Coming back from a family dinner, I found my car filled with chattering aunts and other strange relatives, and so chose to ride home with a cousin who, I hesitate to say this for the light it sheds on the family&rsquo;s mating habits, is still of a tender age and in college. The car, given to him by fond parents, was his refuge away from his home &mdash; though it had precious little space left over after a giant cabinet of what appeared to be music equipment took over a chunk of the rear passenger cabin. Squeezing myself between more speakers than I&rsquo;ve seen next to a DJ&rsquo;s console, I found myself having to adjust into whatever space was left over after I&rsquo;d moved aside packets, cans and piles of stuff.

Kishore Singh: Garbage on wheels

Business Standard

I took visitors frequently to the Other Criteria pavilion at the India Art Fair because it gave me a chance to pore over Damien Hirst&rsquo;s edition pieces. Not too many gave the beautifully foiled skull lithographs, or his pharmacy cabinets, a second glance, but his butterflies arranged symmetrically enough to please fastidious Indian aesthetics drew crowds through the day with their fields of &ldquo;diamond dust&rdquo;. By the last day, I&rsquo;d taken my wife&rsquo;s permission to sign up for one of the works at Rs 2.3 lakh, and so was both relieved but also dismayed to learn that all six pieces had been snapped up by a single buyer.

It's the season for buying art

It was mere coincidence that I happened to be home when my wife was having a group of &ldquo;Sweeties&rdquo; over for lunch, and I was quickly drafted into mixing their cocktails while minding my own business and keeping quiet. As an observer, I quickly discovered that women in their fifties &ndash; referred to as &ldquo;Sweeties&rdquo; among each other, which is useful when you can&rsquo;t tell a Kamini from a Kamya behind the botox mask &ndash; after first demurring about daytime drinking, knocked back their Cosmopolitans faster than most men I know; they delighted in dirty talking; and innuendo was invented by them as idle entertainment.

Kishore Singh: The age of the 'Sweeties'

Everyone aspires to success in Mumbai, in Delhi they contribute to your downfall &mdash; but in Kolkata much intellectual debate goes into pronouncing why something is wrong rather than right. &ldquo;Dada,&rdquo; the posturing thinker will tell you, &ldquo;dis ees ay myshtek,&rdquo; without having bothered to check the offending piece of writing, or cinema, or art, you&rsquo;re referring to because, of course, a heated &ldquo;deeskashun&rdquo; is better than the point of the debate anyway. And woe be the Dilliwallah who brings &ldquo;kaalchur&rdquo; &ndash; apparently a Bengali birthright &ndash; to a city Mamata Banerjee is currently in the process of painting blue. It makes the bhadralok bristle like a porcupine, unleashing quill-like ripostes on anyone who dares to thus cross their path.

Kishore Singh: Keeping up with the Bengali

For much of last year, I lived close to France-based artist Sakti Burman &mdash; not, alas, actually in Paris, where he has a studio, or in his 13th century priest&rsquo;s cottage in Anthe which he describes as having the kind of landscape that Matisse painted, brimming with sunflowers reminiscent of a van Gogh canvas, but with pictures from his 50-year painting career that travelled everywhere with me on my laptop.

The painter of a dream world

His friends remembered to call him only after midnight, so my college-going cousin &ndash; who had been reminded that very day by his visiting mother of his frequent AWOLs from his boarding school that cost him his last term there &ndash; decided to sneak out of home at 2 a m, hoping to be back before my aunt roused herself in the morning. Imagine his shock &ndash; and hers &ndash; when he found, on tiptoeing back in, that she&rsquo;d woken earlier than usual, and instead of in her bedroom, as was her norm, was having tea in the living room. Shock gave way to lamentations, then admonitions, and expectedly his grounding. Ever since, she&rsquo;s been accompanying him to his college, to the gym, and keeping vigil outside his bedroom. While he and his friends are hoping she&rsquo;ll return to Shillong sooner rather than later, she&rsquo;s confided in us of extending her originally intended stay of two months in Delhi to three.

Kishore Singh: The night managers

This morning, while leaving for work, my son pinched a bottle of white wine &ndash; &ldquo;for after&rdquo;, he said &ndash; weekends being when he heads off from office to be with his friends, though my wife insists that any wine bottles are intended for a girlfriend, while the whiskies are for keeping his stag friends in scotch spirits. Going by the depleting stock at home, he&rsquo;s been seeing the significant person almost as much as his buddies, though the lack of supply at least in the bar could be on account of my wife &mdash; not because she&rsquo;s taken to tippling like my mother-in-law used to, but because she&rsquo;s hiding away bottles from our son and daughter who must think their parents own a brewery.

Kishore Singh: Peek-a-booze

To know what a maverick artist looks like, look no further than Ranbir Kaleka. He wears a hat even when indoors, from which on occasion I have seen fish hooks dangling &mdash; or perhaps they were earrings. Unlike the networking artist, his eyes don&rsquo;t dart impatiently across the room, scanning to see whether there are buyers interested in seeking him out. You have all his attention when he speaks to you, and his speech is deliberate, slow and accented.

'I do love donkeys very much'

I was grateful when at the start of the year real estate companies desisted from sending out season&rsquo;s greetings &mdash; or maybe they no longer include me in their list of a member of the paying public. The neighbourhood spas gave me short shrift as well with their messages of seasonal cheer aimed at growing their businesses. My club, though, wished me a sedate new year and hoped to see me for lunch where, as usual, I was expected to pay. If the other companies decided I wasn&rsquo;t worth an SMS, it suited me just fine, though I did miss the nagging reminder about losing some weight around the waist.

Kishore Singh: Strangers in the New Year...

My sister, who lives in Ahmedabad, has been liberal with her invitations to the family. But no one seems to have given anything but superficial consideration to her repeated offers to visit. &ldquo;We can always go to Ahmedabad,&rdquo; one of us will suggest when we&rsquo;re in the thick of a disagreement about where to take the next family break, but it&rsquo;s a submission invariably accompanied by derisive laughter and a collective shaking of heads.

Kishore Singh: A dry state of affairs

What do you do with an awkward relative on an extended visit to the big city who wants to gatecrash your social circuit and partake in the &ldquo;good times&rdquo;? You could &ndash; like I tried &ndash; hibernate, declining invitations on the pretext of work, but then find yourself having to spend the cold night slaving over the computer to prove to the ancient relic that you weren&rsquo;t shamming in the first place.

Kishore Singh: Guest of horror

Subodh Gupta has contributed a great deal to the economy of steel utensil manufacturers in the country, buying several dowries worth of kitchen vessels for his art projects. Bronze sculptures that require foundries for casting are still the norm for sculptors like K S Radhakrishnan &mdash; who works out of Santiniketan, Goa and Jaipur on his projects.

Morals and materials

If the Jaipur lit-fest was all about the Rushdie controversy, the India Art Fair was all about business. For all of this week, all anyone wanted to talk about was how Marc Chagall was nice but Sakti Burman was nicer, that Damien Hirst might be making millions of dollars putting butterflies behind frames, but wait till Maneka Gandhi found out and banned him. A general refrain of &ldquo;too much art&rdquo; seemed to echo amidst the air-kissing &mdash; everyone&rsquo;s favourite form of greeting in spite of the put-off of body odour and pyorrhea.

Kishore Singh