In 2009, when I quit my job at a popular music channel to give my undivided attention to pottery, my boss thought I’d lost it,” laughs Rohit Kulkarni. But his boss wasn’t the only sceptic. After all, Kulkarni was setting off to a tiny village in the north of Himachal Pradesh to spend three and a half months learning the nuances of working with clay. “It was a completely immersing experience. I was living and breathing pottery. The only breaks I took were for eating and sleeping. That was the routine every day,” he says, recalling his stint with 74-year-old Mansimran Singh in Andretta, who he refers to as the Grand Old Man of Indian Pottery.