Series on design masters in India:
"Dots, spots, dashes, arcs, lines, smudges, smears, stains : groping, searching, floundering to arrive at some form of truth or other... . Attempting to utter a statement : sometimes coherent, sometimes not. And the utterance could stretch to a cry, a wail, a moan". These words by Mickey Patel best express the character of his drawings, cartoons and caricature, also seem to chart the 'critical path' of his personality. Mickey Patel passed away on August 17th 1994. His works have inspired many and his contributions unforgettable. Dr. Ajanta Sen profiles the Master.
Works:
Biography:
About Mickey Patel's Contributions:
The Friendly Savage: a tribute to Mickey Patel:
Biography:
Mickey Patel was born in 1941 at Lahore, now in Pakistan.
Studied economics at St. Stephen's College, New Delhi.
He worked with the following advertising firms — Lintas, Thompson, ASP and Clarion.
He worked for leading newspapers and magazines such as India Today, Reader's Digest, Business Standard, Hindustan Times, Illustrated Weekly of India, Shankars Weekly and the Patriot.
He illustrated many books for the National Book Trust in Delhi.
He was passionate in illustrating and worked as an independant illustrator to the media industry, as a cartoonist for the daily newpapers and as achildren's book illustrator for the publishing industry.
Awarded Noma Concours by UNESCO for Picture Book Illustrations in the years (1978, 1984, 1986)
About Mickey Patel's Contributions:
written by Dr. Ajanta Sen:
- Mickey Patel Work:
Mickey was born in Karachi in the early-forties' turbulent years and whichever way one looks at it, these were turbulent times for our country, turbulent for the continent (Europe), turbulent worldwide. Mickey's youth advanced through another kind of turbulence -- the radicalism of the sixties. What settled down eventually is reflected in his prolific and essentially eclectic body of work - notably his series on the 'Sarod player'; his 'Gandhis' articulated within cinematic frames in reverence to the hugely compressed and frozen concept of time that cartooning is apt to embrace, the kind of time-frame that in Mickey's words could make "cinematic time blush in embarrassment"; his cartoons ranging from the "disinfected medical symbol for sex"' to the faceless Annual General Meeting, to "the advisor on economic and political affairs imported from the affluent West" (a la the 'all-knowing' experts on our countries' conditions who are sent in by the Brettonwoods' institutions and such, and who perpetuate their "mutilated myth and perception" of the Third World); his statement on 'the beautiful people',to his own muscled version of the Miss and Mr. Universe. His book-cover designs and illustrations for books for children; or for writers as varied as Sigrun Srivastava representing fiction-writing, to books covering non-fiction writing such as those published by the National Book Trust (NBT). Especially a book like the 'Economics for the Laymen' which carries his work and which aptly reiterates the fact that regardless of the subject Mickey handled, his quirks added on to each of his illustrations.
- Mickey' achievements by contemporary interpretations:
Without meaning to rationalise on why Mickey today appears to a section of the media (including the print and advertising ) as a man who 'didn't quite make it', one would like to interject with the thought that perhaps Mickey was too sorely aware of the frailties of the here and the now to wish to 'make it' at its expense. Living, as he did, in a world caught up in a web of its own inhibitions, its guilts and its "falling-downs" and its "falling ups," that the conveyance of this harsh reality through his work laced with a Jules Pfieffer brand of black humour never always carried a comfortable sense of reminder for the establishment that constituted part of the readership. Or perhaps Mickey was not quite prepared for what he had only just begun to witness, i.e., the blurring of the communications, cultural and economic boundaries, the absence of which had earlier had the effect of enclosing the real market for our products. In practical terms it meant that the fact of this fusion was only now beginning to unleash more takers for 'our' stuff across these boundaries than ever before. That, the media now represented more and more avenues in varied forms and proportions, the upliftment of the artist's works than could have been envisioned in all the previous twenty years of our publishing put together, and a sad coincidence to occur with Mickey's own prime years of output behind him. In sheer objective terms, Mickey had operated in a field stymied by a lack of adequate outlets, that today seems to be exploding with potentials. Until twenty years ago we had had no electronic media, until ten years ago these had remained fairly regulated, and today, we are suddenly breaking into the market place - with the opening up of