Arjun Thomas: was ⁓ thinking through this episode, ⁓ at least the two three guests that I've talked to already. It is always easier to figure out how to define that arc. And with you, had a bit of a unique challenge because as I was kind of, you know, looking through what you've done, it's, know, a writer, an editor. ⁓ an artist, later I found out a musician as well. maybe the question is better posed to you, which is how would you kind of describe yourself or introduce yourself if someone kind of walked up to you at a party? Vinayak Varma: I'm an ⁓ Well, it depends on who's asking, I suppose. But if I'm trying to get work out of them and they're like in the industries as it were, I suppose either if they seem like the kind of people who could use some branding input, then maybe I'd introduce myself as somebody who, I mean, as a designer basically who works sort of end to end in the branding space, or maybe if they're in publishing, then I'll talk about publishing. So I don't know. But I have this idea of, and I think at some point I mentioned this to you before, this idea of design being a sort of, and possibly I think the creative arts in general being a sort of continuum. So where I think you can put any of these things, and I feel like these are all sort of artificial silos. once you kind of have, I think once you have a sense of how the process works, how the design process works, or how the creative process works, I think it's, you know, it's. Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Vinayak Varma: pretty simple to sort of apply it to anything. And I think that extends also to learning these skills because the same thing, mean, fundamentally it's the same, same kind of thing, ⁓ like the process. So, you you learn a skill, then you, that will kind of predispose you to learn another skill and then to apply that skill and so on. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, just, I suppose just, I don't know, like, it depends on who's asking. Arjun Thomas: The reason I can ask the question is because there's this, I guess this. a fork in identity where you either, well probably it's not a fork in identity, maybe there are multiple personas where you're probably either a generalist and I guess I'm guessing that's what you're leaning towards. I know I'm a bit of a generalist where it's a combination of bit of ADHD and kind of trying your hands at different things and obviously and the other one is being a specialist, right, which is I think a large number of people kind of try to head down that path or ⁓ innately fall into that bucket. And the reason I kind of want Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: to kind of start the conversation there is because I know I'm a generalist in certain things that I do, but in the, I guess the hyper creative, at least the way I look at it, industry that you come from, ⁓ I'm always curious whether being a generalist is far more difficult or it's a far smaller subset of people in the design, I guess, subset of people out there in the world to be like a design generalist, so someone who can write, who can not only write Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: but I guess edit, And then you've got the ability to of ⁓ put images towards ⁓ and of visually tell a story, not just write a story, and then put that into another ⁓ kind of ⁓ sensory which is music. So is that really kind of common, ⁓ uncommon the space that you kind of operate? I'm curious about that. being a design generalist in its truest form. Vinayak Varma: I think I- So I think ⁓ it should be common. I think that's the answer in the sense that, know, I think even in design institutions and things like when we plan curriculums and actually that's how it was even when I was studying in design school where like we had a very healthy liberal arts program as well. And then we had a whole bunch of these sort of electives and minors that were in very, different kinds of fields, like kinds of fields where we had, you know, whatever filmmaking or ⁓ making music or theater. you know, whatever it is. ⁓ And I think the idea is, you know, as you're saying, to kind of make that person a sort of well-rounded individual who can kind of, you know, apply themselves in whatever direction necessary, or at least, you know, even if they're not good at all of these different things, at least to be able to kind of understand the perspective of like a practitioner in that industry enough to kind of work with them, because, you know, we, ⁓ these are at the end of the day, like they are actually highly multidisciplinary. like kind of areas. We think of it as, when I was in college, it was basically like graphic design, furniture design, know, textile design, ⁓ so on. ⁓ And like, I think now those definitions have changed a fair bit over the last, you know, 15 or 20 years, because now even in design schools, people are kind of, you know, they do recognize the fact that these are very multimodal ⁓ kind of jobs. So, you you do have to apply yourself in many different areas. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: Yeah. Vinayak Varma: So yeah, think most of the designers, and particularly the fairly successful ones that I know are people who have skills in multiple areas. ⁓ at a very basic level, also just kind of, doesn't work well, because you think that you may get a job just to do a logo or an illustration or whatever, but then there is an entire other aspect to it that are like, There are communication aspects to it that do rely on the written word and presentation. So if you've done a bit of theater, that feeds into your presentation skills. If you're able to write well, that feeds in, again, to how well you communicate your work, all of that. So I think it all kind of ties in. I think it does make sense to know a bit of all of this, I think. And it's the same, as I said, it's the same process that you're kind of putting into all of this, like in the sense that, you know, any of these creative things, think everything sort of begins, you have an idea and then that kind of, you know, then there's a sketching or thumb nailing process. And then that's the sketches will then kind of get into like, you know, the sort of prototyping stage where you're iterating. And then the iterations will then eventually, you know, yield like two or three sort of. finish designs, then you present and kind of, and I think that works in music, that works in art, it works in writing copy or whatever it is. It's kind of the same thing, think. Does that answer your question? Arjun Thomas: It does, it does. I'm just wondering if that as a trait, as a discipline... or a skill set is very common in the industry because you did say that the couple of the, I guess the greats, you didn't use that term exactly, but people who really, that you seem to respect do this really well are able to kind of use this multimodal format to translate idea or vision onto something tangible, whether it's paper, whether it's music, whether it's it, and to do it across multiple formats. But the path to get there, was that an incremental one? So I do get that Vinayak Varma: You look fun. Arjun Thomas: ⁓ from a design philosophy and a foundational grounding from an education point of view that may be stored in your university or schooling. But then to kind of translate that into something that's practical, one requires a fair bit of exercising that muscle that comes by doing. And the next question, which is, are you any good at it? ⁓ Logic, or at least the industry will say, is that the market tells you whether you're good at it by determining how much you get paid for it. Vinayak Varma: Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: you get paid for it at all. Now on that continuum of foundational understanding of a concept across designers as a multimodal form of philosophy to practicing it to getting better at it and then getting and the eventual goal which is I know it's a very oblique way of looking at it, ⁓ market validation. How did that happen for you across all these formats, which is writing and visualization and music and how did that kind of unfold? Vinayak Varma: Right, I mean, I think I start off by saying actually that in music, I'm very much at the early stages. So I wouldn't even bring that into this conversation. But I'm hoping to get there. you know, applying the same processes, I guess. But yeah, you're right. I mean, there is a learning curve. And I think there is also a curve in terms of like competency in these things. I need to get this right, actually. I hope I remember this. We used to have this Like I had a teacher who used to kind of talk about this, this process in kind of learning and applying anything that, know, generally it's a good idea to sort of keep in mind. And how it, I, I'm assuming this is one of those Edward de Bono things, or, know, one of those like, you know, sort of ⁓ lateral thinking type of guys, know, whoever it was, those gurus, I think one of them have come up with this thing, but it, you know, how it's about how you're sort of understanding of anything sort of begins at the stage of unconscious incompetence. where you're incompetent and you're unconscious of the fact, I mean, you're not conscious of the fact that you're incompetent. ⁓ Then, as you learn a skill, then you move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, I think. ⁓ And then that moves to like... ⁓ Arjun Thomas: Ha ha ha. and competence. Vinayak Varma: I'm definitely getting this wrong, basically the steps are unconscious in competence, ⁓ unconscious competence, conscious competence, then sort of, know, sort of, you know, generally, I think conscious competence is the last one. Yeah. So, you know, eventually where you get to the place where you know you're very competent and you're applying it sort of consciously. I'm sorry, if someone is listening to this who knows this. ⁓ in clearer way. This was years ago, right? It was like 25 years ago in college that we were taught this thing. But essentially the idea being moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence is the goal. so to kind of have that, build the skills, but also sort of building awareness of that. And there's a lot to it, I suppose. It's like saying, Arjun Thomas: So some things from university have not stuck clearly. Vinayak Varma: you know, ⁓ like good readers are good writers, know, half of it is really just sort of like exposing yourself to things that you're kind of learning, like a lot of it is just sort of assimilating stuff. And then, and then there is of course the practice side of things where you're actually putting that into. So, you know, if you don't, if you're not aware of like, you know, what is being done out there in terms of good illustration, or if you're not like fully aware of like, you know, the history of art and things like that, then. then that is something that you need to ⁓ fix and then eventually you move to applying some of that in your actual skill building. ⁓ yeah, there is a process there is what I meant to say and you're right. mean, each of these things, it does take some amount of experience. You need to go out there and if you have an interest in some of these things, have to actually try it out. actually go out there and do it and be bad for a little while, you know, like not be aware that you're bad and then be painfully aware that you're bad at what you're doing. And then, you know, you have to kind of build your skills in some of these areas. And I've been there. I I was, mean, I probably still am, but I was an atrocious illustrator at one point. I'm ⁓ certain I was like a pretty bad writer at one point. most of these things. ⁓ I'm certain I was not the most diligent editor at one point, all of that. But then, know, just being out there making mistakes and then ⁓ being painfully aware of them, that kind of fixes things. Yeah, it's always nice actually in a way to kind of look back on your old work and actually feel really horrible about it and feel like that whole, that cringe that you feel when you see your old work that you know that... OK, maybe you are getting better. That's just that's the signal of. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: So that's a good place to ⁓ maybe it with ⁓ I specific examples of your past that you can ⁓ that you can unpack maybe. And up to you to choose which example, maybe two examples or three examples we can talk about. We haven't talked about what specific work you did. So Brainwave, the science magazine for kids, I really want to get into to understand from that design arc and getting better at it philosophy how Brainwave evolved from where did the idea come from to how it evolved over time. Vinayak Varma: Okay. Arjun Thomas: successful, why it wasn't successful. think that's one great example I want to kind of get your help in unpacking. The second is more on the commercial side, is you talked about brand building and brand concepts of brand building. So, brusky and geist. ⁓ again, we talked, I think, a while ago about the Asura, at least the Asura concept that you used rather uniquely to kind of, in a way, save or salvage, I guess, Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah, Arjun Thomas: a brand identity or create a unique brand identity, that's probably a fairer way of ⁓ mentioning it. So maybe let's, from your point of view as a ⁓ creator, walk me through that arc from concept to something tangible in the world, for first Brainwave maybe and Ruski, or either way, ⁓ and that'll be good to understand from a designer's point of view how that unfolds in the real world. Vinayak Varma: Okay, think that brainwave actually is a good place to kind of start this, think, because... ⁓ Yeah, I can do that. Right. So, brainwave was a science magazine for, I would say, the age group that we had sort of defined was somewhere between eight and upwards. And upwards could be all the way to teens, adults, whatever. Arjun Thomas: Ahem. So what is brainwave? If you can start with maybe just talking about what brainwave was and then kind of go from there. Vinayak Varma: but that was the age group. so ⁓ it was ⁓ part of the ACK media stable at that point, which was like Amit Chitrakatha comics, Tinkle magazine, things like that. then those people at that point, ⁓ the Sameer Patil who ⁓ then went on to start scroll.in and scroll stack and things like that, he and Ashish Gul who start who eventually went on to start Urban Ladder and then now he started this company called Optimist. ⁓ These two guys who had a background in engineering and then later in management and things like that, they kind of got together and ⁓ they were kind of running ACK Media. Sameer Patil, I think, had sort of acquired it from India Bookhouse. And so ACK Media also included India Bookhouse. think India Bookhouse at that time was like the largest distributor in the country. And they wanted to, they very ambitious plans for it because for years and years, these publishing companies had been kind of going at a certain pace, but they wanted to kind of grow it in a big way. And one of the things they wanted to do was to kind of start a science magazine and then eventually sort of build it out in such a way that it becomes, they were very ambitious about it to become a sort of science movement and kind of get it, get, know, kids everywhere around the country to sort of start thinking about science in a very qualitative way. There's always a sort of barrier to entry, right? Like in science, know, there's, there are, think it's just because of how it was taught in schools. It has been taught in schools for like years and years. ⁓ It's not a subject that even though it's, actually one of the most interesting subjects is the way it's taught doesn't make it seem very interesting, but just because of how the textbooks are, how the teachers sometimes are and things like that. So this was, this was meant Arjun Thomas: Is it a case of talking about the building blocks without talking about the castle as an end objective? that's what they wanted to flip on its head. you kind of paint ⁓ the end objective, the actual magical castle at the end, and then you work backwards to water the building blocks and turrets that you need to eventually visualize this. To use a rough analogy. