The Crossover Kids

Inside India’s home-brewed design revolution.

- Ayaz Basrai

Serendipity.

The word finds its roots in the strange tale of the three princes of Serendip, who track down a lost camel by solving various clues, all the while “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. Recently, a British translation company voted it among the top 10 toughest words in English to translate. Which is ironic, considering we owe much of the way the modern world functions to its mysterious workings. We’five discovered penicillin, Post-it notes, hell, even America, completely serendipitously. And it’s the chief characteristic of the cultural boom we’re smack in the middle of, made increasingly possible thanks to a healthy blurring of creative boundaries.

Once a year, I teach a Futures course at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, where we imagine a 20-year future for culture and cities. The experience always keeps me on my toes. It’s amazing to see the students’ comfort with their context: Being part of a 5,000-year-old cultural story is not baggage to be shed, but a springboard to use freely. They’re completely at ease mixing 3D-printed drones with Navratri nights, or thinking about theplas as sustainable options for inter-planetary travel.

It’s the kind of free thinking that results in an initiative like Antariksha Sanchar, BLOT! member Avinash Kumar’s Tamil language video game about the brilliant synaesthetic mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The seamless blending of fact and fiction becomes a fertile ground for the creation of a fresh visual language. In it, a vintage Tamil pulp fiction aesthetic meets high-gloss Cinema4D renderings.