Bill and I gave our official lecture last night, at the magnificent Villa Aurelia, which might just be the most enchanting place I’ve ever been. The gardens are vast and well-tended, with great wafts of wisteria giving way to more manicured paths and arbors and hedges. The villa itself is a vision: pale yellow and regal and elegant, with a terrace offering perhaps one of the most beautiful view of the city.

Upon arriving Saturday in Mumbai, we visited with the creative team at Umbrella, a talented design agency — and again we saw work that was unusually rich and vibrant. The funny thing is that we met founder Bhupal Ramnathkar (known to all as Ramu) through Facebook: he follows our status reports. A highly successful advertising creative director, he’s created a design-focused boutique firm that does lovely work — unusually thoughtful and visually sophisticated. Ramu was a very helpful and gracious host in Mumbai.

We flew from Cochin to Pune last weekend where we were hosted by Ashwini and Ashish Deswande, partners in the design firm, Elephant, where we gave a lecture Friday evening. (Bill met Ashwini a few summers ago in Bellagio, Italy, at a Rockefeller Social Innovation Summit.) Many of the questions following the lecture were interesting to us, among them, is there a difference between design in the United States and design in India?

Here at the National Institute of Design, the two-week open elective workshops ended yesterday, and Fiona and I walked by to see the results. There was a fabric workshop on folding and draping (be still my heart) and another that I will go back and photograph this morning, in which students photographed things then responded to them through sewing and embroidery (breathtaking, but I have to shoot in daylight) and finally, this: dresses made from recycled cups and plastic bags.

Words fail.

Fiona did her part last night by taking it upon herself to fill the blackboard in the lecture hall where we were speaking. She’s now offering her services for conferences and lectures and her fee, she tells me, is quite reasonable — although her brother has advised her to charge what our lawyers would charge. Wonder where he got that idea?

Tonight at 5:30, Bill and I will give a lecture about our work at Winterhouse. We asked our new friend, Satya Rajpurohit to design a poster: he’s been working with Peter Bilak and recently released the Hindi version of Fedra. We called it “Post Ulm” because there’s actually an opening in the gallery of work from Ulm happening just before it. The “Post-Client” thing, however, is pure Bill.

Uttarayan — otherwise known as the annual kite festival — began yesterday, and all over the city people are flying kites of all sizes, shapes and colors. Phone wires are punctuated with wayward kites, lending yet another level of color to the skyline. Kite sellers line the streets, selling handmade paper kites out of the narrowest spaces imaginable. No wind, but nobody seems to notice.

We walked miles today, through markets and mosques, past parks and peacocks, in a city drenched by sun and covered in a thin and constant dust that miraculously never seems to dull the extraordinary colors we’re seeing everywhere. From one second to the next, the smells shift, from curry to cardamom to cinnamon, pungent and sharp, a whirlwind of mysterious (to us) new sensations.