Every morning in South India, someone kneels at the threshold of a house with a fistful of rice flour and draws a kolam. First the floor is washed, then the dots go down, then lines loop around them. By noon the pattern has been smudged by footsteps, chappals and the neighbourhood dog. Tomorrow, it gets drawn again.
I grew up practicing this Kolam everyday as routine, but just as a ritual. One architecture degree and fifteen years of urban planning later, I see it as something else too: a daily design brief. Set your intention at the door, every single day, and don’t get attached to the result.
That idea is the foundation of my newest painting, a Shri Yantra I think of as the founding yantra of Studio RaMuHa.
Okay, let me break this painting process as best as possible, I started this Yantra drawing on October 2, 2026 and finished it on November 4, 2026. With necessary pause because of festivities, I was able to step back and reflect on the right parts so it was easy to document.
The geometry
The Shri Yantra is one of India’s oldest design systems: nine interlocking triangles radiating from a single point, the bindu. I drew it to Shilpa Shastra proportion, which means every line is measured before it’s allowed in to mean anything. As an architect, I find this deeply relaxing.
The triangles are in olive green, white, saffron and red, closing in on the bindu, which I’ll come back to. Around them sit lotus rings in pink and blue on a pale mint circle, then a silver-grey bhupura, the square enclosure with its four gates.
The gold
The gates, the four corner lotuses and the band around them are all 24-carat Tanjore gold foil, with the gates and lotuses raised in relief. Yes, real gold foil. Not the kind that makes you hold your breath if you need to sneeze. This one is a specific sheet, one which needs a delicate hand and instruments that only come together when you are in a specific mindset. But she gave me the strength to take this up and I trusted the process and slowly chipped at it.
The floor
The maroon border isn’t just any maroon. It’s red oxide, the cool, polished floor of South Indian homes, the one you lie on in May because nothing else in the house is cold. My Fremont home has carpet. The closest thing to red oxide here is a rug from Costco. So I painted the floor I missed.
Then I drew the kolam on it in sterling silver paint, both pulli and sikku: dots, and lines that loop around them in one continuous thread. Together they read as a row of lamps, deepams lit all along the walls of the goddess’s abode, making the approach to her home festive and luminous. At each gateway the pattern changes, so you know you’ve arrived at a door. The outer edge is scalloped in indigo, which softens what would otherwise be fortress walls into an entry that welcomes you in. A bhupura is technically a boundary. I wanted it to feel like an invitation.
All of it sits on a charcoal wash, like the Sadaralli granite stone and cement floors at dawn, just washed and still dark, waiting for its kolam.
It’s all on archival Arches cold-press cotton paper, because a painting about permanence deserves paper that will outlast most building permits.
How I read it
I’ve spent my career turning community hopes into approved plans. What I’ve learned is that ambition alone is a scatter of lines. Realisation needs proportion, order and a lot of patient intersection, which, in a city hall, means meetings.
The yantra looks like that process to me. You start at the threshold, where the world is noisy and full of competing needs. Each ring inward is a deliberate step: discipline, alignment, and upward and downward triangles that only work together. The bindu at the centre isn’t an escape from the world. It’s the focus, though not in the way I expected.
And it all begins at the doorstep, with a kolam. The knowledge systems for building what we dream of were never lost. They begin each morning on the floor of countless homes.
What the planner in me learned
Sequence like a construction project. Geometry first, then gold relief, then the kolam last. You don’t paint the doorstep before the foundation is set, and you never let wet gold near anything you love.
Proportion is a spec, not a suggestion. Shilpa Shastra works like a building code: tedious until you realise it’s the reason the whole thing stands.
The threshold is the most important design decision. In urban design, we obsess over the edge where the street meets the front door. South Indian homes solved it centuries ago with rice flour. The kolam is the original public-private interface, a welcome mat for guests, ants and good intentions. And a wall can be a fortress or a welcome. The difference is the edge treatment. A scalloped line and a row of lamps did what design review boards spend months asking developers for: a boundary that invites you in.
Leave room for scope that’s worth it. The kolam and the charcoal ground weren’t in my first plan. Good project managers know the difference between scope creep and the change that makes the project.
What’s next
This one stays home on the mantle above our puja shelf, between two paper butterflies who have grown attached. Good news for them: it’s staying.
If you’d like a yantra, a Tanjore piece or a namam in calligraphy for your own threshold, my commissions page is open. And if you want to follow along as I draw more of these lines, from rituals to red oxide, subscribe to the newsletter.
The centre
One last thing. Look closely at the bindu. It isn’t gold, and it isn’t painted at all. It’s a tiny dark hole, the mark left where my compass sat while every circle in this painting was drawn.
Every ring, every lotus, every gate was measured outward from that single point. It held still so everything else could move around it. When the work was done and I lifted the compass, what was left at the centre wasn’t a thing. It was a space.
I didn’t plan that. The tradition did. The bindu is the point before form, the void everything arises from. I just had to pick up the compass to see it.
Every project plan I’ve ever written has had one of these: the fixed point nobody sees in the final drawing, the one that held everything in place. In a city, it’s a community’s shared intention. In a painting, it’s a pinprick in cotton paper.
All that gold, and the most sacred part of the painting is a hole.
🙏🏼
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