, sometimes,” says Renuka. “Imagine we order just a vegetarian dish while everyone else orders half the menu. Wouldn’t you be paying for other people’s gluttony?”

She has a point. In principle, I agree.

But I can’t shake my past.

There was one exception even in India — the Udupi restaurant.

As early as the 1930s, young cooks from Udupi in South India began moving to Mumbai, bringing their cuisine with them. When we went to a Udupi restaurant, almost always for breakfast, we ordered individually. Mine was invariably idli sambar with lots of extra coconut chutney. My brother or sister would order their own. Nothing went to the centre of the table.

But breakfast was always the exception — even at home. No matter how many people were in the house, breakfast was a private meal. Lunch and dinner belonged to everyone.

Even after quarter of a century, maybe that’s what I miss most. Not just the food in the centre of the table, but what putting it there meant.

P.S. Do you share your meals where you come from?

“I know three languages”, said the 20-year old German on the train.

“My mother is Spanish, my father is French, and I grew up in Germany”.

I’m not sure how the conversation started, but it somehow found its way into the subject of language learning. Naturally, he asked how many I spoke. I told him — roughly eight, some I just understood, others I spoke fairly well.

How, he wanted to know.

I told him my benchmark was a minimum 100,000 sentence repetitions in any given language.

He sat with that for a moment. Most people do.
The number sounds slightly insane, and that, it turns out, is precisely the point. When most people start learning a language, they begin with words. They may make a note of it on a piece of paper and a magnet reminds them of the ten or twenty words they’re supposed to learn. Some people take it further, running a year-long Duolingo streak.

Yet, the moment they have to speak, all of that learning seems to be quite useless.
100,000 sentence repetition sounds like a lot because it is a lot. That’s the idea. Everyone immediately knows that a figure like that feels insane, almost undoable. Yet, get this: a child by the age of five is exposed to about five million sentences.

Yet, let’s not get distracted by these numbers, because the real goal is the distance.
I learned this, without knowing I was learning it, from cartoonists.

Growing up, I watched Calvin and Hobbes appear from nowhere and then show up five days a week — plus Sundays — without interruption. The Far Side was the same. Gary Larson drawing cows and scientists and hapless campers, week after week, with no sign of running dry. In India there was Mario Miranda, who turned out exceptional work on a seemingly daily basis. In England there was Giles, and JAK.

Without realising it, I was getting a masterclass on the long game.
I have thought since then about what made those cartoonists capable of this, and I think part of the answer is that they never framed it as discipline. They had simply decided, at some level, to go on indefinitely.

In Japan there is a word for this: shinise.
It refers to businesses that have been in operation for at least a hundred years. Japan is home to over half of the world’s companies older than 200 years — roughly 33,000 shinise in total, of which 3,100 have crossed the 200-year mark.

This is not accident or luck. It is intention built into the culture. You can start a thousand-year plan and stop at twenty-five, or fifty, or five hundred. However, the plan is simply to never stop.

My friend Marina finds this idea baffling.
When I start a new project, she assumes I am abandoning the previous one. It is a reasonable assumption; most people operate this way. Something new arrives, bright and interesting, and the older thing gets quietly set aside.

Instead, I believe that you can usually do a lot more than you think, and for much longer than you’d expect. However, you have to plan for the long game.

I started learning French about 720 days ago.
The early months were a struggle. You couldn’t have held a proper conversation with me, because I was too busy concentrating. Now, at 700 days in, I can scroll through Pinterest or even do some other activity at the same time. The language has become, a lot less consuming. I’ve reached about 3400 sentences in Spanish. With Greek, I’ve only just started a few months ago, so it is still demanding, still requiring real attention.

The same happened with watercolour. When I started out in 2010, struggle was my default mode. You couldn't even have a conversation with me because the paint would be getting too dry, or I'd be scrambling for the right brush.

Now I paint on the plane while talking to the air crew in that very cramped space. This task would have seemed impossible to the person I was in 2010. And yet, here we are with more than enough evidence to prove the point.

The same logic plays out at work.

The marketing newsletter at Psychotactics started around 2001 and still goes out twice a week. The podcast began in 2014 — that’s over 550 episodes at this point. The watercolours are somewhere past 5,000. The photographs — I decided in 2020 to take two or three a day, and the total has ballooned to around 50,000.

I am not saying this to impress. I am saying it because the arithmetic only works if you never really planned to stop. It’s a quiet, unannounced intention to get somewhere far into the future, for seemingly no reason at all.

When you do, you’ll find to your surprise, that you can juggle a lot, that you still have lots and lots and lots of time to waste, and to do absolutely nothing.

That part, it turns out, is also part of the plan.

P.S. If you’re wondering if the photos are any good—well, yes they are! Here are a few so you can judge for yourself.

