Serendipity

Serendipity.

I like it. Like the word and like what it is.

Sometimes you just stumble across something that feels so perfect and whispers to your soul. Something you never expected, were not looking for, didn't know existed.

The net makes chance finds like this so much easier. Maybe serendipity is not so much a peripheral attribute of the net, but right at its core.

Anyway, reading my book on India has been a revelation. 

I had not heard of Amrita Sher-Gil and met her in the book. She was India's most celebrated woman artist of the last century,  and died in her late 20s. 

Her chapter is illustrated by a terrible reproduction of one of her works, the Haldi Grinders. It looks like this:

I had to search for a better reproduction and found one:

But searching for this one picture opened a door onto an unknown gallery of such visceral power. I am not a massive fan of painting, but her pictures, all painted at such a young age, just spoke to me. They are diabolically good, by which I mean that they seem so impossibly brilliant that they feel almost like some kind of black magic. 

Yes, they speak to my soul. This woman, Amrita Sher-Gil was never painting for a simple photographic reality. She saw something in her subjects, something hidden within, and expressed that. Fleeting moments that catch something central to being, central to living.

Serendipity may feel trivial, random, mere chance. But sometimes chance encounters can change your life. Thanks to Amrita Sher-Gil I am richer than I was.