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Small thing, but it's been sitting with me all week. I've been sketching at the old market near Avenue Road for months now. Same three vegetable sellers, same crates, same blue tarpaulin. And every single time someone walks into my frame I do the same cowardly thing: I look down, wait, and hope they move off. Which means three years of urban sketching and my sketchbooks are full of beautiful empty streets that don't exist. Anyway, Thursday I just drew the man. Sat down on the low stone step, ink first like always, and instead of waiting I just caught him where he was, mid-argument with the auto driver about parking. Took maybe forty seconds. His shoulders are slightly wrong and I gave him one leg too many folds in the lungi, but he's there. He's in the drawing. The odd part is the whole page came alive after that. The crates stopped being an exercise in perspective and started being a place where something happened. I don't know why it took me this long. I think some part of me was treating people as interruption rather than as the actual subject. Architect habit maybe, buildings don't fidget. Anyone else here guilty of the empty-street sketchbook? Or is it just me being a coward with a pen 🙏

Mine was a tea shop. No, really. The owner had hung some of my urban sketches by the counter just for fun, and a woman who ran a small gallery in Indiranagar saw one while waiting for her chai. She asked the owner who did them, tracked me down through Instagram, and I had work hanging in a real gallery three weeks later. All because I did a favour for a friend who runs a tea shop. It made me wonder how many of us got our first foot in the door through some completely sideways route instead of the cold email or the walk-in. So tell me na, where did your first gallery actually come from? Was it someone who saw your work in the wild, a random connection, or did you have to push for it yourself? I didn't realise how rare the "I asked directly" path is until I started hearing stories.

Mine was pure nerve. I carried a portfolio of urban sketches into this small gallery near MG Road, fully expecting to be told they don't take walk-ins. The owner's assistant said they were busy, and I almost left, but I'd come all that way in the heat so I just stood there awkwardly until someone finally looked at my stuff. She flipped through maybe four pages and said "bring these back properly framed." That was it. No contract, no email, just that sentence. I got paid in the end, eventually, after chasing. But that one sentence changed everything for me. How did yours happen? Did you cold-walk like me, or did they spot your work online first? I'm genuinely curious which path actually gets you in the door these days.