the skies and the media from abroad arguably keen to find a toehold in India. With Mickey no more, whether he would have commanded the sellers' or the buyers' market can only be a matter of conjecture , but by most reckoning, Mickey would have survived in spite of the adversities of his health and the weight of the prevailing opinions about his iconoclasm. In any case, a man who had had the temerity to wish to survive in spite of his cartoons making "digs at Doon School heirs" bang in the mid-eighties at the height of a Doon School brigade forming the political establishment and headed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi - himself a Doon School graduate - couldn't have been making much of a living for himself. Obviously, for him these were precisely the times when satire served as the artist's corrective for society that was "straying away from a rational course", and he lived by it with full conviction. Mickey's achievements by contemporary interpretive yardsticks can in no way diminish his efforts at attempting to use cartooning as "a legitimate dialect of its parent language" viz., the drawing. And, therefore, the very criticism against Mickey that he had spread himself thin through his use of parallel modes of expression outside of cartooning (viz., through drawing, painting, etching, illustration) could itself be turned around to accord to his work a certain degree of legitimacy and credibility, which in its turn, derived from his ability to grasp the broader as well as the immediate nuances of communications that are so intrinsic to the very spirit of the representational arts. Mickey may also be credited for upholding the view that humour was not THE "inevitable ingredient" for cartooning----a notion that had been widely and quite erroneously presumed and which had begun to border on the myth of the essential cartoon. The important thing for Mickey in stead was to be able to attempt "a visual allegory" that employed "familiar images to reinforce and heighten their meaning".
The Friendly Savage: a tribute to Mickey Patel:
by Dr. Ajanta Sen
- Beginnings:
Where it all began was Karachi, which in Mickey's words was "the city of his (sic) first six months of existence". Whose bombing and the subsequent sub-continental partitioning meant for him a complete "historical and political denial of his place of birth". One wonders if that was the earliest seeds of genesis of the cartoonist in him. Mickey had his first cartoon published at age fourteen around the mid-fifties when he was preparing to support himself through college. At that time his overwhelming influence in cartooning may be traced to Punch ...... the British magazine that set the trend for cartoons in those days. He slowly graduated to what critic Shankar Menon describes as the "Time magazine cover style" and then onwards to the grim and sardonic style of Jules Pfeiffer. A much-touted reason advanced for Mickey not occupying the absolute centerstage of cartooning as Laxman, Mario, Abu and Dar have done is the fact that Mickey never "devoted an entire career to it ". Mickey's career began and stretched into advertising, beginning with the Lintas in the late fifties which was when and where Mickey assimilated in him social influences as variegated in character as " the West side story, and Paris blues to Norman Mailer." As Mickey grew in years as an artist to a visualiser to a copywriter to an art director in succession, Mickey's work began to reveal the real truth behind why he had to keep off the centrestage of the greats of cartooning in India. Someone once speculated about this in a popular magazine as being the result of his characteristic " digs at Doon school heirs". If these digs came in around the mid-eighties("Darling , who do you expect will be appointed minister for the Doon School"), there couldn't have been much of a future for an Indian cartoonist who wasn't into political or business cartooning. But even outside of digs, healthy and sour, had already emerged the Mickey Patel ouvre: a brand of jet black humor that is hard to come by in the very intensity of its pitch. A good look at Mickey's works and one is reminded of a predominant Norman Mailer attitude-- "mate the absurd with the apocalyptic and one has the desired captive". What did drive the young Mickey to defiance? Was it some kind of snobbery --- maybe not snobbery necessarily of the most direct sort? Or was it some kind of deep disillusionment "with the manner in which our politicians have betrayed the ideals of decency and democracy"--- the way an art critic once read into his cartoons way back in the late-seventies (A bureaucrat to the salesman in a shoe-shop : "I 'am looking for something edible, mine are often licked"). For certainty however, remains the fact that to expand the irony of Mickey's cartoons with their characteristic jibes at the system was to be able to see them well past any smooth radical rhetoric.
