August 2022

Hey!

Anyone who is a creative person who has tried to have their own website is familiar with the struggle of figuring it out, then updating it, and then never updating it properly until a couple of years pass, and then you start stressing out about making the website AGAIN.

So after ~10 years of going through this cycle, this time I have decided to try something a little different. I am always excited about what I am currently working on, and so now I will just make monthly updates of what all I have been working on, what have been some interesting conversations I’ve had, etc.

The first thing that I’ve been most excited about has been my podcast with Kahran, called Thinking on thinking that we have been posting every other week. We discuss all sorts of things, but mostly stuff that has been on the top of our minds, and usually, we try to think through a particular concept or idea like success or failure or social structures, and how we construct our thinking around those. We’ve also been structuring our offerings and figuring out what kind of service offerings make sense together, and what scope they would have. It’s the first time I am bringing this much formal structure to my strategic thinking and it has been the most interesting kind of discussions and output. We should be putting up some stuff on our website by the end of this month. Hopefully.

I’ve also been consulting with the lovely people at Mello, as they figure out how to create meaningful experiences in a post covid world. Even in my personal experience, it has been an increasing need for people to find interesting experiences to go to in the city, both alone and with friends. With Mello, we’ve been doing a lot of thinking around what makes a brand stand out, and how do you understand and build trust with your users enough that they would want to repeat. A lot of our conversations have also been revolving around ideas of where user behaviour is moving in terms of larger trends in the world.

Charu and I have been working on a fun game for which our game Misplaced could be considered a mechanical prototype. Initially, when I first made the design document for it, it was supposed to be a shorter game, but it seems like both of us have fallen in love with the idea and we have decided to take our time with this idea. I have been learning a lot more actively about visual art after years, as we build some of the concept art. Charu used unity’s inbuilt node graph system and built a dialogue system for us. I think one of the most fun things about working with a developer is seeing them build stuff or repurpose things that can be used to make the game-making process faster.

And the last thing that I have been working on is a branding project for the super cool Leslie Gaston. She is an audio engineer and we first came across each other when I worked on an illustration for the podcast 20K hertz for an episode that she was on. She got in touch with me a couple of months back and we started to work on the branding for her new inclusive audio institute.

I also met up with Shikhant who runs Choorma studios in Delhi after a long time. He is the most vibrant and fun friend I made over my 5-year long stay in Delhi and it’s always a blast to meet him, and discuss things. They have been working on a lot of really cool stuff like animation, comics, and storytelling for brands, and it is just super interesting to have conversations with people when they are building something similar to you but in quite a different way. We ended up chatting about his comic based on his road trip with artists across the east coast of Africa. He’s doing a lot of cool stuff and I’m excited to see where they take the studio.

One of the teams that I had worked with in the past, Tatsam, which is a mental health product has been doing really cool stuff recently. They shifted their strategy and it was fun hearing from them about it. They also recently ran a reddit AMA about mental health which was a really fun thing to see. I don’t think I have seen a lot of companies use reddit as a common medium of awareness building. I’m super excited to see more AMAs that they host.

My friend Arpan has been working on his new startup Pockla where they are working with consumer data, and empowering people to have more control over it. We had a few chats with the team, discussing the product side of things. The conversations were interesting and they also prompted me to think more about how the user perception around security is and what direction it might go it.

It’s been a happening month with a lot of different things going on and I feel very positively about this new format of website updates. Hopefully I will keep it up this time around.