29th June, 2026

What am I working on?

I made an illustration with this year's mascots for FIFA

Buy the tshirt here⚽

What am I reading?

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui is a debut graphic memoir that took nearly a decade to create. At first glance, it reads as a family’s survival story during the Vietnam War caught between internal conflict and then US’s involvement, ultimately leading to their escape from the country in turmoil. But when you set the book down, you realize it is less about war and more about the intimate, complicated bonds between parents and children, intergenerational trauma, and what it truly means to build a home away from home.

Made in monochromatic water colour style, this book has some wonderfully poignant sections that left me thinking long after I put it down. Saying I love to your parents, confronting the shadows of their past, and the profound shift of becoming a parent yourself, realizing you have created a family when once you were only born into one. What a beautiful book for a story that was so so tough for the people who went through this. In hindsight, you will always find things that could be done differently, but when you are in the particular situation, you will realise that what they did was the best they could do.

What am I watching/watched recently?

I watched Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers last week. On Christmas Eve, three homeless misfits - a drag queen, a drunkard, and a runaway teen discover an abandoned baby in the trash. What begins as chaos quickly turns into a quest: to find means to care for the child and find her real parents. Along the way, each character’s backstory unfolds, revealing the circumstances that pushed them to the margins of society.

The film is all about absurd coincidences, bringing together serendipitous events that lead each of them back towards reconciliation with their families. The baby becomes a catalyst forcing them to confront their pasts and seek solace. The revelation of the baby’s real parents is withheld until the end creating confusion but giving the story a satisfying closure.

Visually, most of the action in the movie unfolds at night. The dark brown-black-grey palette shows the harshness of urban life for the three of them, yet the humour, eccentric characters, and the magic of Christmas make the movie fun to watch. It’s a story of flawed people who remain so empathetic and whose kindness shines through despite their circumstances.

Compared to Kon’s surreal masterpiece Paprika, Tokyo Godfathers feels basic - less experimental, more grounded.

New thing I learnt lately?

The Cannes ad awards (officially known as the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity) were started in September 1954. It started as a single competition specifically for cinematic commercials and has now grown into the world's largest celebration of creative communications and marketing. India’s first-ever win at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was in 1996. The historic ad was a television commercial for Ericsson mobile phones featuring the now-legendary "One black coffee, please" punchline. India concluded the 2026 Cannes with a total of five Lions (two Silver and three Bronze) compared to the record-breaking 32 Lions achieved in 2025.

Silver: Indianis Dentris campaign for Colgate and The Unofficial Sound of F1 campaign for Sting

Bronze: Sawaal Uthao campaign for Tata 1mg, Renu vs the City for St. Jude India ChildCare Centres and Don't Look Up for Steadfast. My understanding of these campaigns -