VarnikaDesigns has started ‘Jugnu’ - A monthly book club to read, reflect, and share knowledge. Books, books and more books for finding the Jugnu - the glow - in you 🙂
JUGNU: the book club by VarnikaDesigns – let’s find the glow in our lives
Happy New Year ♥️
2025 was an exciting year for us 🙂 VarnikaDesigns turned 15! VarnikaDesigns Blog turned 10! The Museum Memories Project turned 5! Immense gratitude to each of you for supporting, motivating and inspiring us.
Designing Narratives: How ‘The Museum Memories Project’ Inspired Kareena Vaswani
Kareena Vaswani shares her insights on how ‘The Museum Memories Project’ has profoundly influenced her belief in the power of design as a tool for cultural preservation and storytelling.
Insights from LLDC’s Vibrant Winter Festival 2025
VarnikaDesigns collaborated with LLDC to present to the world their amazing Festival. The blog has videos of interviews with individual artisans. We conceptualised, planned and moderated an interactive discussion between upholders of generations old craft communities from Orissa and Kutch and their custodians - long video link in blog.
Adieu 2024 – Welcome 2025 :)
VarnikaDesigns wishes you a very Happy, Healthy, Safe and Peaceful New Year. May 2025 be kind to you ♥️ We are grateful to all the people and institutions for supporting our new ideas in 2024 ♥️ details in link
Astad Deboo: Dance of Textiles Panel Discussion
This post wraps up the panel discussion held on Sep 3, at the NGMA, Mumbai, as a tribute to Padma Shri Astad Deboo. He experimented, broke boundaries and created new paradigms that has an everlasting impact… he belonged to not one city, school, genre or creative form but seamlessly moved in all. Video link to the entire discussion is in the post.
Textile Book Review: The Shoemaker’s Stitch – Mochi Embroidery in TAPI Collection, India
This post is a review of the book 'The Shoemaker's Stitch: Mochi Embroideries of Gujarat in the TAPI Collection', published last year by Niyogi Books. It is as delicately narrated as the embroidery itself by Shilpa Shah and Rosemary Crill. Each page is like another stitch into the past of the embroidery and the lavish photos do justice to the exquisite embroidery. The festive season of India is upon us, and women are digging into their treasure chests for old textiles that are still wearable or can be upscaled.
International Museum Expo, New Delhi, 18 – 20 May, 2023
I was honoured to be invited by the Ministry of Culture as a speaker on International Museum Day to talk about the oral history documentation project called ‘The Museum Memories Project’ – it was found at the beginning of the Covid global lockdown that to bring the world closer through sharing of personal memories from museums visited by anyone in any corner of the globe. It is a free digital archive and resource platform of histories, heritage, cultures of all people, making them accessible and inclusive to everyone 🙂
Happy 2023 :)
Happy 2023:) Wishing you a very Happy, Safe and Peaceful 2023. Thank you everyone for your support, encouragement and appreciation. VarnikaDesigns managed to get back to doing what we have been attempting since 2010 - to make Indian museums and heritage more accessible and inclusive.
My name is Shamsul.
My name is Shamsul. I am originally from Bihar, I ran away from my home at the age of seven and came to Delhi and became a permanent resident of New Delhi Railway Station. Astadji meant everything for me and will remain so. He was like a Father and an Angel. I consider him as my Father.
VarnikaDesigns 