Woven, colored, cut and sown into the Field of Destiny,

Clothing is our Identity

Like a Dreamcatcher made from an interwoven web of threads, Clothing can capture the intangible breath of our spirit as it passes through the running winds of time. Within clothing we can find our country, our culture, our history, our beliefs and our journey.

Conformity in clothing can often be beautiful, because it expresses a uniform unity that can blur our differences while emphasizing our commonality. However, in excess, it can consume our diversity, our individuality and our journey; normalizing, reducing the dimensionality and projecting our identity onto a simplified plane of existence. Often when sitting at an international airport, as waves of fatigue break at the shore of my consciousness, I let my eyes glide and linger like an albatross over oceans of people from different countries, nearly all wearing identical clothing and I feel a lurking sadness...I desperately hunger for bright colors, for clothing dipped in tradition and culture, for exploratory styles...for anything beyond the muted boring accepted range of 'normal' clothing.

I want to develop, popularize and spread across the world, the idea that our Clothing is our Identity. Through clothing, I want to see life stories sauteed in life lessons, I want to see family trees with leaves of sin and redemption, and most of all I want to see the beginning of a dialogue that will weave together our divergent threads of destiny and make a unified world....not by homogenizing our differences but by using them.

Destiny of my Clothing Artwork

Stage 1 - Grow my craft

• • Grow the depth of my clothing artwork portfolio.

    • Create patches that represent important moments of struggle and realization in my life.

    • Create patches that trace the historical journey of my ancestors.

    • Create patches that capture themes of Nature, Cycles, Mathematics, Networks, Birth, Death, Pregnancy, Metamorphosis, among many other themes.

    • Create patches that include a larger mythology and universe of my symbols.

  • Grow the range of my technique

    • Using dyes, printing and other methods, I want to create patterns on clothing (as opposed to buying patterns from stores).

    • Collaborate with people from different academic and trade backgrounds to experiment on new ways of decorating fabrics. For example, trying to use fungus or 3D printing or the way 2 chemicals mix and then capturing those processes and patterns on clothing.

Stage 2 - Community and Identity

• • Create a community consisting of people across ages, genders, cultures, etc

    • Create collaborative projects that explore different layers of identity, including the American Identity (i.e. how can we create a unified American Identity while also nurturing our individuality).

  • Popularize the idea that clothing is identity and that people should sow patches that represent their journey, community, culture etc.

    • • • Hold many workshops that brings diverse clothing and artists. While teaching how to make patches, have discussions where each person shares their journey and background. Every person leaves with something that they have made that represents them and the whole group as well. The collective artistic summation of these workshops will represent peace and unity.

  • Create video series that not only teaches techniques but also the underlying philosophies mentioned above.

Stage 3 - Make it epic

• • Overthrow the world of formal clothing. Make suits and fancy pants obsolete and replace them with hand sown clothing of identity.

  • Create a book/video that explores the meaning of American Identity expressed through clothing and symbolic patches that weave together our diverse backgrounds, collected through workshops conducted across the nation.

  • Promote ideas through larger media outlets...news, movies, music at a national level.

  • Integrate into afterschool lesson plans...and into community centers to bring people with different backgrounds together.

  • Hold events at international airports

  • Create a business based on my designs where the products are made in India and all the money is invested back into the community.

Clothing Artwork Portfolio

When I was younger, people would look down at my clothing, they would make fun of me and would say that I looked homeless and dirty and ugly. They said that they were embarrassed when standing next to me and lectured that self-respect and dignity are conveyed through good proper clothing...but I knew better...because I had seen many human monsters hiding behind pretty clothing. In this way, my clothing, hair and beard became like an insulating shield, and for those years I incubated my growing soul within myself and germinated my identity and style within the safe and fortified placenta of SOMDEland as the storm of scorn tried to ravage my conviction. Although I felt adrift and lost those years, when I look back, I realized those were the years that I found myself. And now those same clothes, hair, beard and ideology are what pave my destiny and opportunities. I proudly present my Clothing Artwork.

Balding Solar Radiation Cap

When the kingdom of MasterTreeIII fell, its shattered majesty and fragmented woodchips carpeted SOMDEland and in its death, an army of insects worked relentlessly to resurrect the vast supply of nutrients. The woodlice, an old and ancient friend who originated from the depths of the ocean, were part of this divine army that returned the beauty of MasterTreeIII into the womb of Mother Earth. These woodlice are a leitmotif in my artwork (the creature in the center of the cap). They are weak and often tumble without control through the turbulent moving waters of life. But no matter where they land, they create a microecosystem of destiny, decomposing fallen wood and and impregnating the earth with fertility.

