Indian Designer Takes On The Challenge To Sketch New Words For 100 Days & These Are The Results

On a balmy Mumbai afternoon in early April, Rituparna Sarkar was reading a book by Meik Wiking titled Hygge when she encountered the word Tokka – Finnish for a really large horde of reindeers – which is untranslatable in other languages simply because it isn’t relevant. A quick Google search yielded other such anomalies like Lebensmude, which translates to “weary of life” in German, and it struck her that every language has words that are unique to the culture of a country.

A lot of us might have realised this before, but in her case, this aha moment coincided with the start of #The100DayProject – a global art project where participants commit to a theme and upload their original work every day, for a 100 days, on Instagram. So she signed up to hunt down and illustrate words we use daily that have no equivalent elsewhere, such as the Bambaiya term Kali Peeli, and maybe even rediscover old archaic English words like Groke that are too good to be forgotten.

Every evening, Ritu starts by narrowing down the word du jour, meticulously sketching the artwork by hand using watercolours in her little A5 sketchbook and then clicking a picture to upload – a process that can take 5 hours sometimes! Even though she earns a living designing on a computer, she avoids doing digital illustrations for this project, with the exception of Tsundoko – a Japanese noun for the act of constantly buying new books that we don’t always read, but add to the growing pile in our house – because she wanted to add fine details of every book spines which she wouldn't have been able to do justice to on paper.

On Day 29 of the project, while she was trying to decipher Kaffir Lime, we asked her why she got herself into this, considering she has a demanding day job as co-founder of the Bombay Design House.

“Initially, it was because all the mail pushing and crazy deadlines were getting to me. I started feeling the urge to get back to a blank page and polishing my sketching skills, which were getting kind of rusty. So joining the #The100DayProject seemed like a good idea.”

In the age of Emojis, GIFs and truncated sentences, it can’t be easy committing to one word, but she’s got a lot of eager beavers helping her “crowdsource”. Besides her own database, which has extended well over 100 words, Ritu now gets suggestions from friends as well as other artists and illustrators on Instagram. Regardless of the origin, it’s really about the visual, and what she feels like sketching that day. Since she claims to love quirky things in general, she tries to depict the word in a humourous way with an additional layer, and real life experiences always shine through. So the aforementioned Kali Peeli found its way into the project because after a night of drinking, her Uber driver cancelled on her and she had to take the regular Mumbai cab in a buzzed state. That night, even though she was exhausted, she couldn't go to sleep till she spent a couple of hours drawing it out. In fact, if the visual isn’t calling out to her, she won’t continue and there have been times when she’s scrapped an illustration entirely and redone it.

The real reward is the emotional connection her work is creating with people from across the globe. “After I put up my interpretation of the Swedish word Fika, essentially a coffee break over some light snacks, a Swedish Illustrator commented about her “having a Fika at least once a day” and I told her we Indians do the same and it's called a ‘Chai Break’. These little cultural exchanges, sometimes with strangers, make the project more enjoyable!”

While this began as a passion project, we hear a lot of people have been convincing Ritu to sell these prints or maybe even publish a coffee table book. On her part, the designer claims her biggest accomplishment would be if she can just finish the 100 days without missing out on a single day.