As part of the Bonjour India festival, famous french street artists Psyckoze and JonOne collaborated with W+K’s very own Hanif Kureshi a.k.a ‘Daku’ on an eighty year old building in Mumbai. With help from ‘&then’ and other friends, Hanif and les artistes français improved the streetscape considerably. Imagine what we can do with the sprawling grey cement canvas of New Delhi.

Before.

After.

Hanif ‘Daku’ Kureshi in action. Following this project, Hanif was inducted into 156 Crew, an invitation-only international graffiti collective.

‘Put It On’ is a great example of social impact through design from two talented friends of W+K, Thukral & Tagra. Since chappals (flip-flops) and sex are an essential part of everyday life in India, T&T designed a pair of Chappals that promote condom usage and HIV awareness. You can buy just Chappals for Rs 100, and Chappals + Jaankari (information about HIV prevention) for Rs 60. After a fancy kick-off exhibition at Bose Pacia in New York, ‘Put it On’ has hit Delhi streets with a stall at Som Bazaar, where the Chappals are proving to massively successful.

Photography & snake-capturing by our field correspondent Hitesh ‘Rocky’ Malviya.

First-time visitors to our office are often surprised to find a tree-lined garden in the middle of urban chaos. What they don’t know is that the garden is populated by all kinds of beasties, ranging from small and cuddly to large and extremely life-threatening.

Oriental Garden Lizard
According to Wikipedia, ‘Males become highly territorial during breeding season. They discourage intruding males by brightening their red heads and doing push-ups.’

Oriental Garden Lizard – note red head and large biceps.

The object of red-head’s affections..lucky girl!

Mongoose
Mongooses have special kung fu skills that enable them to kill Cobras, and it’s considered lucky to see one (probably because it means that there are no Cobras around). We love and respect our resident Mongoose.

The elusive W+K Mongoose.

Rat Snake.
Large, fast moving snakes which grow to a length of 2.5m or more. As the name suggests, they eat rats, but like French people they also relish the occasional frog or toad.

Baby Rat Snake

Not so wild life

Nokia smartphone users often endure bombastic jibes from iPhone fanboys who go on and on about how cool their apps are. What they don’t know is that your E72 can run the outstanding Bruce Lee Iron Fist S60 game (free download from www.ovi.com). As any martial artist will certify, this is the next best thing to actually being on the mat. Fighting as Mr. Lee himself, you can do his trademark front-foot sidekick, sweep kicks, blocks, even punches to the groin – that’s a lot of action from a tiny 0.32MB app. Best of all, you can play this in a conference room with no fear of discovery. Because no one expects an E72 user to be monkeying around in a meeting. That’s what iPhone people do.

http://store.ovi.com/content/27858?clickSource=related%2Bcontent&contentArea=games
Please note: Iron Fist also works with other Nokia devices.

We miss you, Bruce. But at least we have this app.

Careful – this Chuck Norris look-alike packs a nasty hammer kick.

Incoming!

A very kind architectural review of our top-secret HQ that appeared as a full-page article in the Business Standard newspaper on Saturday. We are now officially ‘funky’.

India’s economic liberalization generated a lot of hype and expectation, followed by a big anti-climax as infrastructure failed to materialize. Of late though, mighty erections of glass and steel have started rising out of the dust everywhere. Across urban India, these metro stations, airports, malls, hospitals, etc. are popping up like giant shiny mushrooms. Whether this is a good, bad or ugly phenomenon is not for this blog to judge. Though one has to wonder when development will trickle beyond the metros to ‘India 2′.

It looks like a gate to nowhere….

but in the middle of a dry riverbed…

is a brand new airport! (Dehra Dun)

‘Medanta The Medicity’, Gurgaon – humongous hospital or what?

busy little builders at IGI airport, Delhi

Enough of those crisper-than-life, 3D images that advertisers seem to love so much. More of the hand-painted stuff, please. Here’s some mighty fine calendar art we commissioned for a P&G campaign. If you have any evocative (and copyright-free) shots of hand-painted advertising, send them in and we’ll post them here.

Indian Beauty, oil on canvas by Mr. Raghavan, 2008

W+K Exp’s latest exhibition of striking wooden sculptures by Sukhnandi Vyam is as intriguing as it sounds. “Dog Father, Fox Mother, Their Daughter & Other Stories” transforms oral traditions of the Pardhan Gonds of eastern Madhya Pradesh into some very unusual sculptures. Based on local stories, rituals and totemic symbols, these sculptures will raise your eyebrows, tilt your head and blow your mind. At W+K Exp from 24th March–27th April, 2010.