Because I am balding, my head can no longer withstand the brilliance of the sun, so I have to wear a hat. To recognize the duality of sunlight, I used both a wave-like pattern and a particle-like pattern. I chose bright orange colors because it represents the fire of the sun. I also chose these colors because I spent 1 year in the villages of Rajasthan in India, where many of the women would wear bright yellow and orange saris that would absorb and re-emit the radiant heat and power of the unforgiving desert sun...those colors in the desert mesmerized me. I bought the pink hat from the dollar store. Pink is one of my favorite colors, because many years ago, when I was in my mid-20s, I was playing Smash Bros (a video game) with a bunch of children and when I accidentally chose Pink Luigi they made fun of me. So I embraced the color pink and I destroyed all of them in battle.

Super Jacket 1

When I was young, the world's fangs tore into me and infected my wounds with a feeling of self hatred. Suffocated by failure, my soul secreted a protective cocoon that was wrapped in an epidermis known as SuperJacket1. We first met in the beginning of 9th grade, when after saving her hard earned and unappreciated money, my mother bought me a jacket and I hated it. But I wore it everyday through winter and summer, and eventually it was baptized in my sweat. It became my most valuable material possession. I drew its shutters closed as hurricanes of depression consumed me and I opened them up as I built SOMDEland and learned to detach myself from the sugary tempest of the outside world. As the body of SuperJacket1 broke and tore, I remembered a story from Mahabharat that my grandmother used to tell me. She told me that in this story, it was said that the soul can neither be created nor destroyed and that life is a dance of energy from one form to another....that the soul changes bodies as a person changes clothes. From this perspective, I wanted SuperJacket to be more than clothing that would be changed....more than just a body to be discarded...I wanted it to become a living symbolic soul. So, with every tear in its flesh, I sow a new patch saturated in symbolism. A day will come in the future when the original fabric will be gone but SuperJacket1 will still exist as long as someone keeps adding new patches. SuperJacket1 has been with me in every major transformation of my life. It came with me to Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps, it was there as I graduated Boston University, it was there when I started and then left teaching at WHS, it came with me to India for a year and I wore it while defended my dissertation.

One side of SuperJacket1 is composed of cool colors (eg blues and greens) and the other side is composed of warm colors (eg reds and orange). These colors represent the cycles of life and death, of tectonic fury in the depth of the ocean where the Earth is reborn. On the red side, the sun is a Creature of Destiny above an image of myself in the Symbolic Nastypose underneath MasterTreeI.

When designing this patch, I was inspired by the anaphase stage of meiosis and mitosis. It plays with the idea that while Life and Death are diametric opposites they are also the same entity: an expression of the flow of Energy (where Life and Death have opposite directions of flow necessary to create the dynamic cycles of energy). In this mythology, when a person (or soul or idea) is born, the Energy-Unity of Life and Death are temporarily mitotically separated by the spindles of destiny. Eventually, however, when a person dies, these two come back together. To represent Life, I used a vegetation-green Creature of Destiny with a turbulent pattern of swirling lines (hard to see in the picture). To represent death, I used an earth-brown Creature of Destiny. Because Death assimilates and reorganizes Life, I used an orderly box pattern. The spindles that pull apart Life and Death are represented by smaller Creatures of Destiny and are submerged in the directional flow of energy (the blue) which symbolizes the placenta. In the background, I used my mother's wedding sari because that symbolizes my birth. The naturally occurring rips symbolize my mother's (Rita Pandey) difficult journey in raising me. The sari has a womb-red sky and a fertile green field with germinating Life.

After six years of labor, often near the shores of stagnation, I finally gave birth to my dissertation. On that day, warm with the smell of freshly printed ink, I cradled my newborn dissertation and knew that I had to create a new patch for SuperJacket1 that I would wear on the day of my defense.

The overall shape is vaginal, signifying the entrance of external ideas that are internally assimilated, digested, reorganized and mixed, with my own ideas that are eventually birthed to produce academic fruit. The shape also represents the third eye, borrowed from hindu mythology, representing the birth and dissemination of new knowledge (in contrast to normal eyes that can only receive knowledge). I still have to complete two meditative eyes that will be sown below this patch.