Do you have any questions about how I go about things? Or any questions in general? Leave a comment — the tiniest response beats a thousand likes. Oh and Cartoon Diary is free. All of it. But if you find yourself looking forward to these posts, you know what to do.

I had just finished a watercolour workshop that had lasted several weeks.
This was back in 2010, and after the workshop, the teacher suggested that the entire art college would have an exhibition and then an auction. I was quite excited that somebody was going to buy my work.

Now, it’s very important to note that ten years before this workshop, I had already been selling my cartoons. They were featured on the covers of prominent New Zealand magazines and in newspapers. It wasn’t uncommon for me to get between $750 to $1,500 per illustration. So how much did I get at the auction? Zero dollars. They started the bidding at $20, which, instead of going up, went down. And with nobody bidding, the auction just moved on.

It’s crucial to keep that perspective in mind: that nobody may want to buy your work. It could be the wrong time, wrong place, or just the wrong audience. It doesn’t mean that you won’t get better, because you will. You find a good teacher, and you will eventually get to the point where you are doing work that everybody wants to pay for. Well, almost everybody.

Eventually, even Apple needed a teacher.
His name? Mike Markkula. If it weren’t for Markkula and a whole lot of lucky — yes, lucky — incidents along the way, who knows how the story would have unfolded.

In any case, here’s what happened at that auction:

I did one illustration and offered a price of just $20. No takers. The auction went backwards. $10, $5. No one wanted to buy it.

“You wrote this? All of this? What do you use to write?”

That’s the question I get a lot of when I show people my Moleskine cartoon diaries. They can’t believe I write so much. Yet, that wasn’t always the case. The whole purpose of starting the diaries, was because I had no clue what to draw.

In 2010, I went to a watercolour class with a renowned New Zealand watercolour artist. The promise of any such class is that you’ll end up with some sort of skill in that area. Yet, when the course ended, I was hardly any better than when I started. Consider this: I’d been drawing professionally for close to 20 years by then. I was doing complex work in Photoshop, almost since 1997. When it came to watercolours, I wasn’t hopeless, but pretty close. The first few diary entries were not much different than slapping a tiny bit of colour on a page, much like most of us do with a colouring book.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? Well, here are some of the early watercolours. The drawing and inking isn’t too bad, but you’ll notice the colour has no depth. As for the writing—well, that would have to wait until much later. I was clearly in over my head, and instead of looking towards the future, it made a lot of sense to simply take a single drawing at a time.

Hence, the early drawings had almost no text. I’d say it was an excellent start.

It’s almost easy to forget the size of the Moleskine I was drawing on. It’s impossible to tell the size of the paper, but I purposely chose the smallest size. If I was going to goof up, I might as well spend as little as I can. Also a small sheet would mean I had not much space to cover. The strategy was pretty solid, but like everything in life, things take a life of their own.

I think I know why the words crept in. Here’s Renuka and I at my niece’s birthday party. The party was supposed to begin at noon, but we seemed to be the only ones at the venue. Without the words, without any caption, I’d have no idea what happened that day. Just a drawing of two people somewhere. The writing became necessary because memory isn’t as reliable as we think.

A photo with no caption is open to interpretation, but with a caption, you know exactly what to focus on.

Writing almost seems to take more time than the drawing or painting itself. But go back over your work several years later and you’ll understand why. The drawings show you how good you were at one point in history. The writing takes you instantly back — to a thought, a mood, a moment that’s been pushed into some recess of the brain.

One last thing about the text itself. It started out in upper-lower case, then shifted to upper case somewhere along the way. Comic strip lettering is always upper case, so that transition made sense at the time. When it happened exactly, I can’t tell you.

I can tell you when it shifted back. A friend, Caroline Getz, messaged me on WhatsApp one day. The upper case was hard to read. So I went back to upper-lower case.

Sometimes the smallest things change everything.

P.S. What questions do you have about the diaries? Leave a comment — the tiniest response beats a thousand likes. And thanks to Eric and Pam for the support.

As a child, our holidays were restricted to a single destination: Goa.

Year after year, we’d look forward to our trip to the coastal city, almost heading back in time to my grandmother’s house. Which is why going to Rajasthan for the first time in my twenties was almost like going to a distant land.

I don’t even know if it was my idea.

In college I had many penpals, and one of them, Marsha, was flying in from South Dakota, USA. That was a good enough reason to head off to some place I’d never been.

We were supposed to get along like a house on fire.

Marsha wrote 16-page letters in cursive script, only to be matched by my own stories. We got along great on paper.

Not so much in person.

This lack of enthusiasm for each other must must have blindsided us both.
How does one spill all their thoughts and emotions on paper, only to be met with a stranger when they finally meet? It wasn’t one-way either. The very first meeting and we both realised we were going to somehow make do for the following two weeks.

Luckily for both of us, Rajasthan proved to be a magnificent distraction

All these years later, when I head back to India, I feel the need to get back to this north west frontier and imbibe the colour and warmth of this place. And I have a delightful travelling companion, my wife, Renuka. Since the moment we met, we’ve had nothing but enthusiasm for each other.

