Beating cancer with an artist's brush: Meet Alka Agarwala

She has a way with paints and brushes. They hear her. They inspire her. Block printing in her backyard, playing with different kinds of loom and fabric - a typical day at Alka Agarwala's home would be one where colour would chase her afternoon. A spiral staircase up her modest office, nestled in the back corner of their family home in Noida is where Alka spent most of her days planning and passionately designing her exhibition of hand painting stoles and sarees. Until cancer knocked on her life.

It's slowed her down. It attacked her at times. But Alka took the disease head on. "I was determined." However small the goals, she wanted to make them big and the centre of her energies. Alka planned her big exhibitions of hand painted works even as she grappled with chemo therapy. In conversation with Poorvi Gupta at her second successful event, the designer and artist recollects all that's changed her life, enriched her with experience and made her a bigger go-getter than she thought she ever was.