Thematically it is very similar to the previous patch: a meiosis of ideas, where external ideas are mixed with my thoughts and eventually new ideas are congealed and pulled from the common bed of knowledge. This common bed of knowledge is depicted by an earth-brown color with a boxed shaped pattern to signify already digested and organized literature. It is in the shape of a foot to represent my footpath through graduate school. The large cool blue Creature of Destiny who is submerged in the box-patterned Earth, represents my first year where my entire existence was consumed by exhaustive readings of literature. By my second year (the leftmost small blue Creature of Destiny), I started to plant my ideas into this bedrock of literature. By my third year (small purple Creature of Destiny), all of my ideas were still failing but were nevertheless fertilized by the detritus of broken ideas, sweat and persistence. By my fourth year (small red Creature of Destiny), my ideas began to germinate and escape the seemingly infinite well of energy needed to publish a new idea. By my fifth year (rightmost small red Creature of Destiny), my ideas were ripening and I had published my first paper. In my sixth year (the large right Creature of Destiny at the top), I defended my dissertation and began to pull my academic idea (the green egg) from the vast ocean of knowledge.

For a year I walked through the fields and villages of Rajasthan, where the blender of modern fashion had not completely homogenized the local clothing and there were moments when my breath was taken away as I gazed, spellbound, at vibrantly bright yellows and oranges contrasted against black, a brilliance that absorbed and then re-emitted the furnace-like fury of the desert sun (bottom left, women leader's meeting that I documented. bottom right, a farmer who I interviewed). I tried to capture this color scheme in SuperJacket1, where the right side of SuperJacket1 has a warm color scheme and the left side has a cool color scheme, to represents the cycles of life. This patch is the right sleeve of SuperJacket1 (top picture). In the upper part of the patch, 4 earth-colored Creatures of Destiny (representing each cardinal direction) travel across a prison-like window lit by sunlight passing through green leaves, representing what I see when dreaming of running free from behind a computer screen that enthralls and captures all of my attention. In the middle are parallel lines of sunrise and sunset that loop together (when sown into a sleeve) to create a continuum of repeating time, each day often a reiteration of the day before. On the bottom is a peaceful landscape of immutable mountains and ephemeral mating clouds, reminding me how insignificant most of my human worries are.

Sweatshirt of Moving Time

Uprooted and floating Untethered in delirium within an Unraveling destiny and an Unearthed lesson, Time moves through us. Using circular cellular patterns, a grey Creature of Destiny flows through the Winds of Time which are represented by the rows of vertical bars. The bars have different widths, representing how sometimes Time feels as if it is flowing faster and sometimes it feels as if it is flowing slower. The Creatures of Destiny are often unable to change the direction of Destiny or the flow of Time, but nevertheless their legs dangle down and once they tether to the Earth they can create Beauty. The Earth is represented by a cellular patterned mountain. Originally designed to be monochromatic, I could not resist adding the blush of pink which represents the moment of sunrise and sunset.

The Butterfly Sweatshirt

When I was young, liquid-disgust would slowly drip, pool and congeal within the caverns of my mind, as I gazed into the future and saw older people ensnared in the churning claw-rimmed cycles of life...repetition, monotony, repetition. As I began to age and these cycles of monotonous schedule began to snag at my flesh, I desperately looked for an escape...for a metamorphosis. But as wisdom slowly replaced wanderlust, I realized that there are infinite cycles of wonder and beauty within every cycle of monotony and every moment holds the potential energy needed for metamorphosis. I designed patches on this jacket to express both of those aspects of life. The front represents the metronomic cadence of normal life, where the black and white patterns on the bottom panel represent the passage of time. The different lengths of blocks and out-of-phase rows represent the asynchronous perception of time during different moments in our life. The top panel shows the life cycle of the Creature Of Destiny, starting from birth and ending in death. In the beginning, there is great distance between each of the stages of life and by the end everything converges closer together.

The inside of my jacket represents the metamorphosis of the butterfly and the ideaology that we have the breathtaking ability to transform and change our lives at anytime....that with enough tears, sweat, blood, dedication and devotion, we can change the chains that anchor our souls to the bedrock of destiny. It also represents the idea that within every boring and monotonous moment there is a hidden infinite universe of beauty. While the front of my jacket is dependent on time and has a directionality, the inside of my jacket is time invariant.

SuperJacket3

No matter how far we drift or how deep we hide within the bosoms of technology, we are the children of the mountains and the sun and our souls are sustained, like all animals, through the umbilical cord of Mother Earth. This patch is on SuperJacket3 and is made from dupttas that my mother donated from her salwar kameez (indian clothing). SuperJacket3 was given to me as a hand-me-up from my younger brother. I also sowed on wire-reinforced squirrel ears on the hood.

The Family of Earth Shirt

Sometimes when lost in a moment of nostalgia, I feel that perhaps family is a reiteration of the same theme expressed with slightly different initial conditions in the chaotic flow of destiny. The rightmost Creature of Destiny represents my Mother, followed by myself, my sister and my brother. Together we walk upon Mother Earth who is a larger Creature of Destiny, including the summation of Humanity and all life and all death (notice the eye on Mother Earth to the left). The patch is sown onto a shirt that my sister gave me from the lost and found bin at Middlebury. The red symbolizes the womb and blood where the roots of family converge. The faded grey fabric for Mother Earth comes from my old fancy pants that I used to wear as a high school teacher.