- His Characters:
It isn't easy to be able to extend a tidy metaphor that might quickly embrace the essential Mickey Patel ouvre. May be there was a certain inquisitive perspective to his work since Mickey was always gathering up information from the air without even perhaps meaning to. Mickey's apparently inscrutable face would betray just that hint of opening up. But overall for him, to revert to his expression of eloquent boredom would take him barely the split of a second. The formalism attached to the bird on the flute -player's shoulders; a sense of regard shown for those elements that have remained incorruptible-- his vultures, birds, tigers and monkeys; the image of a baby drawn in anticipation while still in her mother's womb; the twitches, the twirls, the hops and the jumps of his lines, their "life of infinite expandability of a form beyond the enclosure", their ontological soundness as construed within Mickey's universe of aesthetics compounded with sound as an essential "break in the air"--- are the aspects that one likes to ponder over. For me, Mickey's work has tried to say what jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson once said that "singers aren't taught to hear (unlikely )intervals". That 'perfect pitch' as against the usual 'relative pitch' that one aspires for, one gathers only through one's own impulses and instincts. In one stride of such thought Mickey's personal imagery of life could begin to show up in his art. The bird on the flute player's shoulders perhaps signalled Mickey's personal sense of freedom---- the way he lived till the end; perched on the flute player, bird and man breathed life into one another. Without a doubt, Mickey indulge in a sort of trendy self- satisfaction; and without it there would have been none of his art.
- His works:
Mickey's works also reflected a fair amount of eclecticism --- an essential attribute of the Mickey Patel personae anyway. By merely flipping through his drawings and cartoons,therefore, could one construct a profile of this man? One example of a cartoon that shows two high-ranking (despotic-looking) army generals shaking hands with one another (perhaps after a screening) with the blurb "we hate violence in the cinema" could well serve as a take-off into an area of art that Mickey admired, viz., the cinema. On the occasion of an exhibition of his famed series on the 'Sarod player' in Bombay about ten years ago, film-critic Ashish Rajadhayaksha attempted to use the metaphor of the cinema language (stripped to its bones) in terms of its continued narrative as a transposition on Mickey's own language of the cartoon. Even apart from the frames that he used to enclose his Gandhi's, or his fascination for the cinema reflected in his drawings of Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Monroe and others, had arrived his tendency to show "defined temporal movement" in his works. And alongside its visual expression remained these: "I like my feature film in colour, my regional film in sepia, my news in black & white and my cereal in milk and sugar." In one stroke, he had gathered the entire spectrum of the contemporary politics of cinema in India, and by implication, the status accorded to regional and documentary film-making. Ten years ago, this comment on the state of art of cinema might have seemed distant and absurd, today it is a reality dawned upon us and therefore it seems passe. Another gem which says "Ray directs Attenborough, Attenborough redirects modern Indian history" could well represent the subtle but insidious neo-colonial forces that have managed to find their way into every aspect of our post-colonial private and public spheres of living. Mickey's eclecticism ranged from these neo-colonialism related jibes that even gave us the artist's vision of an impending globalisation long before it had arrived on the scene, to serious social and political issues in relation to Third World development and exploitation, power blocs and power play, the environmental holocaust, society riff-raff (charity balls, country clubs) and so on. Going by this and more and his awards (Noma Concours, etc.), obviously Mickey had a lot to say and a way to say these. Some of his detractors would go so far as to consider his words too overpowering as a communications device to be accompanying its visuals. Making the net effect of some of the cartoons being rather laboured. One admits that occasionally these visuals would be threatened by what appeared to me and to many others to be the artist's inability to translate abstraction into appropriate visual parallels. Creating in the process, Rudolf Arnheim's ultimate nightmare of the 'word' substituting for the 'feeling'. Above all, Mickey challenged the artist to a "singular dedicated ferocity" against all adversity and against all tides of history "lest he forget his own image". Obviously, Mickey Patel was not trying to create any kind of a lowest-denominator brand of art that sells or appeals easily. On the other hand, by merely following his instincts for authenticity and human identity, "regardless of the colour of the medium" of expression Mickey's art in its inimitable style added a dazzling new dimension to cartooning.
- in conclusion:
And now if I said Mickey never became anybody's 'personal hero' because he just swept aside those 'virtues' that parents usually ask their kids to emulate, it would not be saying too much. And if I ascribed to this man who drew endearing cartoons in his typical straight line-spiral line - dotted line style what Walt Whitman did to someone else in his 'Song of Myself', it would not be any (gross) exaggeration of my notion of this artist Mickey Patel:
"The friendly and flowing savage...... who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization or
past it and mastering it ?"
