I want...

I want to go back to school. No, not the uniform-wearing, homework-skipping days; I want to go back to Art School.

I want to attend my first class and be told by the sweetest professor *ever*, "Bachche, Aapne idhar aane ke liye pichle janam mein moti daan kiye honge" (you must have given away pearls in your last life, to have made it here) - It doesn't translate well.

I want to feel puzzled at that...and realize five years down the line, how much sense it makes.

I want to sit in the canteen, and through the rain-bead curtains, watch the red and gray stone sculptures glisten.

I want to be a little scared...at the newness of it all.

I want to be taught the right way to *hold* a pencil (between the thumb and the forefinger), to sharpen it (never to a point and never, ever with a sharpener), to move it.

I want to be taught the difference between a good paintbrush and a bad one - dip the head in water, if the bristles stick together in a conch-shell-like shape, with a single hair point, take it. Flat brushes with plastic bristles are for children.

I want to use watercolours for the first time...and with such trepidation that my first painting looks more like the ghost of a painting. I want to be gently told, that there's no reason to be scared, that it's only colour.

I want to stay up nights, squinting with the effort of creating fine typography.

I want to do what every student of art does at least once; dip my paintbrush into my tea-cup instead of my water container, and not realize it till I taste my tea.

I want to learn about Michelangelo and Botticelli and Caravaggio. About Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel...about line and colour and form. And the different ways that light can fall...and I want to be amazed.

I want to go back to the college library, and drink in all the books there. Their maroon and black, hard-bound covers with gold lettering. I want to read every book I didn't in four years.

I want to walk around Purani Dilli (Old Delhi) with my drawing-board, and my roll of cartridge sheets. I want to find a shady spot and find a good composition - a bucket and a broom, under a tree growing out of an ancient mossy wall. I want to paint the worst watercolour ever - with the leaves of the tree looking like coriander leaves - and only the bucket looking relatively real.

I want to laugh at that painting with my friends, but inwardly worry, that I'll never, ever master watercolours.

I want to not be able to hide the sparkle in my eyes, when a professor I worship, looks at my work and smiles his approval.

I want to be impressionable, I want to be gullible, I want to be naive.

I want to be awed.