The Lactating Cycles of Life Shirt

Once a year, every senior graduate student at Brandeis is required to give a presentation on the state of their research in front of all the graduate students, faculty and many undergraduates and postdocs. The first few times I gave it, months in advance, nervousness would diffuse through every capillary within my body and I would feel the salivating breath of the beast on my neck. Oftentimes for these talks, I would custom make a shirt and this is one of the best example. I wanted to create something visually titillating...with a slight gust of naughtiness, with thematic roots in science. From a distance, it appears as if I have the giant milk filled breasts of Mother Earth. The first circle is made from sunflower prints which represents First Level Producers (i.e. those that obtain energy from the sun). The second circle is made of cardinals, which represent the First Level Consumers. The nipples are cat prints that represent Second Level Consumers. Since cats like milk and are placed over the nipples, it is as if they lactate imaginations. On the bottom is a little Creature of Destiny that represents the detritivores and the decomposers (like fungi). Together, these are the cycles of life and death...the cycles of energy. The patches are sown on the back of a shirt that was gifted to me by a friend.

The Habitat of the Elephant Brother Shirt

On my birthday, my brother gifted me with a beautiful elephant printed fabric (center). To give the elephant the perfect habitat, I made a background consisting of an animalistic brown that represents the Earth; I used a vibrant and turbulent green to represent vegetation swept by the winds of changing time and I used a cosmic blue to represent the sky and the unknown universe beyond. I sowed this patch onto a tshirt that someone let me borrow 13 years ago and I forgot to return.

The Meditative Eyes Pants

Made sacred by age steeped in history, I resuscitated these pants as they began to tear. The blue underneath the pant is fabric from another very old and sacred pant. The symbolism behind the meditative eyes are borrowed from a book that I read about yogis that entered into meditation (I believe it was written by Swami Vivekanand about Swami Ramakrishna). In this state, the eyes are half open because half of the consciousness is submerged deep in a meditative state and the other half is embedded in the flow of reality, where truth and illusion mix.

The Ceremonial Pants

When I was young, I had no control over my life and I was mired in a tangled and suffocating frustration that was fermented and fomented in a pool of perpetual procrastination and a lingering feeling of self-hatred. Decaying from within that cesspool, bubbled up the potential for redemption in the form the symbolic NastyPose, my hair cycles and my ceremonies, who forced me to flush the mental toilet where the tranquilizing effect of routine caused the gelification of my stagnant dreams. In these ceremonies, I wear a holy armor of my most sacred clothing which includes SuperJacket1 and these pants. Throughout the years their symbolic growth has become symbiotic and synchronized. Both have one side composed of warm colors and the other side composed of cool colors, to represent the cycles and flow of energy. In the front (left picture), the pants have the half-open meditative eyes (described above). Submerged in the red blood and womb is a depiction of the symbolic nastypose. Underneath the meditative eyes are chakras which also represent shin splints that often afflicted my legs when I was young.

On the back (right picture), each layer is made from fabric with cellular-like patterns. In the center is a womb which represents my field-of-destiny and within it is a fetus which represents my dreams. The central symbol also represents Massachusetts (the green dot represents Lexington) which is the physical location of where I make my destiny. It also represents the arm from my symbolic nastypose which itself represents the realization of dreams. There is an umbilical cord which is ruptured (hard to see here), representing how the human species' relationship with the earth is broken. The orange layers are the placenta and muscles; the brown layers are the fat and skin.

The Predator-Prey Pants

With the cold tongue of winter licking my shivering legs, I decided to create pants that would protect my precious heat from the outside world. Made from felt and sown by my mother, one side is Tiger Print (the predator) and the other side is Zebra Print (the prey). Inspired by the yin-yang symbol of Taoism, the pockets have the opposite print to signify that every creature is part of a circular food web and both consume something living and are consumed by something living. The bottom of the pants have rubberbands, allowing me to tuck the ends in, giving my pants a buoyant and neat look. I learned this trick when I went to Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps. Unfortunately, the pants are not ideal for windy days because the cold wind can penetrate the fabric.

The Cock-and-Pussy Pants

Near my crotch, on a fertile menstrual-red sweatpant, I sowed a patch of Cocks (aka Roosters) on the front and a patch of Pussy cats on the back. Perpetually brimming with an inescapable lust, sometimes it feels as if all of life is only the dance of Reproduction expressed through our living genetics across generations.

