Every designer has a drawer — real or virtual — for work that was rejected. Mine is quite full. A book cover refused, a brand identity that won the pitch and then died in committee, a competition entered and not placed. If you added it all together, it would be a much larger body of […]
David Hockney died this month, and unlike many artists whose work you remember only when you hear the news, I thought about him often — all the time. It is a strange kind of mourning to look for his fingerprints on your own hands. He taught me three things. The first is stillness — not […]
There are days in Paris, in late April or early May, when the sky turns an impossibly saturated blue — not the pale grey of winter or the hazy white of summer heat, but a blue so confident it feels like pigment pressed straight from the tube. This is an essay about that colour, and […]
After my first maternity leave, I started sketching daily ballpoint pen portraits of the baby to relearn how to see and represent. This time around, towards the end of my last maternity leave, I turned my attention to objects — a Bialetti, an apple, a whisky bottle, a lemon. The French call still life nature […]
When people ask me where I’m from, it’s easy to say Bombay. But returning to the city after years in Paris means encountering the gap between the place stored in memory and the one your senses actually find. In this essay, I explore what it means to paint a city from inside that gap, through […]
Ten years ago, HarperCollins sent me the manuscript for Janice Pariat’s The Nine-Chambered Heart, and I fell in love with designing book covers. The best covers add a layer of meaning before the reader encounters a single line of text, they become a form of commentary, a dialogue between designer and author that enriches the […]
A year ending is a good time for new beginnings. After almost twenty years in design and six years running Studio RAGU, maternity leave brought a shift — observing the world with new eyes, new creative energy, and a desire to share more of my own art. The result is a 2026 calendar with twelve […]