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, very much so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great analogy. That's very much what it was really. I my analogy was far worse. I was going to say that it was meant to be like a gateway drug into science, but I suppose this is much, much prettier what you just said. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: As a parent to a 4 and half year old and a 2 year old, I'm already hyper tuned to the term drugs. So this will be over indexing. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah, Magic Castle is better, I guess. ⁓ but yeah, very much, very much so, you know, so, so, so where, know, for me, where that began was, so I had a background at that point in, like, I had done, you know, picture books and this and that. And, and, ⁓ and I think for a brief while I was, you know, and then, yeah, for a little while I was, ⁓ I was working as a in like journalism actually or oddly enough, excuse me. I was working for this magazine which then kind of I started out working there as a designer and illustrator and then they, you I started writing for them and then I started editing for them and then eventually that led to like me working as an editor at the Indian Express and so on and then that kind of, you know, so I had this sort of know, writing and editing background at that point. And then I kind of, and I was freelancing on the side as ⁓ in design and stuff like that. And so randomly, you know, I kind of came across this thing and I ended up meeting Ashish. ⁓ And, and so I think he was kind of intrigued by the fact that, you know, I had the, this sort of illustration ⁓ and sort of fine art kind of end design background, but then I kind of moved into journalism. So. ⁓ So he, you know, like in the conversation we had, know, the question was whether you'd be able to handle something like this. So my pitch basically to him, because I didn't have a science background, but I had a massive interest in science in the sense that in popular science, you know, I would read all the time and kind of I was very into it in general, not a not very in depth like knowledge, but just sort of broad knowledge. ⁓ And, and it's cool, you know, the like the thing is until maybe about like, you know, the ninth or tenth standard, I was I was hugely into it in the sense that, you know, like I really loved physics and biology and things like that. But I think where I was a little weak was in chemistry and maths. And then that ended up kind of shooting my like the whole science aspirations in the foot. And I ended up not getting into science. And I think this was a way for me also to sort of kind of get acquainted with the subject. So I think my pitch to these guys was essentially that, listen, you know, I think of me as like you know, the sort of kind of reader that you want to appeal to where, you know, I have an interest in like broadly in science, but I don't know this enough. like the textbooks and the school system have sort of put me off it, ⁓ off like deep learning. So maybe, you know, this is, it's a good way for like, you know, somebody who's a lay person to kind of understand these. concepts and then kind of translate that into good content. That might actually be a better way to do it than to get an expert to do it because if you just straight away get a science editor who has a science background to kind of do this, to run the magazine, you end up again with the risk of it becoming a little too dense maybe. ⁓ So that was the proposition initially and then they kind of, I mean, to their credit, they gave me a bit of time and space to kind of develop this and do this, you know, how I sort of imagined it. And at that time, at that point, had a kind of a, I think just, you know, I had a network of peers in like design and art who are now, you know, some of the sort of best illustrators and so on and writers and so on working in the industry. I kind of harnessed all these guys and kind of got them to, mean, because, you know, often it's like the quality of the content is really dictated by the team that's kind of, you know, working on it. So I kind of built out this sort of really good team of people who would bring in regular content. So over the course of a year, we kind of built out this whole thing. And I think we launched about a year after my initial conversations with these guys. So that ran for a few years after that. I was involved with it for the first, I think, about two to one and half volumes, which was about maybe 25, 30 issues or so. But essentially each issue kind of worked exactly like this where, know, there was very much a solid learning curve. You you're talking about that earlier about, you know, whether these processes are, know, and how this sort of ⁓ like how you kind of go from not knowing anything to kind of then building some skill in it. So actually it really helped me learn a lot of basic concepts as well because, the way we approached each of these things was also in interesting ways. Like, you know, when we wanted to do a, like a physics issue on light instead of doing that, kind of looked at it from the perspective of invisibility. Like ⁓ how do you kind of ⁓ mess with light in order to kind of create invisibility or like, you know, if you want, rather than just having an issue on gravity, we did an issue on flight and things like that. You know, we had, and we had a lot of fun, interesting issues. had like an issue, an entire issue on like movie visual effects, for instance, where like it had like, you know, King Kong on the cover and like inside was just full of like, and we had like, we showed kids how to make like ⁓ stop motion animations and all kinds of things. It was great fun. ⁓ So yeah, that kind of very much followed that sort of a process. ⁓ Sorry, I want to just kind of like refresh and go back to your original question. So yeah. Arjun Thomas: No, that's fine. the idea was to kind of walk through maybe two or three examples. And I think the brainwave one is great for a variety of reasons. One, I love science just as you do. And the fact that I'm at the stage where I have young kids and you're at the stage where there are five why questions to everything you tell them. So the neuroelasticity of a child is just so great. And you want to kind of Vinayak Varma: Yeah. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: find creative ways to ⁓ not shut doors. what you just talked about, is the whole reason, I guess, Brainwave was put together and the way the team was put together was essentially to get, I guess, a 15-year-old or a 12-year-old, Vinayak, excited about ⁓ science without having chemistry and math get in his way. ⁓ So kind of looking at... Vinayak Varma: That was exactly that. Well, I kind of ended up loving chemistry and maths as well through the course of brainwave actually. So that does, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: So I mean it's like a redemption arc that you have a full kind of circle. But I'm pretty curious to of double click on that, which is you have these bunch of illustrators and creative artists, people who come at this from a very... out of the box kind of thinking, but you still have to kind of root this back in science. And the two examples that you talked about, which I really love, which is, you know, how do you talk about light, but then you talk about it from the point of how do you become invisible, which again, already said, say, I want to know how to become invisible. So then you're already pre-wiring kids to kind of, you know, want to kind of unpack that problem as with learning to fly. And again, the foundational, I guess, here is gravity and math. So how did the team kind of decide on ⁓ what to talk about and whether there was a need to kind of in some way connect it back to Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah. Arjun Thomas: the curriculum as it were because how did this sell here? How did this sell in the market? Which I'm guessing was it through primarily through schools or through parents? Like who was the decision maker on the customer side that said this is a fascinating perspective that my kids really need to kind of learn it this way or this way as well. Vinayak Varma: Right. Yeah, because that is a consideration. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think, I mean, it's a question that poses a lot of problems actually in the publishing space in India all the time, even now actually, which is that, you know, one of the big issues is distribution. So I think, you know, when you're talking about it from the customer side of things, it's the customer, A, the customer needs to know that the product exists before they can buy it. And one of the big problems is, and at least it was at that point, this was, you know, this is back in like between 2010 and 2013 or so. You know, if you, if you send out copies and India book house at that point was the biggest distributor in the country and all the copies would be sent out to all the tier one and tier two cities in India. And these issues would, and I think there was a certain amount that was reserved for subscribers. It took us a long time to build a subscriber base because first people, again, you know, they need to know that the magazine exists before they can subscribe. And I think at the time we didn't probably have a lot of the, like the social media channels weren't as sort of advanced then as they are now. don't know, was Instagram around then? I don't know. I think it was Facebook mostly. And Facebook, I don't think they were like, mean, obviously even now they're not supposed to be there, but there weren't like kids on it. so back then, know, these copies would be sent through India Book House. They'd end up in these go-downs and then, Arjun Thomas: Hmm. I doubt it, I doubt it, no. Vinayak Varma: there was a sales team who would have to go and ⁓ sell it to various newsstands and bookstores. so the big challenge over there was, ⁓ the thing is, ⁓ it's not through any fault of theirs, but most of the sales team were not sort of highly conversant in English, and this was an English magazine. ⁓ So. translating some of these concepts, know, when you go and kind of, have to kind of go and hand sell these copies to, you know, shops and ask them to kind of place it out front so that people will see it and buy it. And the shopkeeper mentality in this thing is always that, you know, what sells well already is what is going to keep selling. So they'll keep the bestsellers out, out in front. And then the new things are just sort of hidden away in the back. So, you know, the discoverability is very, very limited unless you actually go and push them to do that. And I would do that. Every time I would visit various cities, I'd go around meeting scientists and things like that to ⁓ get ⁓ some consultation on some of the content and things like that. And every time I would travel around, would ⁓ make it a point to basically spend at least a day going to bookstores and then telling them, listen, do you have copies of Brainwave, firstly? And if they don't, then I have to call the distribution team and say, listen, there is a store here that doesn't have copies. And then if they do have copies, then they very sheepishly say, yes, yes, we have three, four copies. And it'll be like in the back, like hidden away behind like a bunch of tinkles or whatever. And I'll have to tell them, OK, listen, you've kept like four tinkles side by side here. Can you please take like just one issue of Brainwave and keep it in front along with these things so that people know that this thing exists? And eventually, so it takes a while. Anant Bhai who started ACK and Tinkle and so on, he had told me at some point that any of these magazines, it will take a good five years of doing this kind hand selling and going out there and really pushing it in order for it to make it. if you don't last, ⁓ I mean, if that doesn't work, then you don't typically last beyond about five years, which is what happened, sadly, to Brainwave. It was, at the end of the day, was a sort of I think there was a failure in distribution at multiple levels. then, and also, I mean, there were various considerations. There were multiple like management changes and things that put an end to that magazine. But in initial stages, this was one of the challenges. And the other thing, as you were saying, what are the other ways? think institutional sales was a main thing because ⁓ that's another place where kids end up discovering things. So we had to kind of go and talk to various schools and so you have to. get past the principles first, where you have to talk to the principles and then convince them to kind of keep the ⁓ magazine first in the libraries, like a few copies in the library so that the kids can read it. And then if there are enough kids reading it, then you kind of ask them, can we do like a subscription drive here? Can we maybe do like a workshop or an event here? And then kind of push that. We also then started doing things like we had, we had like, so we had, we already had a science advisory. Arjun Thomas: Right. Vinayak Varma: ⁓ board for the magazine, which had ⁓ a ⁓ set of established ⁓ scientists and educators and things like that on it. And so we would send each issue to them to vet and then also do a post-mortem afterwards and just see if it was all OK and where we can get better. But similarly, we also started a similar program with kids. We had these school advisory boards, like ⁓ comprise of student advisory board. ⁓ And they would also kind of send in, like we tell them in advance, like three issues in advance said, okay, two, three issues from now we're gonna be doing something on material science. so, if you have any ideas, send something in. Like we had a DIY section, we had like comics and this and that. if you have anything in mind for some of these, then send it in. So we had like content coming in. And I think that also sort of generates interest because kids will... ⁓ like they'll send their content and then they'll obviously then, you if it's printed, they want to tell all their friends that, know, my thing is there in this magazine. These are all sort of organic ways in which you kind of spread the, that information. ⁓ Yeah, it was a, it was a big task. mean, in the sense that like, know, on the one hand sort of, you know, like focusing on the editorial and content was, there was a lot of work there, but the real work really, you know, because that once you kind of. set up, a system in place and once you have a team in place and have like a content structure and things like that, that's actually the easy part. Like if you have good people involved that the content side of things is actually the easy part. The real like hassle is the distribution side of things. And in India, everything, you know, there's bureaucracy also in everything. Like IBH for instance, it says age old, you know, like I think when we were kids and things like was like India Bookhouse who used to distribute. Arjun Thomas: Yeah. Vinayak Varma: like everywhere and they, know, like the, think at that time, I mean, not to, not to like sort of slight anyone involved in the thing, but you know, lot of the employees and a lot of these, a lot of the different cities were probably as old as the company at that point. And they were, they would just sort of sit on these piles of copies. Like, you know, 5,000 copies would be sent to this one go down. And then I'll find like three weeks later I'll call and I'll like, I'll, I'll speak to the distribution people and find out that like those copies are still sitting in the go down and they haven't left. So you have to like then kind of go and light a fire under somebody's ass and kind of get these copies moving. And it's just a whole thing. I mean, these are things that I did not expect to kind of have to get into at any point in my life, but you end up living and learning, I guess. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: Thank Well, I guess it goes hand in hand with being a generalist, right? So if you think of this as, in a way, starting a business, while Brainwave was just a, I guess, well not just a, it was ⁓ a magazine under the auspices of a very, very large publishing house, it still was essentially, in a way, a startup. At least that's the analogy that I can draw from it. I think maybe the, not the lesson here, but I guess the self-evident Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: you call insight is that just as you the team took a very contrarian view to getting ⁓ heavy for some people, ⁓ science material to them in a manner that's easy to digest by taking this very, very ⁓ different view on how to kind of communicate concepts, which is the foundational idea behind Brainwave. ⁓ I think it also probably merited a foundational rethink on your go-to-market strategy. And you talked about some elements of how you guys did it, which is the student council, which I think is brilliant. Because at the end of the day, ⁓ you're not creating another science magazine. If you were creating another science magazine, the existing Roots to Market or another Tinkle, there's a great fit. But from what you're telling me, it seemed that there was a bit of a dichotomy between ⁓ the kind of content you were creating and ⁓ who the sellers ought to have been and how you had to get them into the hands of the eventual buyers. Because innovate was a category that didn't exist or was there something similar to Brainwave when you guys were doing it? Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. There were, you know, mean, there were, there, like, there had been magazines in the past and there were, you know, like, not really, I would, I would say no, you know, because, so in the past, there were great magazines that kind of, think, ⁓ just in terms of like ethos, there were magazines that kind of were in like the same sort of general kind of like area, which was, you know, early, I think, so there was Quest, do you remember Quest from like way back? Arjun Thomas: Yep, yep, yep. Vinayak Varma: So there was Quest and there was ⁓ like Quest and Junior Quest, think. there was a whole, mean, I'm sorry. mean, like early in the morning and I'm here to have breakfast. I'm kind of struggling to remember some of these names. then, but there were, I mean, there were, but the thing is, I think what wasn't really there was like a focused science magazine that kind of ⁓ was not so much. Arjun Thomas: Yes. Vinayak Varma: geared specifically to kind of drive kids to the textbooks or kind of, or it wasn't meant to sort of, you know, append whatever was already in the textbooks, like something that was just a general interest science magazine. That was not really there at that point. And I think also just in terms of the quality of the content and so on, I think we kind of, we, in many ways we made our own jobs quite difficult because one way of doing this could have been really to just kind of use a... this you know all the existing Tinkle characters and so on and kind of do like a Tinkle add-on you know so it could have just been like a Tinkle Science magazine and which was something that we discussed early on and that I think would have been easier to sell as well because you know at the shops they already know these characters. Arjun Thomas: Yep. So curious about that, why wasn't that picked up on? Because the biggest thing is, I think a lot of people talk about this. ⁓ Creating a brand is massively expensive, is massively time consuming, regardless of how good the quality of the product is. And you know this because you've built brands, or least designed brands from the ground up. So I'm curious, why didn't that happen? What was the pushback to say, ⁓ shit, we own the assets, this would be a great ⁓ segue over to a new category, leveraging a well-established brand in the market that already has outstanding penetration in the target segment that we're going after. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Yeah, I mean, you're completely right. And I wish you were part of those conversations back then. I think we were all like, I think there was generally a lot of confusion and this kind of thing, because it was very much a too many cook situation. So at that time, ASK Media had, it had Tinkle, had Amat Chitkata, it had Kara Details, which the children's book company based out of Chennai, they were also at that time part of Amat Chitkata. it had brainwave, had, know, so, and then there was the IBH team and all of that. And because a new property was being started at that point, you know, there were like these larger level conversations included everyone from every team. And there was a lot of input and there was a lot of noise. And I think there was a lot, there was a fair bit of worry also on the one hand of like, how are we going to kind of incorporate these? And then once you kind of use these existing characters, you know, people like whatever, Shikari Shambhu and... ⁓ Arjun Thomas: Mmm. Vinayak Varma: and Supandi and all of these things. would this then, would we sort of, from the content side of things, would we then be a bit constrained by ⁓ the sort of world building and structures that already existed around these characters? In the sense that, you know, if you use a Supandi, which like, ⁓ will we then, you know, is that entire section that kind of includes him, you know, be limited to like a certain kind of story where like, you know, there's this Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Vinayak Varma: this guy was just sort of stumbling his way through life and like very sort of Mr Bean kind of character and then every single time we have to kind of do this thing where there's this massive learning curve and then you know maybe he doesn't learn anything at all but like something funny happens and you know all of that maybe that's not the route we want to take. I then said you know I think the I liked the general idea of using characters to kind of tell these stories. I didn't want to be really constrained by them. in hindsight, do think maybe it was a mistake. Maybe we could have least used two three of these Tinkle characters and pushed it that way. ⁓ But ⁓ what I ended up doing was I ended up creating a set of characters just for Brainwave. So I had this set of characters called the Smarties, which were this very strange bunch of kids. think someone in the team wanted ⁓ real life scientists to be included in the characters. They said, why not some great Indian scientists like Aryabhata and then you can do Einstein and things like that. So I created, there's this story that I came up with where there's this, it's very strange, but there's this elderly Toda woman who in the Nilgiris, in this mountain, who is... She's got this long white beard and stuff, this old bearded lady. And she and like, who's this like amazing scientist, like who no one knows about. And she's working in this like cave somewhere in the Neelkiri's and she's accompanied by this, like the, you know, the only living dodo in the world, like who's this little dodo called Dr. Dodo. And so Dr. Dodo and this, the dodo lady is called Skri, I think. Like both of them kind of, you know, try to create this. They come up with a time machine and they kind of create this thing to kind of bring back these like famous scientists to kind of help with problems that are there in the world today. And then they mess up their calculations a little bit and these scientists come back, but they come back like it's the child versions of them who end up being pulled into the future. So you have like little ⁓ Albert Einstein and little Aryabhatta who are basically, think, RB and Albie. then there was, know, so there's a bunch of these. Arjun Thomas: Hmm. ⁓ very cool. Vinayak Varma: weird characters and like they kind of go on these adventures. So every issue we had, you know, we had ⁓ these things happening where like, so we had one, like the energy issue for instance was, ⁓ it began with, it had this elaborate ⁓ like comic where it started with Dr. Dodo being kind of stuck in the past because he's kind of used the time machine gone there and then now like the, whatever energy like this thing is kind of running on, it was depleted. So he kind of leaves a message on the cave wall, which, like, whatever, 2,000 years later, 3,000 years later, the current day Smarties team will have to kind of read and interpret, and then they have to then use the smaller time machine there, which has only a certain capacity to kind of send back a certain amount of that energy to kind of thing. And so the thing is, this thing can't carry that payload or whatever, so then they have to then go and research. all the different forms of energy and find what is the right kind of energy to kind of thing. So we, at that point, we were talking to Saigon and met the scientists at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune. And we spent some time. And we were actually planning this material science issue that was going to come up a couple of issues later. So I asked them if they had some ideas on ways in like. compact forms of energy. And somebody I think was doing some research into how crystals can be used to kind of like, know, hydrogen, hydrogen is like a viable form of energy, but I think there's a lot of space between the atoms or whatever. like the crystals kind of, you know, condense them and kind of hold them in an efficient way. So that was the theory they were working off. And I don't know how I arrived at this, like, I think it was based on their science, like in Arjun Thomas: Mm. Vinayak Varma: For some reason, the end of the comic, Dr. Dodo harnesses something from guano, like bat guano, in the caves to then come back into the present or whatever. So this is the whole thing. But in the middle of that, we had several spreads. One spread was on nuclear energy. One was on wind and solar and this and that. And so it was a nice way to talk about energy and how that works and conservation and so on. kind of tied together with this story. So the characters actually ended up working quite well. It's just, think, as you were saying, from a brand exercise, have to, like, if you think of these as branding properties like mascots or whatever, it does take time to kind of build interest in these characters. And yeah, maybe that was a mistake in not using existing Tinker characters. think we initially, before the first issue of Rainwave, I think we tried to kind of popularize these characters by putting out like a couple of one-off comics in Tinkle so that you know kids who are already reading Tinkle could then kind of see that okay there are these new characters and then you know they can engage with them in this new magazine. I don't know how well that worked. I think towards the end we were maybe selling like I'm not sure maybe like you know 20-30 thousand copies at most. Couldn't have been like much more than that I think. But then you know Arjun Thomas: So I'm not going to double click on that. There's a lot for me to wrap my head around. But it is really fascinating because, ⁓ it lends itself very nicely to both my interests of... Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: science as well as all things wacky. And I'm very, very curious about how you essentially have to marry those two things. So one is the book, at least each article talked about a specific concept, it talked about nuclear energy or particle physics or light or whatever. So the foundational elements of that arc ⁓ had to be grounded in science, in actual working science. And then you had to marry this with this really abstract, wacky, no framework Vinayak Varma: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: of reference characters that you had to of concoct, which is, I'll be coming back from the past. And these are really, really interesting story arcs by themselves without the ⁓ scientific aspect. So I'm kind of curious about how that process actually works, because you have to do two things. And it has to ⁓ culminate. There's a point of the story. The arc has to end somewhere where there is some learning. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: What is that process like? How long does it take? Over how many iterations? ⁓ Is it a lot of people dumping into that pot of creativity where someone on the side is basically saying, hey, you guys are straying away from the science? I'm very curious about how this messiness unfolds. Because it seems messy to me just thinking through the process, but maybe there's something that's really structured that you're accustomed to. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, so I think there is a kind of... ⁓ I mean, so there's this whole field of like narrative design. I think narrative design essentially kind of, it's this thing of like, how do you kind of use narrative to kind of tell what essentially just sort of very utilitarian kind of like pieces of communication that you need to get across, but how do you kind of build narratives and worlds to kind of make it a little more engaging. And I think it uses essentially like the same principles as like just classical, like, Aristotle and storytelling principles. So you have a certain narrative arc. You begin with a certain status quo and then there is a high point in that arc. And then in the end, there is a learning and so on. And then you come back to that status quo. now you have... ⁓ And these are kind of structures that are present in everything from the Odyssey to the Ramayana to whatever it is. ⁓ in the case of things like this where, again, the challenge here, for instance, I'll give you another example. So a couple of issues later, as I was saying, we did this thing on material science. so we were working with these scientists at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune. And they had a bunch of things that they wanted to talk about. But the challenge was trying to make it interesting for kids. they sent us a whole bunch of these concepts that like things that they were working on in their labs. ⁓ So, you you have to slightly kind of work at it a little backwards. So you kind of, you arrange these concepts and see what are like common elements. ⁓ And I think the idea that ⁓ like, you know, so we had a team that sort of worked on these things. The idea we came up with was, you know, essentially, uh, you know, forensic science is actually at the, at the base of it, it kind of, you know, there is a logic is a big part of it, but a lot of it is essentially chemistry. And we were working with the chemical laboratories. so, you know, so I was saying, you know, why don't we kind of do something where, uh, like we create a detective story, uh, because detective kind of, you know, use forensics to solve crimes. And we kind of create like a, like, uh, uh, this sort of elaborate crime kind of thing. And then, you know, include all these. ⁓ these things along the way as things to be solved and then which eventually leads them to kind of solve the whole thing. so this was, mean, I just kind of proposed this idea, but then there was this, think that particular story was, I think written by Rajita Gadhakar, who was one, like one of the senior editors in the team. And she kind of created this crazy story where like there were, ⁓ like there's a series of islands and like think it begins with like something happening on this one island. ⁓ I don't remember exactly what and then like this one of the characters has to solve these crimes. So they go island hopping on each of these islands. There's something strange like that's that's happening in each of these islands and everywhere like you know she has to solve these kind of things. But it's all I think at every island like what the problem that was being created was like one of the ⁓ I can't remember exact concepts that we were talking about. was way back, 12 years ago. All of it is up. We have a brainwave archive on archive.com. these are things that anyone can go and read. stuff like that, where we see what is a thread to this whole concept and ⁓ try and find a parallel thing in existing fiction and so on. And then we try and map it to that kind of ⁓ an idea and then kind of use just classical narrative techniques to build it out. know, same way, like the energy thing, was just like a standard, like back to the future kind of time travel thing. ⁓ know, that was just the framework within which you then kind of slot all of these. I don't know how successful we were in the sense of like, you know, like in terms of making it very organic, but, know, for the purposes of what we were doing at the end of the day, it's a... Arjun Thomas: Okay. Vinayak Varma: It's to reduce the didactic element that we bring in the story element. But was, think, know, again, once you have the characters, once you have the world in place, it's actually fairly easy. