Inside, Outside: Celebrating Multitudes in a World that Flattens Us
Two weeks ago, I claimed the word “artist” on a podcast after twenty years of carrying the verdict: “You have no originality.”
On November 1, I proved it to myself—not by learning something new, but by doing what I’ve always done in front of my town. The ripples that have flowed since Saturday evening have been warming my heart.
Monday morning, walking my daughter to school, I was stopped six different times by neighbors, the crossing guard and two strangers I didn’t know had come to the Live Painting Art Battle.
A lady who lives half a block away from us said: "I just love that you had no plan and went through this journey with your painting. That is the sign of a true artist. You had fun and you played."
I stood there in the middle of the street, misty-eyed. Finally people were seeing what I’d always felt to be true.
The Yes
When the email came from Arts Los Altos—inviting me to participate in a Live Painting Art Battle—I said yes without knowing any details. Foolhardy, maybe. But it sounded like fun.
It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I learned what that yes would actually require: a 3x4 foot canvas (the largest I’d ever attempted), six artists, an audience, prizes, and a theme: “Inside, Outside.”
Then I looked up the other artists. Professional muralists. Landscape painters with gallery shows. Artists with MFAs.
And I paint 2x4 inch tokens with my fingers.
By the time nerves started kicking in, it was too late to back out. But I guess, some part of me also needed to know if I could follow through with fear in the driver’s seat. Imposter syndrome isn’t one to give up easily.
Saturday evening
At 2:45 p.m., I arrived with my daughter and my cart of supplies. 75 minutes before the start of the event because I’d said “I’d like to look at the canvas before I decide its orientation.”
The other artists were inspecting canvas weight, grams, surface texture, technical things I’ve never paid attention to. They had rulers, measuring tools, a smorgasbord of professional brushes laid out like surgical instruments.
I had squeeze bottles, egg cartons, bubble wrap, and a neighbor kid's monster trucks. Standing there, I felt how legitimacy gets measured—by tools, training, and plans. “Inside, Outside,” for me, was also about who decides what counts as art, and who gets to be called an artist.
They were setting up reference images—photographs clipped to easels, compositions they’d practiced, visions they’d refined. Most of them knew exactly what they were going to do.
I didn’t.
But the thing is, I never do.
Not in the Ripple Room, not in workshops, not when journaling alone past midnight in my studio.
I follow the feeling in the moment—what wants to emerge in this breath, with this color, on this surface.
So standing in front of that blank canvas, not knowing what would come next—that wasn’t new territory. That was home.
What was new: doing it publicly, on a clock, with my daughter watching.
30 minutes to go. We went around making introductions. An artist came over to my station and, seeing no reference photos, asked what my plan was.
“I don't have one.”
She stared.
"You still don't know? Not even loosely"
"I love bright, happy colors,” I said. “So, I guess there’ll be a rainbow in there somewhere but I honestly have no idea what it’s going to be."
A long pause. Then:
“Wow. You’re brave.”
As I smiled at her, I thought: It's not brave. It's just how I work.
I placed a small artist statement at my table along with a simple philosophy: “Art is an act of Courage. Kindness begins Within.”
But her saying it out loud made me realize: what feels normal to me—this not-knowing, this trusting the moment—looks like courage from the outside.
For three minutes, I just stood there. Hands on my hips. Waiting for the canvas to speak to me the way it always does.
My daughter was watching. "Are you feeling intimidated?"
"No!" I said, shrugging.
I wasn’t intimidated by the not-knowing. That’s my language.
I was just figuring out what the canvas wanted from me. When they announced “Ok, artists, it’s 4 o’clock, you can start now!” I looked around. I could only see two artists and they were measuring the canvas with their foot-long rulers and making marks. Focused. Precise.
I looked back at my canvas, picked up a Stabilo pencil and wrote: "inside." Then I picked another one in a different color: "outside." There, the canvas isn’t blank anymore. Now what? I turned to look at my daughter
“Mama, just start already!" she said. “Everybody else is already doing stuff.”
“Have you seen the size of this thing?” I responded with a laugh. She wasn’t amused.
So, I squeezed red paint onto the canvas from the top left. Thick, like ketchup. Then orange. This one felt runnier.
"What color comes after orange in the rainbow?" I asked my daughter. I was seriously blanking out.
"Yellow!" she shouted, panic setting in her eyes.
I laughed, “That’s right…and then green?”
Poor kid. I think in that moment she just wanted to crawl in a hole and never come out.
The Squeegee
I grabbed a window squeegee after I had all my colors neatly donning the top of this gigantic canvas. I had seen people on Youtube do it. This should be fun!
I dragged it down the canvas.
All the colors ran. Dripped over the edge. Onto the floor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“Oh well. There goes the rainbow!”
Play time!
We are a complexity of multitudes. The world wants us in clean, simple boxes. This painting was about the courage to stay complex when the world demands homogeneity and conformity.
Bending down, I started picking up paint from the brown-paper-protected floor with my bare hands. Scooping it up. Pressing my palms against the canvas.
Yes. This sensation felt familiar.
“This is just like a giant journal page,” I said to my kiddo who went “huh?”
Never mind. I started scribbling how I felt with a charcoal pencil. Uncensored stream of consciousness writing.
You must follow rules. You must listen. You have to obey.
