The pond was one of the first features we worked on. It was also a controversial decision. Atul wanted a pond, to fill it with aquatic plants, fish and ducks. I did not want a pond at all. We started this project exactly 2 years back, April 2008. I’m glad we built it though. It has potential to look nicer than it does currently, but overall its a pleasant feature. We get a direct view of the pond from our dresser window on the first floor of the house.

This is one of the earliest pictures I have of the pond. We got a JCB to co...

While planning the orchard, we decided we wanted a nice big one, with hundreds of fruit trees, with our creative workshop studio overlooking it. We planted some trees in 2007, but most of them died during the harsh winter that year. We planted more the next year and put on some protective gear on them in 2008, and thankfully most of them survived.

Last year we thought the entire patch of the orchard (roughly an acre) was too large and needed some walkways within it for us to be able to stroll through it at leisure.

We decided t...

Tarak and Vardhini came by the other day, with little Ruhaan, their camera, and most important, Lunch

Vardhini had a blast going crazy over the millions of flowers that are blooming at Aura, mostly in the orchard area and some in others. She sent me 107 odd pictures of flower photographs captured beautifully with this message:

“Thanks to your mind blowing valley of flowers, i’ll now have a new background on my screen everyday…for the next 100 days!!! ”

Thanks Vardhini, you did an awesome job&h...

We’re about 10ft below road level, therefore a ramp leads down to the plot and further leads down the drive all the way to the house. The front parking is on the left as you drive into the property.

This is a Jan 2009 picture, so is fairly recent and I don’t have anything older than this. Notice that the boundary wall is missing and the trees are kind of sparse.

This one is a more recent picture, Feb 2010. All the material trucks going in and out have taken a toll on the poor ramp. We’...

About 4 years back we bought a three acre piece of farm land about 15 km outside of Chandigarh, in Punjab. We still cant recall why we bought it, or what we intended to do with it, but we’re glad we did. It was an obsession that possessed Atul and he did not rest till he managed to buy this plot.

The picture below is one of the earliest I have, however, this is not an image of what the land looked like when we first got possession. It was a messy, undulated landscape and this view is one after lots of labor to just convert it in...