Aug 21 2026 to Aug 21 2026 6:30 p.m.

Price: Free Entry. Walk-ins allowed Book/Buy

Where

BLR Design Centre

6th Floor, 46/1, Church St, Haridevpur, Shanthala Nagar, Ashok Nagar Bengaluru, Karnataka 560001

Event Description

The Author of the Month Series is envisioned as a year-long curatorial initiative at BLR Reads – Library and Archive, strengthening its role as a shared cultural and civic space. Building on BLR Reads’ ethos of reading beyond books, the series will invite one author each month for an in-depth book discussion, situating literature within wider conversations on the city, history, design, culture, and everyday life.

The initiative aims to deepen reader engagement, foster sustained community participation, and build meaningful collaborations with authors, publishers, academic institutions, and cultural organizations. Each session will be accompanied by curated reading lists and, where relevant, allied activities such as talks, walks, or exhibitions.

This edition, we bring to you 'Vāsané' by Indu Antony. Vāsané is a sensory archive of Bengaluru that can be read with the nose. Combining twelve bespoke scents, an olfactory map, and years of research, the book explores how smell carries memory, belonging, and the emotional landscape of a city. It is an invitation to encounter Bengaluru not through what it looks like, but through what lingers in the air.

Author of the Month – Indu Antony

Indu Antony is a multidisciplinary artist based in Bengaluru, India. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of feminism, the body, memory, and public space, often weaving intimate personal narratives with larger socio-political conversations. Through long-term projects such as Cecilia’ed, she reflects on the presence of gendered bodies in public spaces, questioning who gets to occupy, move through, and belong in the everyday landscapes of our cities.

Deeply invested in community-building as an artistic practice, Antony co-founded two community art spaces—Kanike (with fellow artists) and Namma Katte, a women’s leisure and gathering space—both rooted in creating accessible, non-hierarchical spaces for dialogue, rest, and shared imagination. Her work consistently moves beyond the gallery, finding meaning in slow encounters, collective storytelling, and everyday rituals.

Antony also initiated Bengaluru’s first smell archive through her project Vasane, mapping the city through its olfactory landscape as a counterpoint to the visual overload of the IT capital. Committed to widening access to self-publishing—especially for women—she founded Mazhi Books, an independent publishing platform that supports experimental and personal narratives. Her first book received wide recognition and critical appreciation, marking the beginning of an ongoing engagement with books as intimate, tactile archives of lived experience.