Super Ram and Durga Woman: Contemporary Indian Comics

If I had a rupee for every time I’ve heard the sentence, “This is about the battle between good and evil”, I’d be a multi-millionaire. I could bet that every book that tells a story from Hindu Mythology has this sentence somewhere in its pages. It is a cliché I have truly come to hate, because it grossly and erroneously oversimplifies the truly complex stories of Hindu Mythology. So I was pretty dismayed when this phrase showed up as a tagline for a recent exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Luckily, “Heroes & Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics”, is a forgivable case of inappropriate titling. I completely sympathise with the exhibition’s curators, Julie Romain and Tushara Bindu Gude. Coming up with a title that bundles together Chitrakathi art from Paithan, Miniatures from Guler, Amar Chitra Katha, Wonder Woman, and Ramayan 3392 AD and Devi from Liquid Comics, must have been a pretty uphill task. But once you get past that unfortunate title wall, painted so stereotypically in fuchsia pink and orange, the richness and diversity of the material on display gives lie to any one-liner analysis of the fascinating development of comics in India.

Celebrating Design

September is the best time to visit Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, India. In the gentle autumn weather the Bengalis celebrate a ten day festival in honour of their favourite diety: the ten-armed Mother Goddess Durga. There is private worship in every home, but each neighbourhood organizes public worship at a stall, or pandaal. These pandaals are elaborate affairs: ranging from small sheds to enormous halls that are several hundred square feet in area. They are designed and built by local artisans, and have the most diverse inspirations. Last year’s pandaal themes included Victorian, Tribal, Gandhi, and Harry Potter. The highlight of each pandaal is a large idol of the Goddess Durga, designed in keeping with the theme. The Harry Potter pandaal was shaped like Hogwarts castle and the idol had moons and stars on her sari.

My Pressure Cooker Fascination

Listen to me talk about pressure cookers, or download the file. (4.22 MB .mp3)

1. The ubiquitous aluminium Hawkins pressure cooker
2. The Hawkins Futura, introduced in 1985, became an instant design classic.
3. Typical publicity material that always comes in the pressure cooker carton: in this case, a recipe book for a Futura.
4. How do you open a Hawkins pressure cooker? Opening pressure cookers is never easy for first-timers, no matter what pressure cooker you buy.

Indian Design Edge: From the Top of the Pyramid

On the 25th of October 2008, Dr. Darlie Koshy retired from the post of Executive Director of the National Institute of Design (NID), a position he held for eight years. Within the Indian Design World, this is about as high a position as one can hold, and he has literally filled that capacity to bursting with a long series of much discussed actions. His coup de grace is definitely his book, ‘Indian Design Edge: Strategic Insights for Success in the Creative Economy’, written from his ‘enviable ringside view’ of the world of design.

Following a good many years after Prof. S. Balaram’s ‘Thinking Design’ (1998), this book positions itself as the next macroscopic view of Indian Design. In Dr. Koshy’s inimitable style, it is filled with case studies, vision strategies, ‘design for-’ sub-headings and heavy doses of design evangelism. If not anything else, the book brings Indian Design out into the sunlight, in riotous jubilation and in considerable detail. It is unsurprising that Chief Secretary Shri Ajay Dua, of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, publicly acknowledged Dr. Koshy as his mentor in all things Design, at the launch of the book in Mumbai.

Beginning with ‘design for development’, and quoting the Ahmedabad Declaration of 1979, the book works its way through design history, comparisons with other Asian design achievements, ‘crafts as foundation of design innovations’ and ‘designs for grass roots innovations’. The chapter ‘change for design’ is in large part devoted to the author’s perspective of his role in shaping NID, ending with a charming classification of ‘progressive’ and ‘retrogressive’ designers: those who saw eye-to-eye with him and those who didn't. The chapters on ‘Strategic Design’, ‘Sectoral Growth by Design’, and ‘Creating GenNext Designers’ are large in their scope, and in the vigour of their arguments. One sector or topic after another is taken up, and the author’s view of the potential of design is forcefully sketched out for the unconverted.

Any glitches in this sumptuous smorgasbord are perhaps purely semantic. Delineating the ‘strategic perspective of the first national design policy’, the author begins the list with ‘Bottom of the pyramid model: design for masses, source of innovation and wealth’. This little loose end might well be the unravelling of the   edifice. It positions the designer/policy maker at the top of a pyramid of money, power and class reaching down, as it were, to those at the bottom. It also presents a view of these ‘masses’ at the bottom of the pyramid as the new frontier for design and business, where business conquistadors can ride on horses called design and discover new treasure viz., ‘innovation’ and ‘wealth’.