My days of uncertainty began a bit earlier than the pandemic. In the May of 2019, my husband and I decided to move out of India, packed up our home in Mumbai, and started what turned out to be a very very long journey to Europe. We were initially hoping to move to Vienna, but encountered a lot of obstacles with the visa application and long story short, after spending five months, figured that wasn’t going to be possible after all. Finally in January of 2020 we decided to relocate to Berlin instead and Rob was able to get a visa in just two days! This seemed fantastic and we assumed we would be in Berlin by April, but little did we know… Continue reading
Author Archives → Kimya Gandhi
Remember December: The year of superlatives
After deciding to write for the Remember December series, I began to scroll through my phone’s camera roll to pick an interesting memory to write about. This turned out to be a difficult task because this year has been filled with so much travel and so many beautiful memories – picking just one was extremely hard.
Being in India, it takes a lot of effort, time, money, and a pile of visa paper work before I can plan a trip outside the country. This year however, we (me and my husband Rob Keller) took a personal record number of trips – some were meticulously planned, others quite spontaneous, and we ended up traveling across five countries!
The greatest thing about all these trips to different places has been the sheer diversity of people I met and the wonderful experiences we had together. When I think about the year gone by, I am most reminded of the incredible people that I shared my time with that made these adventures so special.
With this post, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude towards all those people for the many enriching memories and for impacting me in some way or the other. Here’s to friends, old and new, and to the power of simple experiences that give hope & inspiration in this often messed up world.
We started the year with one of the most fun New Year’s Eve and stay at Oakland California, with the most wonderful hosts Frank Grießhammer & Tânia Raposo.
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Greetings from Kolkata
I don’t want to play favorites with Indian scripts, but I have to admit that ever since I became interested in type, I particularly love Bengali letterforms. The Bengali (‘Bangla’) script is the writing system for the Bengali language, the seventh most-used language in the world and is primarily used in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, and South Assam.
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to visit Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, known as ‘Calcutta’ during British colonization. Kolkata is feted for its art and cultural heritage, symbolic of both the bygone British era as well as the Bengali Renaissance. I associate a sense of romanticism with Kolkata, with its trams, the Howrah bridge, and Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry. However, Kolkata in person is simultaneously romantic and chaotic. This duality can be experienced not only in the visual landscape of city life but also through its letterforms. While many examples of elegant Bengali typography exist, the streets are also flooded with bold vernacular lettering on busses.
Design of a Handwritten Devanagari Typeface
Mr. Sharad Deshpande has been a prolific copywriter for 50 years and an intrinsic part of Setu Advertising, Pune. Mr. Deshpande maintained many diaries documenting his writings and what made them extra special was his beautiful, neat handwriting. It was when he suffered a mild paralysis attack, that he lost the ability to write, a couple years back. It was disheartening for a copywriter who was so proud of his writing, to not be able to continue doing what he loved so much. But his sons decided to gift their father something very unique on his 76th birthday – his handwriting. His son, Rugwed saw great potential in converting his fathers handwriting into a font and approached me with this project proposal. This gesture was extremely overwhelming and it’s been a humbling experience to be a part of this project.