Mickey Patel's conflicts with design: IDC as a metaphor for an artist - designer interface:
by Ajanta Sen Poovaiah
- The artist-designer interface -- some fall outs:
The question then is what happens when such an artist extraordinaire arrives at a design institution ? Which is what Mickey Patel did in the fall of 1989 at the IDC where he stayed on through the spring and summer of 1990 . It is not often enough that the paths of the artist and the designer meet. While the designer relates himself to changing the immediate lives of people through his design interventions, the artist works in abstraction without necessarily having to relate to any immediate cause or concern. Therefore, regardless of common world views their methods of achievements could very well differ from each other's. Under the circumstances, the interface provided by a design institution for the artist already contains a potentially explosive situation but not so unique in its scope as to be potentially hazardous. There are examples of artists from the performing and the reproductional arts represented respectively by classical dancer Mrinalini Sarabhai, musicians Ravi Shankar and L. Subramanium, and film maker Satyajit Ray among a few others, who are known to have accepted certain bottomline conditions as visiting faculty members for prestigious Ivy League institutions such as the Brown University at Providence,R.I., on Eastcoast USA, or at the Univ of California, Berkeley, or at New York University. In situations such as these, artists have had to find their own sense of equilibrium with having to 'teach' their art, or as a step ahead, to have had to find skilful, useful areas of applications of their individual artistic domains in order to (i) extend their personal sense of creativity beyond the immediate boundaries of the solitary act of creation, in order to keep it alive and burning; (ii) allow more and more people to participate in the dialectics of these glorious moments of creation by interacting with these learners while the language of these creations continued to retain their fire; and (iii)to help the non-artist to "penetrate through the veil of mere appearances and reveal the truth". Under the circumstances the strength of the kind of institutional support extended for such purposes by a set up such as the IIT-IDC may not be underrated. Mickey's conflict might well have arisen out of a common sense of consternation faced by artists viz., the absence and the consequent need to construct universals which might help define how an artist interfaces his creative skills with the objectives and the needs of an institution
- Strains from the Bauhaus:
In our bid to understand the artist - designer interface that is potentially situated in a design school, one is inadvertently, therefore, drawn towards parallels from this post - War One design school. The Bauhaus in Germany, in its decade and a half span of existence (1919 - 1933) had managed to set the standards of present-day industrial design. In a distant but a tangible sort of a way, Mickey might have been expected to be something in the mould of painter Johanness Itten given his perplexing mixture of the 'saint and charlatan'. However, while Mickey matched the above description of Itten's, he entirely lacked the Bauhaus form-master's conviction for art education. Especially considering the fact that prior to his arrival at the Bauhaus, Itten had already been engaged in teaching, an unconventional form of art based on techniques espoused by Pestalozzi, Montessori and Franz Cizek. Moving on to find a closer match for Mickey one conjures up the example of the second form-master Lionel Feininger, who was also the second of the three original faculty appointments made by its principal Walter Gropius into the Bauhaus (the third form-master being the sculptor Gerhard Marckes). Feininger was a highly successful cartoonist known for his contributions to American newspapers and German magazines; also a serious painter, he was at the Bauhaus 'to create atmosphere' which Mickey himself managed to create at the IDC through his sour and wild humour and which more or less also signatured his own works. Between the two now, one might try and understand the nature of the influence of Mickey's presence at the IDC. Mickey's engaging role as a kind of crusader made him denounce in no uncertain terms the modus operandi of student evaluation which at the IDC appeared to him to be rather stringently analytical and problem -solving with no room that could allow one to breath one's impulses for subjectivity. This crusading had had the definite effect of eroding a slice of the then existing student morale. The general consensus at the school was that Mickey's brand of iconoclasm minus his talent would take a student nowhere. But another school of thought in assessment of Mickey's approach that emerged soon after Mickey left and which was initially dismissed as being a lot of pro-establishment tirade was exactly what many of the Bauhaus creative-teaching members(painters, sculptors, etc in their own right) have themselves had to endure- viz., that these individuals remained not much more than 'rootless painters' who were 'reluctant to show their work to the students'. And showing one's work obviously meant transcending the mere activity of discussing one's repertoire to more concrete propositions in terms of certain suggested means of achieving a style, locating its relationship within the broader matrix/canvas of other styles --- both prevailing and past, and upfronting critical evaluation (formalistic, functional, technical) of one's style in order to arrive at a decided point of a creative scale that attempts to "dissect" these styles by contemporary and past aesthetic values. If a teacher failed to establish these principles of pedagogy, it meant that he had not been able to connect up with his students in a very fundamental way --- his brilliance or range of work notwithstanding. While it was Wassily Kandinsky who had provided some relief to this tenor by his views that legitimized scientific principles as being intrinsic to the advancement of the knowledge of art, many of the other Bauhaus teachers fell back upon the precept (as Mickey did) that art cannot be taught. In so many ways, Mickey also stood apart from the Bauhaus comparative categories. The example that comes to mind is Bauhaus' Paul Klee, whose work was described by his colleague Shelemmer as inspiring a lot of shaking of heads. Mickey's work never even grazed past these areas of social applaud. Mickey, on the other hand, always managed a much more direct and grounded response from his people. The above section by no means attempts to cover the entire spectrum of creative and teaching viewpoints at the Bauhaus. The section merely seeks to serve as a pointer to the way artists of calibre have functioned in a design school located far away in space and time and which yet manages to provide a certain perspective and points of convergences or divergences for our own reference.
