College girls’ chat session near a wooden foot bridge. Sketched with Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint Black pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils on ordinary printer paper.

A few sketches of street scenes of Kolkata (Calcutta), India done with Pilot Hi-Tecpoint 0.7 Black pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils.

Some of these streets are narrow alleys with not enough space for two-way traffic. They remain crowded all day and walking through them means negotiating and finding your way through people and all kinds of automobiles and manually-drawn carriages. However, for the urban skethcers, they are a paradise full of colour and movement and life.

Street Scene – 1

Street Scene – 2

Street Scene – 3

It is a long journey. The farmer returns home later afternoon after selling his produce in the village market. He returns with a bag of rice and a few unsold items. This is the hour of the day when he turns philosophical. The body is tired and the mind burdened with fear — fear that he won’t be able to repay the debts he made from the local moneylender. The shadows outside lengthen and spread over the fields. They will soon erase whatever traces of light still remain. The shadows within appear to follow them.

My drawing tools: Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils.

He makes bamboo laths or bamboo sticks (বাখারি in Bengali) by scraping, peeling and shaving off the skin of a bamboo pole. The surface undulations and nodes are shaved off making the piece of stick smoother and easier to use. The poles are then employed f0r various purposes, the most common being as a kind of yoke for carrying goods. The yokes are made with hanging cloth or string bags attached to both sides of a stick. These are then carried on the shoulder. The only tool of his trade is his chopper, an old sack cloth to sit on and a gamchha to dry his perspiration.

My tools: Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint black pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils.

Panipuri Seller

Known as phuchka in West Bengal and Bangladesh and golgappa in parts of north India….The phuchka hawker is everywhere on the roads surrounded by women and men. The way they serve the food is a treat for the spectators. This is one food item that you would like to savour standing on your feet, raising the succulent flour balls to your mouth and closing your eyes!

I used Uniball black Click Gel pen and Camlin water colour paints for the above sketch.

An older panipuri seller waiting for customers. I used Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint black pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils for this drawing.

More on Panipuri from Wikipedia:

Panipuri  or Phuchka is a type of snack that originated in the Indian subcontinent.It consists of a round, hollow puri (a deep-fried crisp crepe), filled with a mixture of flavoured water (known as imli pani), tamarind chutney, chili, chaat masala, potato, onion or chickpeas.

Panipuri’s name varies depending on the region. In Haryana it is known as paani patashi; in Madhya Pradesh fulki; in Uttar Pradesh pani ke batashe ; in Assam phuska/puska and pakodi; in parts of Gujarat, Gup-chup in parts of Odisha, Phuchka in Bihar, Nepal, Jharkhand, Bengal and Chhattisgarh.

Phuchka (or fuska or puska) differs from panipuri in content and taste. It uses a mixture of boiled gram and spiced mashed potatoes as the filling, and is tangy rather than sweetish while the water is sour and spicy. [Source: Wikipedia]