Chikka gombe.
Dodda ooru.

Small doll, big city. Gubbi means sparrow in Kannada. This is the story of a small bird, a very loud city, and six wooden guys who refuse to get a real job.

Scroll, boss

Traffic Kumar, a yellow and green wooden auto-rickshaw driven by a small red sparrow, number plate BLR 404

I Got It Bruh, a wooden engineer with a laptop and a small smiling robot either side of a flip sign that reads ship it

Gubbi means sparrow.

Small. Loud. Everywhere. The bird that used to sit on every window ledge in this city, stealing rice from ajji’s kitchen and losing every argument with a crow.

Then one day you notice you haven’t seen one in a while. Every family here has a sparrow story like that. We took the name so we’d have a small reminder sitting on the desk: notice the little things before they go.

What we want to do about it

Where the sparrows used to sit.

How we got here.

The route so far, drawn like a metro map because that’s how we think in this city. Mind the gap.

Gubbi Art Club
A room in Bengaluru where people come to paint, crochet and make a beautiful little mess.
One joke too many
Somebody said “Silk Board is a state of mind” and nobody could stop laughing. Or leave.
Six guys on paper
Traffic, tokens, the eternal ETA. Drawn before anyone said “gombe”.
Channapatna
Three visits, a lot of chai, and learning what the wood wants to be. The makers fixed our drawings.
Collection 01You are here
Six characters, hand-turned, boxed, and on this site.
Collection 02Next stop
On the lathe. Same hands, new stories.

Not the skyline.
The ride home.

Not the landmarks. The particular chaos that makes you say “only in Bengaluru” while stuck under a flyover named after nobody you know. The shared joke. The filter coffee at the wrong time. That’s what we want to make things about — small enough for a desk, specific enough to start a fight in the group chat.

Silk Board Forever, a wooden flyover loop with six tiny cars, a green highway sign and a plaque that says same jam different day — Same jam. Different day.

Wrong time. Correct coffee.

7:40am. Already late.

The first six, before they were wooden.

Where they end up living.

“Swalpa adjust maadi” is not a compromise. It’s a love language.

Please adjust a little. It is how this city fits ten people into an auto, and how we plan to fit an entire mood into a palm-sized piece of wood.

Token Maxxer, a wooden prize wheel with five coloured segments on a rosewood base with a brass plaque — Spin before shipping.

Colour goes on while the wood spins.

Keep the craft.
Change the conversation.

Every Gubbi comes out of Channapatna’s turned-wood tradition — lathe, lac, a leaf for polish, and hands that have been doing this for generations. The gombe on your ajji’s shelf came from there. Ours do too, with slightly more existential dread on the base.

The makers fixed our drawings. Corners became curves, colours became whatever lac was willing to do, and the characters got better for it. Each piece still comes off the lathe one at a time, so no two are quite the same.

How a gombe is made