On Mickey's part, IIT's staid, white-collar, scientific -technological firmament threw him back and quite ironically into his days at the Lintas in the early sixties. Both seemed to have depicted for him the taste of an "aerosol can of corporate antiseptic for spraying any and every threat of freedom, movement, liberation, change" as well as a place that (even) provided for him the recipe for "grinding creativity out of a crucible". In his eight months at the IDC-IIT where he tried to figure out what institutionalised design could do to its pedagogues and practitioners. Mickey might have relentlessly applied his already existing views on the ways of the private enterprise (derived from his experiences with advertising) to the IDC albeit some modifications. Essentially this meant that like Lintas, an institutionalised set up such as the IDC had had the potentials to "curdle to ash every posture of creative bureaucracy". Mickey found it hard to accept that there could be any of the Buckminster Fuller 'critical path' understanding towards the arts, and quite definitely not towards his own brand of 'specialisation', viz., cartooning. However, as a useful counterpoint drawn from a similar set of coordinates of an artist working within a design school one is tempted to quote Bauhaus' 'non-object ' artist Wassily Kandinsky's views on how to teach one's own art. In his 1926 work 'Point, Line to Plane' (republished by Dover, NY, 1979), Kandinsky asserts that "aside from its scientific value, which depends upon an exact examination of the individual art elements, the analysis of the art elements forms a bridge to the inner pulsation of a work of art " And, therefore, for him there was nothing foolhardy about "dissecting" art just because many others ,and to a large extent even Mickey believed, that such dissection could only yield its death. It is not so far fetched an idea to allude to the Bauhaus, because IDC itself was fashioned after it, but more closely in time to the Hoschule fur Gestaltung at Ulm in Germany, an ex-graduate of which school was invited by the Govt. of India in 1969 to set up (with help from a team), India's first post- graduate school of design.
Within the specific context of the IDC-IIT, Mickey was probably over-reacting to the role of clear thinking. And a perfect example that may be advanced in favour of the positive fall outs of such creativity-logical interfacing (and something quite likely even endorsed by Mickey deep down somewhere) is the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. Even a single visit to the MIT(Cambridge, Mass) will confirm for anybody the splendour wrought by the combination of logical thinking with artistry, and which finds such elegant display on the lawns of an institution that works in the best tradition of drawing inputs from economists, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians as well as the best of scientists from around the world.
And now without much hesitation one begins to see another parallel universe reflected in Mickey's conflicts with art education and with IDC. This refers to IDC's own conflicts with IIT itself; where IIT works with a positivistic, scientised, systems-attitude in its endeavour to transfer scientific ideas on to the plane of technological applications. Under this frame of reference, IIT obviously has had the occasional difficulty in comprehending for itself a course of studies that is the M.Des (Master of Design) and which entails what could be viewed as the occasional subjective (read 'artistic') tilt towards problem-solving. By the same token, one also likes to credit IIT for having relented within its broader scientised attitude, a certain leeway to IDC's functioning. And not without its rewards -- for IDC has brought to IIT awards, corporate funding, state funding and eventually a certain external humane sensibility to her otherwise staid firmament. And yet, Mickey found IDC's intellectual grounding too straitjacketed to be able to come to terms with it.
