Hi! I am Vidya,
& this is my Paper boat.

Growing up in Madras (Chennai), a topical metropolis in South India is a sweet spot for a curious child. The culture capital of Southern India, Chennai as it is known today is flanked by the Bay of Bengal to its East. Chennai’s Marina Beach remains the world’s second longest and cleanest of urban beaches. The sea here is rarely silent. The salt, the sands and the sea lend its voice to kite flyers, jasmine sellers, mango hawkers, turtle walkers and fisherfolk as much as to its empires, migrants, storms and tsunamis – whose histories linger with deep intensity.

Chennai carries a vibe – that both speed boats and sails, with an equally layered cadence. Home to some of the oldest colonial relics, cuisines, libraries, universities, museums, music and the world of cinema; the city’s creative chaos and creative quiet, hurriedly drift through its often-oppressive humidity. Growing up and living in this confluence of sea and city, also meant witnessing unrelenting cyclones and monsoons and stories around the sea, nudging both fragility and resilience.

Schools would often declare a “rain holiday”, and I would readily launch paper boats in the muddy waters of our garden, to celebrate. Folded old newspapers, holding damp, wet – words, turned to a little paper boat – chasing water trails. The boat would often disappear or dissolve. Sometimes, I would put my name on it with wax crayons because it empowered me to own something so grand, yet gentle.

Today, in times of rising seas and uncertain skies, the paper boat, becomes more than a childhood gesture. As a profound metaphor, the fragility of the paper boat mirrors our own. This is a space for thinking about such fragile crossings—between land and water, human and more-than-human, survival and care.

This website brings together reflections on planetary well-being, through the diverse lenses of critical and creative responses. It strives to engage with dialogues on the planet and its precarity, both sensitively and meaningfully.