20th April, 2026

What am I working on?

Working on a cute housewarming artwork for a dear friend.

What am I reading?

I read a lovely comic today called the Victory Point by Owen D Pompery. The story talks about Ellen who comes back to her home town to meet her aging father. The book has large panels of illustrations of just the town, its buildings and its different corners on clear summer days and feels like you are walking there with Ellen.

What struck me most was the way the book captures the bittersweet experience of coming back to a place that once defined you, yet no longer feels entirely yours. It evokes this unsettling feeling of meeting your parents while coming to terms with the hard reality that they are ageing; or meeting people who were a part of your formative years and feeling nostalgic.

What am I watching/watched recently?

Watched this lovely movie called 'The Illustionist' by Sylvain Chomet. It is a hand-drawn animation adapted from an unproduced script written by Jacques Tati in 1956. The manuscript, safeguarded for decades by Tati’s daughter was finally entrusted to Chomet, who persuaded them to allow this adaptation. It is a semi-silent movie about a magician who seems himself going out of fashion when other modes of entertainment emerge. He wrestles with existential questions about his vocation and identity, until one of his acts brings him into contact with a young girl. And, then unfolds the story between them - their growing relationship (more akin to that of a guardian and ward than anything romantic) The movie is beautiful and what I loved were the character designs - each figure carefully conceived and drawn with distinctive detail. The movies ends in a rather somber note with the two growing apart and the magician losing all hopes in his art.

New thing I learnt lately?

While reading Creativity, Inc., I came across the fascinating fact that roughly 3% of people experience aphantasia—the inability to voluntarily create mental images in the “mind’s eye.” The book explores how creative individuals adapt to this difference, showing that it doesn’t make them any less capable than those with vivid mental imagery, or hyperphantasia. Aphantasia highlighted the diversity of human cognition. One approach described is that people with aphantasia often rely on feeling what they want to convey, rather than picturing it internally. Where others might trace a scene in their imagination as if it were real, those with aphantasia build their ideas iteratively, shaping them through emotion, intuition, and repeated refinement until the image takes form externally. Which one are you?