If you consider ‘designer’ to mean storyteller, then that is what I am. I am a bilingual storyteller & visual communicator from New Delhi, India. I have my BFA in Graphic Design and Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from the Rhode Island School of Design. As a designer my practice lies in the interdisciplinary fields of graphic design, photography, filmmaking, writing & research.

The world is built around misconceptions, and to me design is one of the lenses that allows for clarifications. I tell complex multilingual stories of individuals in the hope that those smaller stories will tell larger tales of nations whose voices have not been heard in the past by the West. Design for me is a necessity. It’s a translucent structure in place to help communication between people who may or may not have anything in common with each other. Design is a method of questioning, dismantling, & relearning our non-neutral, & non-universal reality. Currently I am focused on looking at design through the lens of decolonization, which in its essence means, giving voice & visibility to minorities from around the world. I started a design collective called Active & Concerned Citizen last year, whose focus is to help clear misconceptions of Indians living in India to the Western World. It is a collaborative effort with other Indian artists & designers. Our work can be seen on instagram @active.concerned.citizen

My specialty has been in publication design, but I have recently diversified into film & sound. I have worked with narratives in a range of languages & I relish the challenge of finding various appropriate expressions for each individual story. I devote a great deal of time to research, in order to awaken a one-on-one relationship with it. Form to me comes solely from content & I do not hesitate to challenge the norm of what is expected from traditional graphic design. 

There is a dire need for people to be allowed to tell their own stories, and that is what I hope to be able to facilitate. We as designers can use our tools and knowledge in partnership with the people whose story it is, to help tell it. However, we alone cannot and should not tell their stories. At the centre of humanity, in my opinion, is the human narrative. To start to decolonize the world we live in, we need to understand and appreciate each other’s stories more. The framework I am leaving RCA with is one of Questioning, Dismantling and Rebuilding. Decolonizing oneself is the first step to try to spread the initiative in the world. I will be attempting to unlearn and relearn for the rest of my life, in my personal and professional life.