All posts by shantanu suman

Last day in India

On the last day of my research trip in India I met a type designer, Sarang Kulkarni. Sarang is the founder of White Crow – a type foundry and design studio in Mumbai. During our conversation, he spoke at length about the hand painted type project that he had worked on with Hanif Qureshi. He […]

The Cutting Crew

After being back in Mumbai on the 20th, Shreedavy, Istling and I spent the next few days at an editing studio ‘The Cutting Crew’, where we got a chance to meet and work with an awesome team of film professionals. After the research work, this is where the actual magic had to happen. The Cutting […]

Filter

When I got back to Mumbai after finishing the research in the northern parts of India, I met a friend and an ex-colleague Prasanna Sankhé, founder and Creative Head of ‘Hyphen’. I met him at a design shop called Filter owned by his company. I knew him from my advertising days when he used to […]

On 11th June, I got up quite early to visit a couple of museums and libraries in an attempt to find some scholarly writing about the automobile decoration of India. But the visit to the libraries wasn’t of much help this time around either. I was suggested to go to the National Archives, but that […]

Panihari painting

The next day before meeting Raja Gharu, we went to the Jodhpur bus stand and booked our tickets to Delhi in the evening bus. When we reached the workshop, Raja and his assistant had just started their work on a new truck. Raja Gharu specializes in painting sceneries on the back of trucks. He doesn’t […]

Next morning, before heading out of the hotel, we asked the hotel manager Mr. Jagdish about locations in Jodhpur where we could find truck painting workshops. Based on his suggestions, we took an auto rickshaw to Pratap Nagar. After inquiring around for a while we found painter Sattu’s workshop, but he wasn’t there. Although we […]

Udaipur to Jodhpur

The next morning we called Ashraf to find out about his schedule for the day. In a couple of hours we were headed towards the workshop where he was supposed to do the writing on a truck which had been painted a day before. For the next few hours, we took videos and photographs of […]

The city of Lakes

While we were still in the bus on our way to Udaipur, we called up Shreedavy in Mumbai and asked her to find us a hotel in Udaipur and book our stay online. Fortunately, Shree had a friend in Udaipur, Megha Parekh, who helped us with the hotel bookings. After checking in to the hotel […]

Some people in Sirhind, and later even my dad had suggested that we should visit Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Saharanpur is quite famous for woodwork that goes into decorating trucks, and we knew if we went there we could find some important material for our documentary film. In the morning on June 5th, we left […]

Back to New Delhi

Our work in Punjab was done, and today morning we decided to bid goodbye to the place. Took us almost a two-hour long queue to finally get our bus tickets back to Delhi.