- Issues emerging from this interface:
Most importantly, however, Mickey's conflict with the IIT-IDC could well serve as an extended allegory for foregrounding two broad and interrelated areas of inquiry that have emerged as relatively recent concerns in modern societies especially since Margaret Thatcher's Britain over the past one decade to our own since our post-liberalisation nineties. These questions address the basic issue of the responsibility of a funded institution towards its taxpayers, the responsibility of the artist in helping these institutions uphold some of those basic values that help to expand the soul of learning, and finally, the responsibility of the tax payer towards the artist itself and who must be seen as a seer who walks with his head high. These questions that had been nudged into recognition by Mickey's presence at the IDC are at the same time also bound by the unified theme of the pedagogue - practitioner divide . The enquires relate to:
1) The relationship between the teacher and the practitioner or the thinker and the doer.
2) The implications of public or state-funding in education and research and their relationship to 'output' in terms of the quantum of their effective applications. While the first question upholds the validity of the holy spaces created as separate entities by specialisations and yet in today's world, these modes have begun to combine themselves under pressures of logistics and sometimes even under creative challenges (multimedia applications representing an example of the latter group of challenges). To that extent, the first question ties up directly with the second where the public has a right to know about what goes on with the taxpayer's money. Increasingly public and social sector spending have found to come under larger scrutiny amidst the altered politico-economic dynamics of global recession, spiralling Third World debt and debt-servicing, resources squeeze in terms of aid from affluent nations and THE final question related to the algorithms of accountability. The waylaying of Hegel and Marx's political doctrines and the fairly clean sweep by market forces in a post-cold war unipolar world led by an oligarchy of multinationals today, makes it imperative for us to 'deliver'. The pressures are beginning to let out at the seams of the existing educational funding systems. Witness for instance the fate of the British journal 'Design' which wound up so unfortunately for the design community worldwide, in the month of May, 1995. While the Design Council in the U.K had had to withdraw funding on account of a lack of finances, its young editor Gaynor Williams, in her closing editorial, expressed hopes for her journal to see the light of day someday, under less demanding times. One might wish to reconsider the eternal ivory tower-versus-the-playing fields debate , in the contexts of these conflicts and closures. The synergy that dissipates on account of these unresolved areas of debate is a question that is increasingly gaining recognition in the context of the modern operatives of globalization, market place and dwindling state funding for learning . And at the end, these comparative categories have merely been used to broaden the scope of what might otherwise mistakenly appear as being the condemnation of an artist and a design school, rather than what it really is, viz., the critical assessment of a certain interactive situation. And a condition thrown up not entirely for the first time. While Bauhaus and its participating members (students and faculty) were making history in the Germany of the twenties under fairly adverse political and economic circumstances, the IDC at IIT makes no such claims and quite correctly so. Except that one uses the occasion to admit to one's own sets of adversities at the IDC and expects that ahead of its twenty-five years of design pedagogy and practice, this collective experience will help her open up her eyes and ears wider in order to be able to net in people who see and hear in symbiosis. And needless to say an attribute that could be considered intrinsic to 'teaching' itself.
- Conclusion:
For those at the IDC who have had an opportunity to work or interact closely with Mickey, what remains among other things, is the artist's conception of his own art. Add to this a dash of funk and chic and one has a Mickey Patel. His search in IIT for a certain kind of freedom of expression and space mirrored a similar search for a similar freedom in his own existence. Until the end he never shortchanged this route in order to hasten the process of what he wanted to achieve, adversities of health and public opinion notwithstanding --- a rare brand of dedication that made cartooning not entirely empty of honour, but in fact quite to the contrary.
Illustrations:

Illustration for a the children's book 'the story of panther'' by Mickey Patel

Illustration for a greeting card titled 'shepard' by Mickey Patel

Illustration on 'dandy icecream parlor' by Mickey Patel

Illustration on 'modern times' by Mickey Patel

Illustration for the story 'The Ghost Rider of Darbhanga' by Sigrun Srivastav, Mickey Patel
(sourced from www.40to40.com)

Illustration for the story 'Fatso and his gardener were working at some flowerbeds...', by Sigrun Srivastav, Illustrations by Mickey Patel
(sourced from www.40to40.com)
* Images/text in this section courtesy 'The Korean Design Journal' and thanks to Sudarshan Dheer for sharing the documents