P.S. Did I meet Marsha again? Yes. But we haven’t been in touch since.

Cartoon Diary is free. If it means something to you, you know what to do.

I carry a glue stick with me everywhere. It’s small, unpretentious, the kind you’d find in a child’s pencil case. Its official job is to paste things into my Moleskine diary — ferry tickets, wine labels, a torn corner of a menu, the occasional photograph. That’s what the glue stick does exceedingly well. It helps me preserve these moments in a way that drawings or photographs can’t.

But it has a second job. A darker one.

I’ve never been a perfectionist, but sometimes a piece of art feels like a truck ran over it. I don’t want to see the image, let alone let anyone else see it.

I can’t tear out the pages — that would destroy the book.
So that’s when the co-conspirator shows up. That very same glue stick, the one that preserves, becomes the cover-up artist. Cover it up. No one needs to see this. Paste the pages together and it will be like it never happened.

Take for instance this entry in my journal.

As you go through my journals, you’re likely to notice that one page seems thicker than the others. You may try to pry it open, then think better of it. Those pages are the handiwork of my glue stick.

But in all these years, and well over 5000 paintings later, I’ve used the glue stick fewer than ten times.

Now I leave the sloppy work on the page.
I know that even if I don’t like it, others will find it interesting. And almost always, the very next piece of work will be exceptionally good — as if it’s trying to wipe out what came before.

The bad painting isn’t the problem. It’s what gets me to do the next piece better than ever before.

P.S. Cartoon Diary is free. All of it. But if you find yourself looking forward to these posts, you know what to do.

P.P.S. Thanks Pauline Le Rutte. You know why! ;)

This was the request the editor of a business magazine made to me, and as you can imagine, I was both excited and terrified. This was Mumbai, maybe around 1992. I’d been drawing cartoons for magazines and newspapers for quite a few years. However, colour was a bit luxe—and most magazines would print the cover in colour, but the rest of the magazines in black and white.

It seemed sensible and kept costs down.
The change to colour didn’t come all at once. First, a few ads showed up in colour, followed by a smidgen more. However, one day, everything changed. Colour was deemed to be the norm for the entire publication—the entire group of publications. That’s because a magazine was usually part of a stable of publications. When one changed, well, it was like a chain reaction.

I’ll never know what precipitated the change.
Was it because colour printing was suddenly more economical? Or were they able to charge the advertisers more? Did they feel the dire need to compete with the growing distraction of colour television that had exploded? In any case, I had a challenge on my hands. You could even call it a problem because I’d never used colour before.

Oh yes, just like you, I had crayons and “coloured pencils” as a child.
However, as an adult, I did not need colour. However, I believe in luck, and so she came to my rescue. I ran into another cartoonist who’d been using colour in his work. He lived not far from me, showed me the materials he was using, pointed me in the direction of a local art shop, and advised me on using paper as well. Then, Keith Francis did something even more magnanimous. He offered to introduce me to other publications as well.

We relish the thought that kids grow up self-centred. The “selfish gene”, it seems, embarrasses the human race. Well, it’s not true.

Normal human behaviour is unselfish, but that’s not what we’re told.
We relish the thought that kids grow up self-centred. The “selfish gene”, it seems, embarrasses the human race. Well, it’s not true. Humans are kind, just like Keith Francis, which is how I got started with colour. It was what enabled me to fudge my way forward, figuring out how to take simple line work and discreetly use colour to make the artwork do what it should.

Almost 30 years later, however, I’m still intimidated by the first page in my Moleskine diary. I’ll open the book, and my eraser hugs the pages more than it should. I’ll draw, erase, and then it’s back to undo, undo, undo—manually, of course.

This is also the first page of my Substack.

It’s like jumping into colour. I’ve written hundreds of articles, recorded a “million” podcasts, and have almost 5000 or more watercolours in my Moleskine books. Yet, this first page continues to taunt me. I feel unrooted, with the need to make it something special.

Then I got lucky. I got my first paid subscriber. Yes, thanks, Cliff Spenger. But now look at what you’ve done. :) And yes, I’ll be back with images too. Ironically, the first page will remain all text.

P.S. I had a weird thought last night. Yes, this Substack, like many others, offers both paid and free subscriptions. However, when I started on the internet all those decades ago (we’re talking 1995), everything was free. People posted on blogs like this every week, sometimes daily. No one expected payment. Yet, as we know, these things take time. If you subscribe, well, thanks. If, on the other hand, you pay a tiny subscription fee, it would be grand. I’ll leave it to you. You judge, because I promise you this is going to be a special spot. It’s part memoir, part instruction, part design and a deluge of art (and photography) that you’ll soak up and enjoy. Yup, plus I’m a good storyteller, so there’s that.

Welcome, to the madness.