And then: NO. And below that COURAGE in red.
Thirty minutes in, I looked at my daughter. "What am I going to do for the next two and a half hours?"
She smiled. "Well, you can wipe your hands and eat something!"
Her demeanor was more relaxed as she watched me easing into this. She'd watched me journal enough times at home to know that I'd figure it out. I always figure it out.
Bubble wrap went on because my hand landed on it and it felt right. The egg carton stamped into wet paint because the texture called to me. The monster truck rolled across the canvas because a kid gasped and I realized I could create a lasting memory for him. "Whoa! I want to do that!" he shouted to his mom.
Yes, kiddo! It’s fun!
Paint kept getting all over my hands, so I just started splattering it. Wiping my hands randomly on the canvas. Faint handprints everywhere. Not intentional marks. Just what happened.
People started circling back every twenty or thirty minutes. "It's changed!" I heard someone say. “Yeah I know. What did you see change?” They showed me photos from the last time they were at my station. How different it looked.
They found it intriguing. Surprising.
To me, it just felt normal. Things evolved as I layered paint over textures over color. I was simply responding.
Presence looks like magic to people who are used to plans.
The Woman Who Hoped
A woman had stopped by around 4:15. She came back at 5:30. She asked me where I was in my headspace. I shared that during the scribbling and the layering, it dawned on me that we're all born vibrant and unique, but in our teen years we learn to shrink. To conform.
"As we grow older," I said, pressing gauze over the words I'd scribbled, "we start questioning norms. The rainbow tries to peek through."
I gestured at the canvas—bright colors fighting through the white texture.
"But the safety of sameness keeps us trapped. It’s easier to stay homogenized. Simpler. Life is too complicated anyway."
Her eyes filled with tears.
"I hope the rainbow fights back," she said.
Goosebumps. In that moment, I knew it had to.
She'd just named what I've been doing all along. In my journal. In the Ripple Room. In every token I make.
Fighting to let the rainbow break through.
“It will,” I reassured her. And myself.
I didn’t know where the rest of the time went. I worked with a fervor, the white kept inching in, the rainbow kept pushing back. At that point, the white wasn’t just paint; it felt like the cultural pull toward sameness—toward a safe “neutral” that smooths over texture, tone, and story. The rainbow’s insistence wasn’t decorative. It was refusal. A choice to let complexity hold its ground.
The Announcement
Near the end, the event photographer was taking my picture when the mic crackled: "All artists, please pay attention. We're about to announce the winners."
"Mama," my daughter piped up urgently. "They're waiting on you."
"It's fine," I said, still posing. “It’s not like I’m going to win anything anyway!”
"And the winner of the audience popular vote is... Mansi!"
WHAT?
The room erupted. A packed food hall in downtown Los Altos cheering for me.
They chose this.
They chose presence over planning. Child-like play over masterful strokes. Rebellion over finesse.
They chose me.
I should’ve jumped and squealed and cried and laughed and celebrated. Instead, I was transported to the board room back in India when I was 19 and the interview panel at the design institute told me “You’ll never be an artist.” I simply hugged my daughter, careful not to get any more paint on her clothes than she already had thanks to my splattering earlier, and said, “I won!” She grinned. “You won, Mama! You did.”
It wasn’t a battle between traditional, accepted forms of art and my paint-slick palms per se. But the fact that I was voted audience favorite felt like vindication.
Three Days Later
By Sunday morning, my inbox was full—twenty-six messages before coffee. Not just congratulations, but a sense of shared win. On Monday’s walk to school, six people stopped me. On Tuesday, the crossing guard called out, “There’s my favorite artist!” Even a couple across the street shouted, “Congratulations, neighborhood celebrity!”
Parents at school pickup have been coming over with hugs and excitement in their eyes.
I truly feel seen.
Not "oh, that's nice that you have a hobby" seen.
But seen, seen.
It doesn’t change what I do, but it lets other people see: this is possible. And the biggest win for me was to have my daughter present. She saw me being kind to myself, having fun, swimming upstream, and doing it all afraid.
"I was really proud of you," she told me that night. "And I kept watching to see if people liked it."
She paused.
"But then I realized you didn’t really care what they thought. You were just making. The way you always do."
The painting is waiting to be hung on our living room wall. Waiting for the paint to cure. Waiting for a final layer of fixative. But even as it perches on the side stools next to the daybed, half-covering a window, I see the rainbow defiant and powerful. The gold leaf glistening. The battle marks raw.
It reminds me that I didn't learn how to do this on Saturday. I've been doing this all along. This “win” didn’t make me feel more validated. I think it just cemented my position as an artist in others’ eyes.
Maybe you already create without knowing what comes next—in your journal, in your kitchen, in private moments when no one's watching.
Maybe you don't need a new skill. Maybe you just need permission to let that process be witnessed.
To let people call it brave, even when it just feels like home.
The rainbow doesn't need to learn how to fight back. It already knows.
Thank you to Arts Los Altos and State Street Market.
Thank you to the artist who called me brave—you helped me see my process differently.
Thank you to the woman who hoped the rainbow would fight back. You named what I've been doing all along.
Thank you to my daughter, for not only taking all the photos and videos but celebrating me as I am.
And thank you for reading this all the way to the end. Here’s a video compilation of what transpired that evening and closeups of the painting in waiting.