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: I can understand how once you've got those foundational elements that don't really change as much. and you've kind of understood the, I guess, you have to be an expert at storytelling in a way. So you need to know how to kind of start, get to the middle and then finish, and then connect it to the context of your media, which is in this case, kids of a specific age group. So you know the kind of the way the characters communicate and the little quirks that need to have to make them interesting, which I guess change, which is why Albert Einstein as a child makes more sense than bringing Albert Einstein as a, in his prime back to an audience of, I guess, Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: to 12 year old kids. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's kind of, it's sort of like, you know, ⁓ a good example of like how, how this has worked really well, I think, in, you know, in, publishing is actually the Asterix series. So the Asterix series is essentially this way. It begins with you open it, you know, like you have these characters that are shown and you have the character Bible right there on the first page. You know, it says like, you know, whatever Asterix indomitable warrior with whatever, and then get a fix who does this and, you know, or be like, you know, whatever. drank a lot of magic potion as a kid and this and that. then, so you immediately know, even if you pick up and like you've never read any Asterix comic, you picked up one of the comics in the middle, you know now these are the characters what they're about. You don't really need to know like, you know, the history of France or whatever to kind of get into it. But then once you get into these books, like they're actually talking like talking about real historical things that were happening at that point. It's just that it's very cleverly done. It's a lot of comedy. It's a lot of fun, but it's like you're learning history when you're reading this stuff. I think and every one of those follows the same mark. You know, there's a problem presented in the beginning and then like, you know, they go on a journey. There's like a quest and then, you know, it ends back in the village where there's a feast in the end. So, you know, you know, there's a very predictable ending that's going to happen. The musician gets thrown out and then everyone else sits and eats wild boar. So it's it's a repetitive thing. think kids like the repetition as well. So. Arjun Thomas: So, so... I guess if you have too much cognitive overload and you have to carry, for example, storylines which have too many characters or the story arc is too complicated or there too many forks that you need to keep ⁓ a memory of, which is, well, the fantasy ⁓ books that I'm used to reading when I got much older, you had more complicated story arcs, you sub arcs and subplots and it tended to get a bit of Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, all your wheel of time and all of that stuff. Arjun Thomas: Bye. Correct, so lot more heavy cognitive lifting that I guess doesn't lend itself to as much stickiness. You really have to be bought into those worlds and those story plots to really power through ⁓ and carve out, I guess, mind space for those kind subplots and remember them over a long period of time. So I'm curious about the last bit of this, which is ⁓ now I have an understanding of the creative process, the structure to kind of put ⁓ images to words and then marry a relatable story arc or an interesting story arc with foundational science concepts. But how did it land with the kids at the end? Because you said there were about 20,000 kind of readers in a country that's as large as India, where there is a culture, at least in that period, there was still a culture of a lot of reading, a lot of books. And again, Twinkle, I'm guessing the volumes were massive. ⁓ So, how do you as a designer know if ⁓ all the effort that you've put in to kind of madding these two worlds that shouldn't be sitting together, which is science and a bit of parody in a way, ⁓ if they land well with your audience or not? And if it's sticky enough for them to come back for the next issue, for example, using the asterisk ⁓ analogy that you used. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, mean, you know, the feedback system is something is the thing that kind of I think does sort of evolve over time. And I don't know whether we kind of ⁓ I mean, it lasted long enough for it to become like as robust as it could have been, like in the sense that I think Tinkle and so on, you know, they would receive like, you know, just an extraordinary amount of mail and things that read the mail and things that we did get like we used to get letters and things. And that's I think that's one of the ways in which magazines kind of get reader feedback. You you rely on Arjun Thomas: great. Vinayak Varma: like letters to the editor. And so there was that. And then, of course, we'd go to schools and kind of actively ask kids and things like that. There is a, I think, there's a danger also of relying too much on feedback from kids. ⁓ There is good feedback, but then like, Arjun Thomas: Mm-hmm. Vinayak Varma: At the end of the day, also slightly need to trust yourself in terms of your storytelling capabilities. ⁓ Because I think if you do it in an engaging enough way, I think it's the same thing that applies for kids or grownups. mean, if it's a fun story, think people will kind of enjoy it either way. And I think we did rely a fair bit even on... The thing is also we had a lot of seasoned storytellers in the publishing company itself. So we would also... there were the kids but then you these are people who had been working on children's content for years and years so we would send out like these copies every issue to also to you know editors of the various like you know ⁓ like a Tinkle and Amma Chitta Katha and all of that and they would all kind of read and give feedback as well and they knew you know they knew this market really well and I think ⁓ if they were happy with it I think we were kind of like you know fairly happy. The thing that I think we used to be always scared of was what the scientists would say ⁓ and because you know Arjun Thomas: Really? Vinayak Varma: Yeah, I mean in the advisory board and so on because we'd worry that they'd think we're making light of some of these things and maybe not kind of, or maybe the story was kind of obfuscating the core concept. Or actually the worst case scenario would have been to just make big errors, which we have, think one or two times we have sort of made some mistakes and then we had to go and correct it and things like that. But yeah, the feedback mechanism, I think it's something that It takes a few years, I think, to develop ⁓ a really robust kind of feedback mechanism from readers. I don't think we got there in the time that the magazine ran. Nowadays, I think things would be a lot different because of all the different sort channels of communication that exist outside of just the email and so on. So I don't know. don't know how it would... Arjun Thomas: Right. So I'm going to play probably devil's advocate. And I'm picking up on what you said just a couple of minutes ago about the, I guess, the board or the science board of advisors that you had. ⁓ Is the reason why there was... ⁓ so much of a focus on ensuring that they were happy with the end product, a function of the way the publishing houses operated in the past, and that was just the model. So you have these of advisory boards and then they played a heavy role or played some sort of heavy emphasis on whether the product was quote unquote good in the eyes of the publishing house. Was that the reason why that was so important? Because ⁓ I would think, especially given the slightly contrarian view that brainwave took, which was essentially to kind of instill the love of ⁓ science in kids, especially at that age, I would assume, again, this is just my perspective, getting the specifics right isn't as important as instilling a general love for the subject, because you have a lifetime and you have your regular school to kind of really pick up the specifics, would be unlikely for for brainwave to become, you know, where you learn quantum physics, in all its glory, or refractive index of the various wavelengths of light and stuff like that. I'm guessing the idea essentially, en masse, is to say that if... Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: And this is way I would kind of look at success metrics purely as an outsider listening to your story and understanding the context of brainwave is that in a classroom of 25 kids, before there was brainwave, there were seven that really wanted to know something about science, and now there 15. And isn't honestly that the only metric that really matters? And I'm just playing devil's advocate again, having no skin in the game. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Right. No, no, you're absolutely right. think I would probably advocate for the same level. ⁓ This is a thing that think the leaders in the organization, ⁓ above us, think the business people in particular were, think a little, ⁓ like the publishers and so on, think were kind of worried about this. thing that maybe even if we kind of put out like some wrong information or whatever it is, like, I don't know, if it might kind of have some sort of backlash, think, because, know, finally, if you are doing things like institutional sales and like school sales and things that you need to, you know, there's a trust element, right? So you need to convey that, okay, you know, there are like trusted names who are backing this thing. And we are not just sort of like, you know, Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Fair point. Vinayak Varma: talking through our ear ends, you know, ⁓ there is some credibility to this thing. So I think to convey that credibility is why we had to build this team. But at the end of the day, I mean, initially it did, think, so, I mean, that is a cynical way of looking at it, but, I think maybe in the beginning, like that proposal also did have a sort of cynical element to it. But I think once we kind of built out the team, because a lot of these are people who are actively sort of, spent a fair bit of time with and went and had conversations with and so on. some couple of people who ⁓ actually even taught me and things like that. there were this board of educators and scientists and so on. They very engaged after a point. there's one group in particular, there's this group of scientists who are running like a science outreach thing among various schools in Bangalore. They were called Curious City. I think now they have a huge science center somewhere in the outskirts of Bangalore. they were a particularly engaged group who kind of gave us a lot of input in each issue. And I think so there was a qualitative difference that they did make. And we didn't have clashes and things like that here and there. I think those were good. I think friction is always a good thing because I feel like friction sort of leads to growth. I think it kind of, know, like those kind of Arguments are always great in terms of making certain processes ⁓ neater and better over time. But yeah, think you're right in the sense that from the point of view of this being the gateway drug to science, I said earlier, but this being, as you were saying, that sort pretty castle of science that you're kind of showing to these kids, think these are maybe like... petty considerations. Maybe we didn't really need to kind of, you know, ⁓ look at the sort of nitty gritties. But I suppose in a very general sense, was a thing of conveying trust in the brand. ⁓ That was that was one of the main reasons. And I think just to kind of make ourselves feel good about the fact that we kind of got something right, because at the end of the day, as I was saying, you know, our entire editorial team, I don't think any one of us had like a science background. We were all like, you know, people from editorial and art backgrounds. And I think, you know, there were our entire editorial team, I don't think any one of us had like a science background. We were all like, you know, people editorial and art backgrounds. And I you know, there were I had people who were kind of writing and drawing comics for the magazine who also were people who had an interest in science but were not necessarily people with a science background. we had to sort of verify some of those details. if you're, know, like we had this series, ongoing series called Brinda the Tapeworm in which this tapeworm sort of like slowly makes its way as the ⁓ progresses makes its way up to the brain. And ⁓ eventually sort of like you have this I had people who were kind of writing and drawing comics for the magazine who also were people who had an interest in science but were not necessarily people with a science background. we had to sort of verify some of those details. if you're, know, like we had this series, ongoing series called Brinda the Tapeworm in which this tapeworm sort of like slowly makes its way like as the comic progresses makes its way up to the brain. And then eventually sort of like you have this Arjun Thomas: Ha ha ha ha. Vinayak Varma: this kid, this zombie kid who's being manipulated by this tapeworm and you know, and then all these crazy things happening. And the weird thing is even something as out there is that like we had to still make sure that the science is like somewhat accurate. So I don't know, maybe that maybe it does make the story a little better if it's a little grosser, but like, this kid, this zombie kid who's being manipulated by this tapeworm and you know, and then all these crazy things happening. And the weird thing is even something as out there is that like we had to still make sure that the science is like somewhat accurate. So I don't know, maybe that maybe it does make the story a little better if it's a little grosser, but like, Arjun Thomas: Sound. So I'm wondering, was this, ⁓ it was a science magazine that was trying to make science more relatable, right? I that was the idea. It still within the realm of science magazines, right? That's the way it was pitched, even to schools. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that. mean, think it's just to all like, in a broader sense, to just kind of make the idea of scientific thinking like, I mean, to give that more, I think to give that more context, think the thing is, think like, we kind of, you know, because we're put into these silos of like science and commerce and so on in school, that we lose sight of the fact ⁓ pretty early on that ⁓ science is essentially in everything. Arjun Thomas: So, Vinayak Varma: And everything we do has science to it. And I think this was just, the idea was just to highlight that, the fact that, like you are science, you are in science, you are participating in science like constantly. So. Arjun Thomas: Correct. So that. So my, think what I was trying to, I think, work my work, my thinking process through was, is it a question of where this this found a home. So it was a science magazine that was trying to make science more relatable. And as a result, had, you know, the conversations with the schools had to meet a certain, I guess, criteria or hygiene threshold. Your board had to have a certain ⁓ number of scientists and educators on board. So while it was the theme was the differentiator was fun, the gateway was still the science, right? I to get into all these schools and that was the conversation with the educators. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Arjun Thomas: But if this was marketed as purely, let's say, another tinkle, another fun kind of magazine, where you just so happen to learn science along the way, would you think that the approach would have been very, very different? Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: and the longevity of the product might have been. Because at end of the day, kids really don't... As we get older, because of neuroelasticity, we start thinking more rigidly. ⁓ Creative types like you, probably not as much, but people like us... ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Mm. No, man. You're very much so. I'm pretty sure. I think my students in college and so on are probably like have much more interesting ideas than I do. Yeah. So you're right. mean, our thinking does get sort of ossified as we get older. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: as we get older. the point I'm trying make is that if you kind of visualize a gateway to the world, and you said it right, science is just the world, if you visually think about this as a huge house with about 10 doors, we think about science and one, and economics and one, and these are the gateway, the entries into that world. They're all the same world. But a kid thinks very differently, right? So we might have 10 doors, a kid has 1,000 doors. They really don't care about which door they open. They really care that their wonders, once they open the door and what's on the other Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: side. So I'm wondering if reframing this as just another tinker and doubling down on the fact that it's just a cool comic and that's where the virality was. So virality in our generation and even not so long ago was not Instagram and Facebook. It's basically a friend looking at you reading a comic book or a book magazine and saying, hey, what is that? Can I borrow it? And that's why virality, that's the OG virality. And that's probably, you would have probably seen Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah. True. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arjun Thomas: ⁓ sales at a far higher level I don't know I could be completely wrong because it's never happened that we'll never know but I'm curious Vinayak Varma: Yeah, I mean, I think you're right in the sense. So, you know, I often ask myself this thing of, so for me, for me, Brainwave was actually one of the like the most fun things that I've worked on. And I think in many ways it was probably one of the most successful things just in terms of not, not as a, like in terms of sales, like not from the business side of things, but I think it was one of the most successful things I've worked on in terms of like creating content that kind of works in a certain way. And there was a lot of work that went into that. I often think of, if I were to kind of go back and start, even now, if I were to start a magazine for kids again, how would I sort of approach it? And I think I probably wouldn't even kind of keep it limited to science. I would probably think of it as a more sort of, maybe knowledge in a very broad way. ⁓ where, know, because while I was talking about, know, not wanting to kind of, you know, conform to these silos that we talk about in ⁓ education, like we, at the end of the day, by calling ourselves a science magazine, we did sort of put ourselves into a silo. ⁓ You know, whereas there are so many other, like, know, even like, you know, historiography in general for like science, it kind of like, you have to then think of like, you know, which we did have, like, we kind of talked about a lot of science history within the magazine, but that kind of has to, like, lives in the broader context of human history. And then that kind of, you know, ⁓ that kind of sits in the broader context of like how geographical forces like, and, know, kind of like geographical kind of things in like things that inform the geography of the planet kind of work a certain way. And then, you know, about how humans have moved across the planet and all kinds of things. There's a whole lot of There are so many layers to the experience of living that I think we kind of by talking, by saying this is a science thing, we are kind of limiting ourselves even there. So I would have sort of broadened that out and then maybe use narrative to kind of talk about all of this. And ⁓ you're right. I don't think like when Asterix comics were being written, for instance, I don't think like... Goshkini and others or whoever those two guys were like, who wrote and illustrated the things. don't know whether they were sitting and like, kind of talking to like history professors and, you know, trying to get all the specific details, right? Even though interestingly now, apparently in France, like I've heard from somewhere that in France, I think like many of these Asterix comics are actually used in history lectures, like history courses as material. ⁓ So, so it can, I think it can, you know, a good narrative actually can work the other way where like you create a great story, it can eventually end up as part of some syllabus. But yeah, by kind of, you know, drawing like on a syllabus or kind of trying to kind of append that that may not be the best sort of ⁓ an approach. So I don't, I don't know. mean, these are, it's a very, it's a, it's definitely a question to kind of think about. I, I like in hindsight, you know, I'm sure I would have like we would, you know, and also without some of the sort of organizational constraints that were there, maybe we would have gone in a very different direction. if, for instance, it was an independent magazine that was created just by a bunch of writers and illustrators, maybe we would have kind of taken an extremely different approach. We may not even had a science advisory board or whatever. We would have maybe just picked topics that we were personally interested in and then tried to do something fun out of that. But again, Arjun Thomas: Yeah. Good. Vinayak Varma: To play devil's advocate to that devil's advocate scenario, think I also do think that, you know, in design, it's something I always tell my students as well. I constraints are also very good. Like having constraints, yeah, like having constraints, I think, you know, forces you to think creatively to kind of make things work within that. ⁓ you know, we kind of right now getting through to the end of like this publication design course. And so, you know, all these kids are kind of putting together like this ⁓ Arjun Thomas: Important, correct. Vinayak Varma: magazine for themselves. they have this college magazine called White Space. they, you know, this one bunch of designers are kind of design students are putting together the next issue of that. And, and they each have like their own spread and every spread is like completely wildly different, you know? So, and so, you know, one of the things I have to then this, there was an advocate thing I have to go in and say, listen, you know, what if like you had only one typeface to work with and you had only black and white to work with. ⁓ like, you know, how would you be creative within that kind of thing? And I think that is like, you know, it's much more challenging in many ways, but it's also much more fun and you end up with much, much more interesting results than if you had access to every color, every typeface, every layout possibility. And then, know, like it's just this explosion. ⁓ Though the other side of it works as well. So I don't know. I mean, it's a hard question to answer, but I, my only, I think my Arjun Thomas: It's complicated, like it's complicated. It's complicated. It's life. Vinayak Varma: The answer is complicated. I don't know, I think is the answer. Arjun Thomas: Yeah, but I mean there are two things I want to pick up on. One obviously is talking about the kids that you kind of work with. But before we get there, something that you mentioned that I relate ⁓ to quite a bit, which is the world that is so interconnected. If anyone has talked to a four-year-old or a five-year-old, you realize after the third why or the fourth why, you've completely changed the conversation structure. So you start talking about one thing and then you're maybe five, Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: five worlds removed away from where you started. And I think that shows how the mind is. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: We self-impose constraints, which is good because it forces critical thinking or pressure tests your thinking style. But on the other hand, if left unconstrained, the human mind kind of wanders. And it kind of wanders less as we grow older, I think, in some fashion for most of us. And striking that balance or riding the third rail, as they call it, between these two extremes of human behavior, I think, is probably where most of the magic Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: I want to touch upon speaking about four year old angry kids, angry Aku and the story there because it's kind of fascinating. We talked about the design process overall and I'm kind of like narrow focus to kind of, know, we talked about brainwave as a format, but again, it's a lot of experts coming together. It's a melting pot across multiple, you know, concepts, multiple spheres. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: storylines, multiple story arcs, multiple worlds, all kind of changing with each release. But when comes to Angry Akko to the singular book, what was the story behind that? And I find that fascinating for a couple of reasons. again, it deals with the complexity of human emotions from the view of a child. Anyone who's had a young child knows ⁓ the extremes, ups and downs that we kind of used on a daily basis. And what's really fascinating, well not fascinating but interesting for me, is that it ended up in the Nobel Peace Museum and I wanted to the story behind that. Like how does an Indian story about an angry kid, like how did that come to be and how did it end up in the Nobel Peace Museum? Like what is the story behind that? Vinayak Varma: Yeah Thanks. So the Nobel museum thing was just, mean, I don't know, actually, it wasn't, I think, any part of my doing really. I'll answer that first, because we'll get that out of the way. Esther Duflo, who was one of the economics laureates, she was actually working with the Pratham Foundation, which is sort of like a sister organization-ish to Pratham Books, which is the publishing company. So I think when... And she'd been working with them for a while. I think they kind of wanted to, when I said Uflo was given the Nobel Prize, think the Nobel Museum has, how it works essentially is every time, every year, ⁓ the laureates are asked to kind of give these artifacts, ⁓ which are in some way related to their work, which are then sort of kept in the museum for posterity as their contribution to the thing. And so she picked like, I think three books, ⁓ which were published by Pratham Books. ⁓ And one of which was Angry Aku, this book. I think maybe it was, at that point, I think it was purely based on like the fact, like I think just, you know, how many of these copies were sort of out there and being read. And even that, I think, was a factor of like internally, had, they used to have these big sort of reading marathon kind of events every year. And Angry Aku was that year, I think it was part of this one of these big reading events that happened. you know, it just sort of, Arjun Thomas: Okay. Vinayak Varma: like snowballed into this thing and then ended up over there. But it began as a thing where... Arjun Thomas: So ⁓ it's a right time, right place kind of ⁓ coincidence kind of thing. If I were you, I'd try to find out the story because it would be really nice if there was something else to it. If you had a four year old niece that read it or probably too abstract an example but I was just curious about how that specific book landed up. Vinayak Varma: That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah, very much. I, it is very much modeled on a four year old niece actually. So, so actually, I mean, so I have a niece called Akira and like the, like the kid in that is essentially sort of modeled on her at that point. Though she was far from being an angry kid. was a very sweet kid. But, Arjun Thomas: So you do it to a logical extreme. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Yeah, kind of. So I mean, that kind of came about because, know, ⁓ these, so how a lot of these children's publishers work is, you know, they have, on the one hand, they have a large part of their like catalog, which is dedicated to like general books that, you know, authors propose, you know, editors just sort of solicit and like they're just great stories, like fun stories or whatever, then they have certain things which are like needs that they have to fulfill like within the market where like there are very specific areas like, you know, for instance, you know, you have alphabet books that, you know, will teach kids how to ⁓ like, you know, teach kids the alphabet. Like, and then you have, ⁓ you have like multilingual books that are, you know, helping kids sort of navigate between two languages or whatever it is. There's a whole lot of different ways in which you, and so, and you have science books that are talking about science concepts in a simple way. These guys wanted to ⁓ start a series which was ⁓ on emotional intelligence. ⁓ so they asked me if, and I think because I had a sort of a background in doing this kind of thing where like, also because of brainwave and stuff. And in fact, going all the way back to like the first picture book that I made, just fresh out of college, the first book that I made was actually a science, again, it was a. It was a story that was built around like a science concept where like, you know, I kind of, you know, talked about gravity by using, ⁓ using a seesaw as a, as a device, as like a narrative device. So, you know, so I had some experience in doing that kind of creating, like using these narrative elements to kind of tell these, these kinds of concepts. So they asked if I would do something related to emotional intelligence. And ⁓ so I kind of looked at this thing of anger. Because, you know, like, because, you know, as grownups, you know, we all sort of now we have all these methods of sort of dealing with anger, you know, you if you fly off the handle or whatever it is, you know, you know that, okay, you have to like, you know, there are ways in which you meditate or do your mindfulness practice or go and exercise or whatever it is, however you're kind of dealing with it. Kids, I think, you know, ⁓ there's a lot of sort of, you know, ⁓ unchanneled anger where you don't know how to direct it and it kind of goes out, flies out in all different ways and you know, and then they often get blamed for this thing where it's only because they end up kind of throwing something or breaking something or whatever and then parents will feel bad and you know, maybe others will blame them for doing something bad but then at the base of it is just like this sort of uncontrolled anger that maybe if it was channeled in a particular way, it could have been resolved in a more sort of equanimous way. So I kind of did a little bit of reading ⁓ from reading ⁓ of like a bunch of these essays and things that were written by child psychologists on how anger is resolved. And the process is fairly straightforward, which is essentially, you first check to see if they're hangry, like in the sense of like, they hungry and like, are they thirsty or hungry or whatever it is, and you solve that first because often that's just the case. They're just hungry, that's why they kind of, and that manifests as anger. or if they're tired or whatever it is. So you resolve those and then you kind of see if there are any deeper issues. Was there an incident like earlier today that kind of set this off or whatever? And of course, I'm not talking about, I this is for a broader segment. I'm not talking about like very specific psychological issues or whatever it is. I'm not talking about people who may, kids who may fall on a certain. emotional spectrum or whatever it is because there there are deeper challenges and I think you know there one has to work with like a clinical psychologist but this is this book is just simply at a very broad level in a very general sense so ⁓ so then you yeah so then you see if there was an inciting incident that kind of made the kid angry and then you kind of try and resolve that and then finally I think you know this is this idea of creative catharsis you know like ⁓ sort of you know in a cathartic way kind of getting the anger out by by kind of engaging in some kind of a creative activity. ⁓ So, you you can paint or, you know, draw or dance or whatever it is and kind of like sing or whatever and kind of get that out. So it's a very straightforward process. And to my mind, this book was also very, very straightforward. It just begins with an angry kid and then, you know, who's being taken home by her father and... Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Vinayak Varma: Along the way, know, like this kid is just angry at everything. And then the father first, you know, feed feeds us some like some vadas and like some some buttermilk and things like that. And then then kind of just ask us if anything happened in school. Then something did happen in school. So he kind of tries to resolve that. And then in the end kind of gives us some drawing material to draw with and so on. Very basic, very straightforward. I didn't think much would come out of this book. But I mean, as you say, it is the right place, right time kind of thing, because that book, ⁓ I think it kind of started getting like the Pratham Books is a massive like publishing organization where you know these books are sort of sold at a very low cost to schools everywhere, particularly to low cost primary schools, the government schools and things like that. So it went out as part of their kind of thing and went to a lot of schools and I think in those schools it did kind of help a fair bit because that so that was the first sort of place where it found some element of success because I started getting teachers writing to me from Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Vinayak Varma: Various places and you know people who are like part of these Teach for India things and so on writing to me and saying, listen, you know, this has been, you know, we've been using your book and it's working really well because you know, lot of these in a lot of these low cost schools like these are there are a lot of these kids who of like, you know, laborers and people like that who kind of, know, aren't aren't earning a lot. They live really tough lives. And and then often what happens is, you know, they live like obviously they live paycheck to paycheck and when the paycheck comes in often, know, these, these people are in like, you know, such a sort of terrible emotional state that they may be alcoholic or drinking or whatever. And then they coming, coming back home and taking it out on the kids or family or whatever. And so all these kids, like a lot of these kids are very troubled. They naturally had a lot of anger in them, which is, you know, because I mean, Arjun Thomas: right. Vinayak Varma: Like we are, I it's a deeply unequal society here. like, and, know, these people really sort of bear the brunt of it. And, and, and these kids were really being affected. And I think, you know, having, like having something that was kind of relatable, I think that was working at that level. But then, then of course, you know, they had this reading, I keep forgetting the name. It's there's some reading challenge or something that they had this big kind of thing. And I think that was one of the first years when they just kind of started it off. So I think because of which they kind of included a bunch of these Bollywood actors to kind of as readers for these books. So they picked two books to kind of read. one was a book by the writer Meera Ganapathy and the other was this angry or cooling my book. And so yeah, there were these like Bollywood actors and actors like, know, kind of reading this book and that kind of had a snowball effect and it became like a big sort of a thing. But it was a fairly straightforward book. maybe it was because of that sort of, you know, Arjun Thomas: Great. Vinayak Varma: popularity which is largely pushed by Pratham books is sort of this big ⁓ marketing mechanism that they had that maybe that's why it ended up like in Esther Duflo's hands, I don't know. But as far as things that I've written, I think it was a very utilitarian book. It served the purpose. Arjun Thomas: Yeah. But I mean that's what I find, but that... True, but I mean that... It's interesting the way life kind of plays out, right? Something that you view as utilitarian can resonate so deeply in, like you said, the brainwave seems as a creative endeavor, a far more complicated thing to do, but something like angry aku, which is in your mind as a designer, as a creator, a fairly straightforward exercise, really lands very differently and then goes to show you that you really don't know how things are received. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ very true, yeah. Arjun Thomas: It might be something really simple, but it speaks to something I guess so human in us and anyone who's had a child who's gone through this phase is instantly relatable and ⁓ even though it might seem super evident, know, check if they're hungry, ⁓ ask them if something happened during the day ⁓ and find a way for them to creatively take that anger out whether it's spinning like a top or running like a mad person. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: person or screaming or kicking a ball, it's something that think any parent relates with and that's probably the reason why I guess it landed so well. I'm sure the Bollywood thing played a role in it but that's great for PR value but you wouldn't be getting the kind of messages from teachers and guess parents just because a Bollywood star kind of read about it. There has to be something foundational about it. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I'm very grateful. have to say, I, maybe I think I'm possibly I sounded a bit churlish while I was talking about this, but I'm extremely grateful for everything that happened. And I'm, I'm so glad that it's, you know, people are using it ⁓ in a, meaningful way. I just wish that, you know, some of this, like some of this could be diverted to some of my more niche books, which are, know, which are like kind of little more lyrical, little more, little nicer, more, you know, the kind of things that I like, I, you know, the kind of stories that I like organically as a, as a writer want to tell, but those are the ones that end up kind of like not getting very visible. But maybe I think there's a lesson in that. I think the broader lesson probably is that if you are actually solving a problem that society ⁓ at large is sort of dealing with, then I think that probably is a better way of pushing your time, I suppose. I don't Yeah, really. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: Market signals will tell you everything you need to know about that, right? And it's perfectly okay writing for a niche because you're doing it to satisfy a creative itch. ⁓ I famously, not so famously. My daughter yesterday was asking me for some random toy and she didn't know what she wanted. her basic approach to this was, just show me a bunch of things, I'll tell you what I want when I see it. I think that philosophy translates pretty well to everything in life. We don't know really what we want. ⁓ The things that we want, the things that we know, ⁓ we think we want are probably not the things that we want. Vinayak Varma: Yeah That's classic. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: want are not things that people actually end up wanting and I guess it translates literally into your creative baby is not getting the same kind of I guess eyeballs that very basic angry Aku books do but then I guess that's life. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a lesson in there for me. I have to unpack it a little bit. Maybe that's the kind of stuff I need to focus more on. Arjun Thomas: So I think it's a great segue over to the next generation of babies and for people who are listening to this on audio I'm kind of aircoating. No disrespect. It's the kids that you teach Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: and I say kids because I think we're old enough to call them kids. ⁓ how is that? ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah, very much. mean, listen, we're like a good 20 years older than more than 20 years older than. Arjun Thomas: is up. Yeah, so I think we have some liberties there. How has design discipline changed from when you graduated from school? Because it's in a way come a full circle, right? So you studied, you studied design, you studied a lot of the core foundational things that you're teaching today. You've had the opportunity to, across different, I said, multimodal formats, develop that muscle, even though music is a fairly new one for you. ⁓ How do you see that now back in the classroom as the one teaching? What's changed? Has anything changed? Vinayak Varma: ⁓ I mean, everything has changed, I think. ⁓ So the thing is, you know, this thing of like talking about multidisciplinary and so on. mean, back then, ⁓ that wasn't a requirement, firstly. You you could specialize. could go down one stream and comfortably kind of stay in that stream for the rest of your life. Now, you know, if you look at like the average sort of JD, like the job description out there for like designers, they want you to do everything. Every young designer who is being hired has to be a good graphic designer, has to be a good videographer, and has to understand social media, has to be able to edit, and a whole bunch of things. ⁓ So expectations have changed a fair bit, I think, as the world itself has moved towards this multidisciplinary thing. And I think as social media has also pushed things in a certain way. ⁓ Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Vinayak Varma: But I think there's a lot more pressure on these kids now compared to how things were back then. I do think things were a lot easier. A, because just the sheer number of designers who are out there now versus what it was back then. back then we had maybe four or maximum five design schools in India. I'm assuming that maybe that's like a... follows a certain trend around the world as well, I don't know. But in India, at least, we had only four or five design schools, which meant that think the number of fresh graduates that were coming out every year would have been probably like, I think maybe not more than about 100, 200 people knew every year 200, 300 people at most. Now you have, that's the, like now you have. I mean, some hundreds of design schools everywhere. then each of these design schools, like in a year, the intake is like 250, 300 students in a year. Like the college I teach at, the intake is now like around 300. Whereas in my batch, like when I, the foundation batch when I joined college was like 25 people, think, or 28 or something like that. So that's like, you know, an exponential increase in the number of people who are, and so I can't even imagine like the number of students who are out there right now, like, mean, fresh, fresh graduates who are looking for jobs. ⁓ And then of course, you know, I mean, the elephant in every room right now, which is AI ⁓ has kind of changed things, you know, in a massive way because, because what AI has done essentially is, you you know, there's this So a period of like, I think about five to 10 years in which you're sort of building your skills where you're making mistakes, you're kind of working under people and they kind of give you room to make mistakes as well. They carry a little bit of that load and kind of let you kind of experiment a little bit. There's a mentorship kind of, you know, period in the first five or 10 years where you're working under senior designers and you you help them with the smaller tasks and then you kind of learn on the job and get better as you go along. That part of the process, I think, has been kind of taken out by Generative AI now because what Generative AI is doing is it's kind of doing that, like that job, the job of the junior designer in many ways. Which means that, you know, think what the design, which is why I think, and which is probably one of the reasons why a designer now needs to know everything and do everything, you so that like the parts of the job that are now being outsourced to AI ⁓ can be kind of, you ⁓ like maybe they can focus on other areas. I don't know. I really don't know how it works, but it seems like there's a lot of pressure because A, they don't know where their jobs are coming from and when they do have the job, ⁓ do they have the kind of luxury of like learning skills slowly over the course of five or 10 years that we all had? ⁓ As I saying, you know, like the process is essentially the same and it is an iterative kind of process in learning these skills, but then time is a big factor in all of this. So I had the luxury of like learning a lot of these skills on the job over the course of like 10, 15 years, which I don't know like now, you know, whether they do have that kind of you know, thing. So yeah, it has changed considerably. And I ⁓ do kind of sense that pressure, like, you know, even when I'm in the classroom ⁓ from the students as well. And often they, I think they also sort of question very rightly so, like they question the relevance of a lot of the things that are being taught as well because, you know, are some of these sort of core disciplines even relevant anymore, you know, when we're kind of talking about like the nitty gritties of like typography and saying, you know, like, and you know, how you move this thing like a couple of pixels this way and so that you align it in this way and this and that and whatever based on, you know, like tried and tested concepts, like maybe, you know, like, you know, another year they're just going to like... Arjun Thomas: Yeah. Vinayak Varma: prompt when they're out there, like this is going to use a prompt to kind of get all that figured out. know, align all, left align all the content on this and then make sure that, you know, the visual balance is correct. And then, you know, the AI does it for them. You know, maybe that's where they're headed into. like, so are we kind of wasting their time? So these are relevant questions to be asking, I think even from a curriculum building, the curriculum building side of things. But at the same time, you know, I feel like if we're not kind of teaching these things in college, then where are they going to learn it? Like the apocalyptic, you know, the sort of, you know, the scenario basically, I think like my dystopian future scenario is like, what if, you know, the undersea cables are cut or whatever, and suddenly the internet goes off or whatever, and then like, you how are these guys going to learn how to do these things? Arjun Thomas: Hahaha How will we survive? I it's very valid questions and I think it is, we're living through a very complicated ⁓ time our lives, there's a massive disruption ⁓ and when you think you're getting settled, the ground shifts under your feet yet again ⁓ and happening ⁓ so ⁓ and such a rapid pace, I think a lot of people are struggling to find their footing ⁓ as were ⁓ and in the context design, speaking about generative ⁓ AI. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: Is it a question of now people moving away from being creators in its purest sense and I'm not talking about creators in the context of content creators online, but creators of design, unique ⁓ art and unique language, ⁓ unique books and articles and stuff like that, to someone who's more an orchestrator. And that's what I'm thinking because these tools essentially are a way for you to orchestrate. You can still get the end output. ⁓ ⁓ but the creative process is no longer as clunky as you articulated earlier in our conversation, which is it's an iterative, make a lot of mistakes, go down paths you had not thought about. ⁓ This way you get tactically to an answer, whatever that is, a lot faster, a lot more efficiently, but then the question then becomes is efficiency the main objective, especially in the context of design as a Vinayak Varma: Thank Mm. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: as a specialization. Vinayak Varma: Also, whose idea of efficiency? think that's the question to be asked. I used to have a lot of resentment when these generative AI's first came out and I used to kind of like, I don't use them at all. and because I also, because I kind of like in certain areas, at least I've honed my skills enough to a point where I just prefer to use, like techniques that I already have in place rather than, because it doesn't really get me the results that I may kind of imagine in my head. The big, you know, thing for I think most like visual, ⁓ like people in the visual arts, I think the big thing is always, are you able to accurately convey what you have in your mind, like on paper in a sort of relatively direct way? And over time, I think I've gotten better at it. So I still find like generative, I don't use them at all. ⁓ But I think, you know, I feel personally, I feel there's a lot of value to process. Sorry. Arjun Thomas: Sorry, I just wanted to double click on that. So you mentioned something very interestingly, is ⁓ two things. as a concept, you want to stay away from it. But the second is that you do a far better job of translating what's in your head down on paper. So is it a question of that? Vinayak Varma: Yeah, yeah. Arjun Thomas: Or the fact that philosophically you believe that you shouldn't be using it because you're a purist? is it somewhere in the grey area between? Like why do you believe generative AI ⁓ isn't something that you would use? Vinayak Varma: ⁓ There's a bit of both. you know, I do think there are like, ⁓ you know, ethical issues that need to be addressed for sure, which is that, like, for instance, you know, when generative AI launched, I'm an early adopter in most cases, I enjoy using technology, I enjoy using new technologies, and I try and kind of pick them up as soon as they're out and kind of, particularly if it's related to my field, I like kind of toying around with all these things. And I did, know, when when mid journey launched, I think the first two or three days I kind of signed on to that beta thing and I kind of used it a few times. had like projects running at that point and I thought, okay, maybe this can help as a sort of visualization tool. there's this, for example, there was this one illustration I was doing which was kind of set on in this sort of coastal village ⁓ in England. This is for this science fiction magazine. ⁓ and so this is like an illustration that was going to go along with this short story that someone had written and obviously I don't know what a coastal English town looks like because I've been to the UK but I've not been to a coastal town aside from like if you can call London a coastal town then I don't know but like I haven't been anywhere like to one of those places so I don't know what it looks like I have no clue so And then I started looking at image references, but then there were certain things that were lacking. So I thought, okay, maybe let me try out this new technology and see what it looks like. And the results it produced were like kind of crap. And I was like, okay, maybe this will get better as time goes on, whatever, let it kind of thing. But I didn't know at that point how it worked at all. So I started reading the first few days about how this whole thing worked. And then over the first few weeks, were all these revelations of where the datasets came from. So my thing was like, I think I would have actually been okay with these things existing and know, whatever, like people using them the way they're using it. If for instance, the data sets were entirely constructed of ⁓ out of copyright material. And that's very easy to do because you know, human history spans like 200,000 years or whatever it is, like we, know, like copyright thing expires like 60 years ago. So anything from beyond 60 years. Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Vinayak Varma: is actually like, you know, is there for the taking. So, and all of that can actually build a really rich and textured kind of data set. Why not just use that? Why do you have to use like, but what was happening was a lot of the content that was being put into these data sets was of like living artists ⁓ and exact styles were being replicated and people like people I knew in the, even like. People I personally know in the illustration and industry and in literature and so on, their work was being sort of used for this and sort of replicated. And they were losing out on work because of it. And I think it did sort of industry-wide, it kind of created a lot of resentment as well. ⁓ you know, and in a situation where as it is, know, illustrators in general don't get compensated very well. I mean, the pay scales are pretty low. You really have to hustle to make a living. And I think a lot of people who are sort of senior in the industry had really hustled for years and years to get to a place where things were happening. Like in my own case, my first sort of international projects had just sort of happened over the last like two years before up to those two years of like when generative AI had kind of come along. And I just started getting recognized like I was being nominated for like some awards and this and that. And then suddenly it all disappeared. Everything went away because this kind of came in. So there was, I mean, you know, there was that side of things, but you know, whatever that like maybe at some level that couldn't be avoided. But I think what could have been avoided was like the data sets where, what was being ⁓ like taken from. I think that was one ethical kind of issue that I did have with it. ⁓ What, sorry, what is the other part of the question that you had? So that was, that was. Arjun Thomas: ⁓ No, basically, essentially... in your mind was it a function of the technology was not good enough, it could not visualize what was in your head, or a function of ethical considerations, clearly on the ethical side, but what if, and it obviously did not also translate anywhere close to what was in your head down on paper. Vinayak Varma: ⁓ right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the other thing, you so I do have something to say on that, which is that, you know, for me, process is actually like really important. And I think one side of it is that, you know, like the process will obviously, if you do it well enough, it can kind of, you know, take what you imagine and kind of put it down on, on to, in a physical form in a very efficient way, if you're, if you're good enough. But, ⁓ but the other side of it is, you know, you're talking about our process is messy. And, and, and I love that about like the artistic, like the creative process, because The messiness of it ⁓ creates these happy accidents that take you off into different ⁓ tangents that you may not have explored initially. And it'll get you into these... And maybe your artwork will end up in a place that you hadn't considered at all when you started out. And I find that all the time, even when I'm writing a short story or whatever it is, I have a fairly clear ⁓ structure in mind to begin with. But then as I write it and as the character kind of, you know, ⁓ becomes more fleshed out, suddenly the character might make a decision that I hadn't thought of or like go off into a different space. And that may, you know, kind of take the entire story in a direction that I had never considered. And I think what happens when you kind of prompt something to like give you a result is that it's giving you a finished result. It's taking away the middle part of like that bridge, you know, and it's kind of directly dropping you to the other side. And what it does in that process, feel, it kind of removes all these other considerations that might have developed, like if you had followed the traditional process. You're not at all considering a whole bunch of other possibilities. Like you have been given this sort of preset kind of thing. This one possibility has been given to you in a nice, neatly packaged way. And suddenly you stop thinking about everything else. And then that's the path that you're going to take going forward. ⁓ I don't know, maybe there are other people who perfected this process and I want to leave some room for doubt there. I don't know, because I don't use these AIs, don't know whether I'm misunderstanding the process. But for me, I put a lot of value in the sketching aspect of things, just sketching a lot. for like in the visual art kind of thing, but also, you know, also in, just writing, like I, just copiously, like I still, you know, take notes all the time on paper, but like I have tons of notebooks all over the place. And, and I just, I just like writing by hand. And I think sometimes organically, there's a lot that comes up in that process, which just doesn't, like, if I were to just take that same line and then kind of prompt it. And then, then I have this thing suddenly, my mind just goes into that. And I stopped thinking about everything else. Whereas when I'm That slow process of sitting and writing, I don't know, it just kind of takes me in all kinds of interesting directions. So there's that part of it as well. Does that make sense? Arjun Thomas: And you're mentioning, no it absolutely does and I guess the... ⁓ The human condition is a complex one, as they say. we're an 8 billion and change people in the world and not everyone thinks the same actually, most people think very differently. But it could also be a function of the creator mentality versus the consumer or the market mentality. So what you're talking about is the process of creation and I know it's difficult to, because everything is so interwoven, it's difficult to kind of create clean breaks between life, ⁓ especially because livelihoods are involved. So I completely get the aspect of the market moving to a point where it's disrupting people's livelihoods. that is in a way nothing to do with if you think about it, very clinically, it has nothing to do with the creator process. Basically, the market has moved on and certain skill sets are no longer valuable. Right. So if I look at it purely from that clinical cold perspective, and that that has happened every single Vinayak Varma: Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: time I think ⁓ human beings have evolved. You move from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy and then to the computer age and so on. There were a lot of industries that were left en masse ⁓ on the side of the road. Not fun for them at all. I think we're going through that phase today. The only difference is that ⁓ I think the creative, because of generative AI, the creative industry was the tip of the spear. I think your industry, if I can say your felt the front of it first and earliest. What you're seeing now is a far more vociferous opposition because there are other industries that are being affected en masse. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, vibe coding and all of that stuff that's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: be a massive industries and massive layoffs and all the sectors. So there's inherently a lot of noise in the space. if you go back to what you basically said, I'm trying to kind of unpack the problem as it were, ⁓ is that creatively you still have the avenues you have, which is you can still take a pen and pencil and you can still write and you can still create art. ⁓ The market again will determine where the value is. And cynically, that's the way it's always been in a capitalist kind of society, which is, Where do I make money? And I think the bigger question is the question of authenticity, which is ⁓ one, ⁓ what do you define as authentic? Because even without computers, you had human beings that parody others. Like you mean you have people who ⁓ copied great designers in the past, where your literary style also evolves as a function of the great authors you've read as part of your career. Everything influences us. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, that's terrific. Arjun Thomas: We are the sum of our parts. All our experiences in life form a unique individual. So I think the question more broadly, at least for me, is can you differentiate authentic versus inauthentic? And the second question is does the market really care? So that's a sad reality. Vinayak Varma: So, yeah. Yeah, well, the second question is easier to answer. think the market probably doesn't care. Maybe not. I don't know. Arjun Thomas: Well, I'll push back on that. I certain aspects of the market do care. It depends on what format. ⁓ For example, you have... Generative AI content like videos and all which are so so so hyper real on flooding all these Instagram reels But there's a reason why in my in my small little bubble the podcast world the long form has a certain function that people listen to really long Conversations and the one of the reasons I started this is with is human beings with all their imperfections in this conversation is not impossible But kind of difficult to replicate with AI and I place a value on Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: that kind of content. So it might be a niche, it might be a small subsection. Most people are happy with 10 second reels, which are AI generated. yeah, just food for thought at least. I'm also double clicking on this conversation as you're talking about it. Vinayak Varma: Yeah. No, no, you'd be surprised. think, I mean, in the sense that, I mean, or maybe you wouldn't be surprised, the conversations like this, you know, I have a long commute to college and it takes me about an hour and an hour and a half to get there. And each way, like it's just podcasts like this that I, you know, I just put on one really long podcast and then I kind of listen to it the whole way through. And I like that. I like the little imperfections. I like the random tangents that people take. I like the fact that, you you start at a certain place and then you end up. somewhere completely different. And I think that is like that messiness of like being human is what really sort of translates in many ways as you know, what is authentic, I guess. And I think that is for me also, you know, how I think about not the market consideration side of things, the other side of things like, you know, authenticity in general, as a creative person or whatever. I think like, You know, this question of whether, you know, it's the same when, you know, like a data set is fed into a generative AI versus all the influences and all the things that you've been reading and watching and so on, that kind of ending up in what you are writing. I think there is a distinction to be made because ⁓ this on the one hand, you I think of it sort of like as almost like a glorified search engine in a way, but it's basically collating a bunch of things and in a very mechanistic way, it's kind of producing a thing based on a prompt. I don't think the human mind works the same way because the question is, so what is the quality of the filter? Because in each case, there is a filter. The generative AI is a filter that's filtering all of this and putting something out there, like a distilled thing. As humans, we are also filters. We are filtering a whole bunch of things and then putting it out there. how we are different as filters is that on the one hand, there is all this knowledge and information that we are, and in that regard, we are similar maybe to these algorithms. But I think where we are dissimilar is that at the same time as filters, we are also filters of experiences that we've had. We've kind of lived. We have lived experience, we've kind of lived life a certain way, we've had all these sort of interactions with different people, we have a certain emotional sort of life going on and there's a perspective and a way in which we see the world. And I think that really counts for something which I think that the computer doesn't give you in the sense that it... The way the light is filtering through my window through the curtain and kind of landing in a certain place or whatever it is. And then when I think about that, you know, maybe, you know, it kind of resonates in a like, and kind of, you know, like there's a memory that I think of which, you know, like maybe something 15 years ago, there was another space where the light filtered the same way. And then that makes me think of something else. And then I kind of collate some of these and kind of create like a piece of writing that kind of maybe I a poem about it or whatever it is. But these are unique. experiences that are unique only to me that I'm kind of using language and know, expressive words to kind of, you know, combine and kind of create something out of. And I don't know whether a generative AI is going to be able to bring that in because ⁓ there's a sensory aspect to it, right? Like we are, you know, we are like feeling sort of, you know, sensory kind of people, like I think. And so the way we see things, the way we smell things, touch things and whatever, all of that is building. into a certain broad experience that we have and the personality that we have and so on. that we as filters in that sense, I think we are a lot more complex and much more layered, I think, than these sort of things that are just sort of compressing and putting it out there. I hope this my feeling. Arjun Thomas: True, ⁓ no no no, you're right, I like I said, everyone has a perspective on it. It also depends on your context. how you process information, your rubric of what is ethical and what is not. So we're complicated beasts. All our decisions, it's a multi-factored data set that goes into every decision that we take, even though it's unconscious or not, right? So conscious or unconscious decision. The way I look at generative AI is it's another tool. Just the way I learn to speak, the way I learn to write. And you're right, I'm sure that are a significant number of people who just and there's no shortage of ⁓ I mean it's literally not even a meme now where people are people can can immediately sense on LinkedIn or Facebook which ones content which content or posts or you know comments are AI generated because it is just so it becomes so evident it's just so good it's so like I said the very nature of the fact that it's so polished itself is in a way not human right so I think Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Though I have to say it, I have a lot of resentment on that front as well because you know, now people are saying if you use an ⁓ dash, it's like, looks like it's AI generated. I've been using ⁓ dashes all my life and I, you know, and I write in fully formed sentences. I use my punctuation correctly. Like, I mean, as we were taught to do in school, you know, and like I do all of that. And now, you know, people may think that an AI wrote it, which is annoying. You know, why? Like, ⁓ it's like perfection is also. Arjun Thomas: ⁓ I'm guessing... So, you're probably where the AI hopes to be. We're all still lagging far behind your writing skills. We're all playing catch-up. