Before group chats, before comment sections, before the internet gave community a new shape, people made things together. That was the original format. A room, a craft, many hands working in the same direction. The conversation happened through the making.
The tools of the trade. Carving chisels and wooden blocks laid out before the session begins.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Something settles over a room when people are making things with their hands together. There is still conversation, movement, the occasional laugh. But underneath it, something slows down. The urgency most of us carry through the day begins to loosen.
We stopped talking about the most loosely used word on the internet, community, the day we started building it. BANANA Labs began as a deeply personal practice. I wrote in my last column about the objects I grew up around. The typewriter, my grandmother's sewing machine, the colour proportion checker that taught me how to see. These were quiet inheritances. Things absorbed slowly, without instruction.
A collection of hand-carved teak blocks, each carrying a different pattern, a different history.
However, craft, at its core, was never meant to be solitary. Block printing has traditionally been a communal practice. It happens in workshops where multiple printers work side by side, each responsible for a different color, a different layer, a different pass of the block. The textile that emerges is the result of many hands and many small decisions made in real time. No single person holds the whole pattern at once. I have also seen 8 printers printing 1 metre of fabric in 8 different colors.
That idea lives within me.
Over the last few months, BANANA Labs has been running an ongoing series of block printing workshops across Delhi. We hosted an evening edition at XXL Art Gallery last Sunday in May, and what I carried home had nothing to do with the prints. It was the people. A woman who arrived saying she wasn't creative, advising the person next to her on pressure and alignment by the end of the afternoon. Conversations that started about fabric and moved, naturally, into family and memory. A room of strangers functioning, within two hours, like a small quiet community.
The only instructions that matter.
BANANA Labs: The Block Print Bar.
I remember a moment from the XXL edition clearly. Someone had misprinted, the block had slipped and the pattern was off. They kept going, worked with it, turned the mistake into part of the design. The table around them started doing the same. That is something no tutorial teaches. It happens because someone else is watching, and making, alongside you.
Colour by colour, block by block.
We live in a moment where so much of life now exists digitally. Artificial intelligence, constant notifications, endless scrolling, fast consumption, faster opinions. Everything asks for our attention all the time. And yet, one of the strongest pieces of feedback we keep receiving after these workshops is how calming they feel and that we should do more of these.
The most asked question is: when is the next one?
People talk about focusing on one thing for a few hours without distraction. About how rare it feels now to work with your hands, to make something physical, to be fully present with a process. There is almost a trance like quality to creating an artwork. The repetition, the rhythm, the concentration. It taps into something deeply human and instinctive that many of us are trying to find our way back to.
Craft has always survived through transmission. Not through preservation or documentation alone, but through the act of passing something from one pair of hands to another. Every artisan I have worked with learned by watching, by doing, by making mistakes in proximity to someone who had already made the same ones.
Ink-stained blocks beside the afternoon menu. Making and eating, in good company.
What changes when that transmission happens in an open community setting is the direction of knowledge. There is a genuine hunger for slowness at the moment, not as an aesthetic or a trend, but as something more fundamental. A desire to make something and know that you made it. To spend an afternoon with other people doing something that requires patience. To take something home that carries the mark of your own hand.
Something about a block printing table draws people in. The XXL Art Gallery edition.
Craft has always offered this. The question is whether we are building the kinds of spaces and communities that allow people to find their way back to it.
Where artisans and spaces meet.
Collaboration has always been central to how I think about BANANA Labs. With artisans, with spaces, with makers working in worlds adjacent to ours. The most recent edition of this series was The Print Bar, a hands on guided block printing workshop with ate at The Glasshouse in Lodhi Art District, Delhi. The afternoon had exactly the energy these workshops always carry.
The ate × BANANA collaboration menu.
The Print Bar at ate. Ink on cloth, afternoon in motion.
Paint covered hands, people exchanging ideas across tables, blank tote bags slowly becoming personal. Food came around as the prints dried and conversations lingered well beyond the making. It felt less like a formal event and more like a shared creative pause, which is exactly what we set out to build. Working with a space that already carries that kind of intentionality made the afternoon feel coherent in a way that is hard to manufacture.
The Print Bar. 24th May, 2026. The oldest group chat, finding its way back.
Not a single person checked their phone. There was no rule about it. No one asked anyone to put them away. The blocks, the paint, the process just took over completely. That is what craft does. It pulls you fully into the present and holds you there.
The feeling that comes from making with your hands in good company is something that stays.
Making together is not simply a workshop format. It is one of the oldest forms of community we have.
The oldest group chat is still running. It just moved to a new room, finding its way back to the present.
Printed, layered, taken home.