The Party Pants

To learn about the depth of my destiny and to find the source of some poison that I found woven into my existence, I went to my ancestral village in India. Over ten days, with sadness, I watched my grandmother's funeral and in the passing of emotions and family and stories, I found some answers. As I left, I was given these jeans, which were longer than my legs but were so tight that I could not fit into them. I had my aunt (Seema Pandey) expand the pants by adding fake fur on each side. In this way, these became my party pants: they mixed the raw history of a village washed long ago by colonialism and then again by modernization with a feral animality neither real nor false.

Third Eye Infected with Herpes Shirt

After the exploration of mathematical ideas and chill discussions with Jesse, Brian and I used dyes to design our own shirts. Brian made a "Quantum Triangle" and I made a "Third Eye infected with Herpes". Ever since I became the proud host of Herpes Simplex Virus One (most of you reading this are also hosts even if you don't get outbreaks :) ), I realized that it is not all bad. Herpes has provided me with a very unique opportunity to bring something unexpected into my universe. I have developed an entire mythology around it, which consists of music, stories, and even a coronation ceremony...and so it has become one of the core pillars of my expression. Thematically it represents taking something that seems bad and embarrassing and first making peace with it and then weaving it into a larger narrative. To understand this shirt, let me also explain the Third Eye. One interpretation of the 'third eye' is that it gives a person the ability to see beyond the 'web of illusions' and observe the vastness of truth and beauty. However, just like Herpes, maybe this 'web of illusions' isn't all bad. What if the entire human identity is the interaction of the 'soul or truth' with the web of illusions? Therefore this shirt explores the idea that Humanity should try to transcend and see beyond the 'web of illusions' but that it should also be infected with a spiritual Herpes that forever tethers it to animalistic world because much of our identity resides there as well.

Animalistic Knitted Shorts with a Tail

Click on the video above to obtain a description.

To me, clothing represents Identity and I try to weave symbolism into everything that I wear. One of the ideas that I have been exploring has been our connection to the Earth and the role of Animality in the Human Identity, especially in the Age of Technology. My mother knit these shorts including the tail which represents my animal identity. The strip patterns reinforce that animalistic vibe. Matching with the purple color is a sweater that my sister no longer wanted and so I inherited it. Underneath the sweater is a shirt with a similar color theme and images of cats floating in the universe, representing the themes of animals, identity and technology. When making the pants, because they are knitted, my mother decided against pockets and so I always wear a pouch with this outfit. The pouch has a similar thematic color scheme and was gifted to me by Dave and Joy after they had visited Cambodia. I also wear sunglasses and a watch that echo the purple, red and pink color themes.

Cardinal Heart Shirt

(Fa$hion part 1) The main part of this shirt was made years ago to look kewl during one of my journal club presentations. At the center is a cardinal, in the shape of a heart, whose redness matches with my shirt. It is surrounded by an orange heart which is thematically similar in color. Aging has caused the heart to fray and peel. This was around the time that I witnessed a poor cardinal couple lose their eggs to a predator and the sad aftermath of the mother looking for her eggs. At the bottom, in pink, is a border with dancing monkeys. Then, recently, when designing a new shirt (next post) I was exploring the idea of having a more expansive neckline and, to practice, I cut that neckline into this shirt. I really like its feel, especially in the summer. The neck can be highly expressive and communicate emotions and I think is underappreciated as means of communication.

Hummingbird Shirt

(Fa$hion, part 2) Looooook what my mother made (and I designed) for my butterfly ceremony!! After my mother had knit the shorts with a tail, I imagined having a knitted t-shirt. I decided to design the t-shirt based on the ruby throated humming bird...a breathtaking bird which often visits my birdfeeder in the summer. First, I ordered iridescent yarn to mimic the shimmering feathers. Like the male ruby throated hummingbird, the center is a brilliant ruby color that glitters and radiates in the sun. The back and rest of the front are green to represent the quickly moving green wings of the hummingbird. On the front, towards the bottom, is a white (which has glitter woven into it) to represent the white belly. Based the description in part 1, I designed the tshirt to have an expansive neckline and also had my mother knit it tapered at the waist and then slightly flair out as it descended downwards...almost like a mini-dress. My mother had to make several version and she has created something truly special and beautiful!

Sari Sweater

Check out my new outfit! My mother originally made this sweater for herself but didn't like it and was going to unravel until I rescued it. This style of sweater is typically worn over the sari and my mother designed it based on memories from her childhood. The pants I have previously shown, I designed them and my mother knit them...it has a tail! I am also holding my mother's sitar.

GrandMother Shirt