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Look. No, that's ⁓ objectively not true, Arjun. think, know, I, like, I, know, we, I mean, so I don't know if people, people listening to this may not know this, but we actually did study together. Like we were, we were in the same school and we did have a pretty decent, like, you know, English education in that sense. So yeah, yeah. ⁓ come on. Arjun Thomas: Yeah, did. Foundational knowledge. Well, some people absorb more than the others, clearly. ⁓ So the point I'm trying to make is that the generative AI as a tool, depends on how you use it. So for me, I use it ⁓ as a sparring partner. So the way I look at it is... Vinayak Varma: That is BS. That's it. Yeah. No, sure, sure. You're right. mean, yeah. Arjun Thomas: I don't look at it to replace ⁓ foundational experiences that I have. We are fortunate enough to have grown through that phase where we've had 20 years of building those foundational experiences that were grounded in reality, good and bad. So that is still the formative data set that I operate, that all of us used to operate to take decisions on a day-to-day basis. The way I look at generative AI ⁓ is a sparring partner or multiple sparring partners that I can turn on and turn off, dial Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Arjun Thomas: up and dial down depending on what I want to accomplish as an end objective. If you go into using generative AI, I know a lot of people, well, fair bit of people use it as input, get the output and use it verbatim, then absolutely yes, you're not using your creative faculties as, you you could be using them. I'm not saying you should be using them. If someone wants to do that way, you know. Vinayak Varma: Mm. Mm. And clean. Arjun Thomas: no judgment on that. But it's the function of can you level up, can you elevate the way you think. So, give you a classic example. because there's only so much of life experience that I can cram in, or any human can cram in, based on where you were, who you worked with. It's a finite set. Eight billion people, we've all had unique experiences. I can't gain the experiences or perspective of someone else, but using generative AI, I can proxy that. can say, pressure test this thinking of mine, take me down avenues that I might have not thought. I might not go down those avenues, but as a sparring partner, as a conversation, like we're doing right now, I can have this going Vinayak Varma: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: 10 times, 20 times, and that's the way I use it. And then I take in all this input, obviously do my own research on the side, and I think of it as, it's like having 10 good researchers working with you. That's probably an analogy that probably lands better. And if you use it in that point of view, then the output is still yours. It's just that you've kind of 10x'd the pipelines into your thinking to allow you to form an opinion that might be slightly different Vinayak Varma: Right, Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: then if you had just operated on the subset of knowledge that you had accumulated over the 20 years of living experience. That's the way I kind of approach it. Not obviously peddling visual style as my own, but that's the way. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, mean, fair enough. And yeah, no, no, no. I mean, it's a, completely fair point. And I, and I take your point and I, and I think, you know, it's well made. I, I, I, I agree with you. And I, and I think I, know, anyone who's using it in that way, like, you know, more power to them. I do like the only thing I kind of, I just worry about, you know, how things are going to look like 10 years from now, because I think I'm not worried for like our generation and maybe older because we Arjun Thomas: That's the point. Great. Yes, that's the point. Yes. Vinayak Varma: Yeah, I'm worried about future generations who may get over-reliant on this. Because they do warn about things like broad cognitive degradation in society and things like that. There are researchers who are actually writing papers on this and they're kind of looking at how generative AI has been affecting, like, chat GPT in particular has been affecting a lot of people and their thinking. And I see the kids who I'm teaching and so on doing this as well. Arjun Thomas: Correct. Vinayak Varma: Like everyone has their laptop open in front of them in class. No one's taking notes anymore. And then if any question is asked, it's instantly like, to like chat GPT and you know, it's just, it's weird. mean, for me, I really, like every day feels like a black mirror episode, know? So I don't know what it's going to look like 10 years from now. So I really worry on that front. But But yeah, I'm not worried for us, think. And I think that's a fair way in which to use it. And I've been hearing about many interesting ways it's being used in science as well to kind of, I mean, these AI's in general to kind of model certain scenarios. And there are a lot of, yeah, exactly. So all that is great. Arjun Thomas: find patterns that human beings can't or process patience at massive volumes. ⁓ And you're right, I think thank you for making the leap for me because that was the segue to the end, is exactly that, which is I'm not worried for our generation ⁓ because I think... Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Right. Arjun Thomas: I have the data on this but I think most people at our age or above still view it with a fair bit of skepticism. We be pressure tested to get the answer that we want ⁓ or discard it entirely because we believe, yeah, that's not how I sound or that's not what I don't believe this or yeah, you know, I can push back on an AI. And you're right, if I'm worried, I'm hoping it's not a... misplaced worry, but that's the reason I'm having conversations with you people who teach the next generation is that, you know, in our generation, maybe five out of every hundred, go straight from prompt answer to, know, that's exactly what I'm going to say, or that's the way I think, to, you know, 80 % of the people going down that process where they're not using generative AI or AI tools as a way to pressure test their own thinking critically. And they go straight to what the AI tells me is what I think. way I'm going to communicate and you're exactly right and that's that's I wouldn't say a heavy worry because I don't think about that stage ⁓ but I'm little concerned but but you're clearly saying that in your classroom you're seeing that happening Vinayak Varma: Yeah, mean, you know, there's there've been all these comparisons. Yeah, I mean, so I mean, socially in a broad way, you know, like the last few years suddenly that, you know, that old film, Idiocracy is sort of back again in the in the like, you general conversation, everyone keeps talking about it. And, and, you know, I mean, it's not very far-fetched to see that happening. Really, we do have, we already have an American president who kind of functions along the same lines as Terry Crews in that, in that, in that film. And society in general seems to be headed in that direction. don't know. don't see it as a... You know, the problem is this. think it's not just AI on its own. I think there is this... You know, in the last 10 years, it's also this sort of one-two punch that's happened between social media and AI. So I think that together is something that is something to be a bit wary about because... A, there's the younger generations and how they're going to deal with the cognitive load of the world that we're kind of emerging into. The other side of it is also, what do you trust? What information do you trust? Because on the one hand, AI is hallucinating, so there's that. But then the other side of things is also, with these photoreal images, and then in the political side of things, how people are kind of using these Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Vinayak Varma: hyperreal images to kind of push everything from like, you know, elections to like propaganda to, you know, create like kind of, you know, creating, you know, narratives that kind of like justify wars to all of that. You know, so I think what in a broad way, I think, you know, it's good that we're having this conversation, but I think this kind of conversation needs to be happening at a diplomatic level, you know, like There needs to be ethics committees that governments are putting together to look at what kind of an effect all of this is having on the social fabric. We did that in the past with the idea of human cloning, instance, or whatever. Governments got together and discussed it. That's the kind thing that we need to be doing right now with AI. In my lifetime, sure, in our lifetimes, I've never seen a technology that has created more disruptive change than... than AI. It's just, it's incredible. And there's no way to predict what is going to happen. Forget like two years from now, we don't know what is going to happen next month. it's just, I don't know. It's a, there are, suppose there are two ways of looking at it. You can be highly positive and, know, be very kind of ⁓ like optimistic about the future or maybe bat in the hatches and ⁓ like prepare for the storm. Yeah, maybe. Arjun Thomas: Agreed. Or a bit of both. ⁓ Very very cautious optimism and skepticism all baked together. On that cheery note, a full circle back to non-AI subjects. What's next for you on the purely creative non-technology space? What are you working on? Vinayak Varma: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ I'm working on ⁓ just like putting the finishing touches on this like short story collection. I hope to kind of send it off to my publisher in another month or so and kind of like see where that goes. ⁓ And then I, know, there's yeah, there's like a couple of novels I've been writing for years and years and years, which I need to do something about. And then I have a bunch of songs I'm working on. So I have to like finish like recording. ⁓ those and ⁓ yeah I don't know just bunch of different things this this month and actually like the big the one big project is we're shifting houses so we have to like plan the whole shift and then and then set up my studio at the new space and that's the big thing but other than that yeah bunch of things just like random personal projects Arjun Thomas: What are the short stories in the book, Simon? Vinayak Varma: These are sort of know, sort of broadly SFF, like, you know, I science fiction fantasy, like with a bit of horror, you know, stuff like that, like in the speculative fiction kind of domain. There are like some of the some of those stories are actually out there on the on the internet already, like it kind of collects a bunch of those plus a bunch of new stories. And it can it's generally set somewhere between like, you know, Chennai and Bangalore. Madras and Bangalore, rather. Because this is a slightly older kind of setting, maybe. ⁓ yeah, there's some common elements between the stories. But broadly, SF, like slightly twisted humor, that kind of thing. I will send you stuff. Arjun Thomas: Interesting, definitely up my alley. Yes please. And any Angry Aku version 2's that you're working on? Vinayak Varma: ⁓ that's a good question. I am actually, there is, mean, I have a series which I've been ⁓ like, which I'm, you know, I'm still sort of, there's a series of like picture books, which kind of go on this emotional intelligence kind of thing, not exactly angry, kind of thing, but like building on those ideas. ⁓ I don't know where that's going to head to, but yeah, there is something. I haven't put out any children's content in a while, actually. I'm kind of very much out of that space the last two, three years. I've been out of it, but yeah, I have stuff in the works. ⁓ Hopefully it'll happen soon. Arjun Thomas: Hmm. Right? So maybe, well, maybe we park another episode for when that's out because both subjects are very interesting. The SFF stuff, for sure. Please hit me up once you've got something out that's published. Would love to take a look at it. And the kids stuff, there's no shortage of a need for kids material in this house. So would love to do that. Vinayak Varma: That sounds great. Yeah. ⁓ for sure. I'll definitely send you a copy of that. Yes. I hope we still have readers in another few years. Anyway, that's how I go back down that. Arjun Thomas: ⁓ no, mean, there are a lot of parents, you'll be surprised by the number of parents that ⁓ sit and read. We enforce reading books before going to bed. ⁓ Multiple books. ⁓ It's just the process of visualizing the worlds that you have in the brain. The child's... Vinayak Varma: That's great. That's awesome. Have you thought about writing something? Is that something that you considered? Arjun Thomas: Not a skill set that of mine that that that would warrant getting it up to the level that it's worth publishing but ⁓ Vinayak Varma: You never know. I'm sure you're getting insights into their minds a lot more than any of us are, who are non-parents, I think. Arjun Thomas: Which, but given the sheer number of parents there are in the world, think there's no shortage of insights on kids. You just need to have... So insights on kids, you can ask any parent down the street, can ⁓ spit in a direction, you'll hit a parent that'll give you hundred insights on a kid. I think it's translating that into something that's meaningful and tangible and more importantly engaging. ⁓ It also depends on the dynamic, right? We're at the age where she's not reading by herself just as yet, starting to, but we're telling her stories. ⁓ Vinayak Varma: Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Let me rephrase that. I meant to say that, you know, you are also very well read and articulate and all of that. know, and, you know, maybe you might find and since you're also into like very much into like, you know, science fiction and fantasy and all of that, maybe you might find some kind of, I don't know, like some interesting stories emerging out of this. Spirit in your life. Yeah, never say never. Yeah. Yeah. Arjun Thomas: Might be, you never know. Never say never. There's no shortage of material, I think it's more the will to execute something that's worthy of getting printed. We shall see. It was a wonderful conversation, thanks again for taking the time. Vinayak Varma: Well, I hope you find that well. Hey, likewise, thank you so much. And thanks for all your very insightful questions. It gave me a lot to think about. Arjun Thomas: ⁓ Onwards and upwards and we should touch base the next time in Bangalore or you're heading to Singapore we should definitely catch up for a cuppa or a beer or whatever that is. Thanks a ton man, lovely speaking to you. Cheers. Vinayak Varma: For sure. Yeah, absolutely. Sounds great. Thank you, Arjun. Thanks a lot.