"Travelling between Fables" | Journey into the philosophy of India and Tibet
Imagine a trip in the Indian subcontinent, a trip in the colours of Rajasthan, in the wool of Himalaya, in the spices of Karnataka and in the embroidered silk of Tibet. There are no pictures, only sketches that resemble Indian miniatures. It looks like a fairy-tale book. It is, and it is not.
The author has design es it as a fairytale-book but if one goes deep into it one will notice that it is a journey into the philosophy of India and Tibet explained in a very simple way and with a very pleasant way of writing.
It is a book that tells us about the last six years of Paola Martani. It starts with, and runs parallel to, the experiences of its author from the moment she took a plane from the airport of Milan, to when she landed in Delhi, to then going on to explore the secret silent treasures of Tibet only to come running back to the craziness of India.
Drawing from her conversations with a variety of people, as well as from books, religions and mythology, she collected a universe and made it simple, understandable, and unique. Using her own words to describe her experience, Paola says: “Here I am, as a director who assembles slides with sharp cuts of scenes in order to start the tape. I must divide, look at, and seize something that really has no head or tail, trying to strike up the opening scene. I must examine and isolate the essential pieces that led to something even bigger than the entire universe. This process, with the premise that I have just made of incompleteness and disruption, began some years ago: I have decided to tell you about the magic which has brought me to this land, absorbing me into a cocktail of 1000 stories, so many times and so unexpectedly, only to finally leave me simply as myself, just richer then before.” Paola Martani is a graduate in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Milano, holding the academic title of ‘Dottore in Philosophy’ as well as a vocational Masters in Linguistics, from the same university. Her thesis was the first research of comparison between Italian and Tibetan. In it, she explored the differences between the two languages, and the possible strategies by means of which speakers of each language could most successfully learn the other. Since 2014 she has been the Italian language course coordinator and lecturer at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre of New Delhi, and since 2015 she has been the resident lecturer of Italian Language and Culture in GD Goenka University SOFD – a branch of the Politecnico di Milano in India.
In 2016, having been a speaker in many international conferences on architecture and design, she began to teach Indian Aesthetic Philosophy at World School of Design (University) in Sonipat. In June 2017 she released her first book ‘A Student Handbook of Italian – Learning Italian through Design’: a handbook with very concise explanations based on the concept of teaching Italian through design, explaining the use of the language through graphics in a very visual way. She created a small slice of Italy containing all the creativity of this country.
