Journalism of Courage
Everybody has heard the saying,The grass is always greener on the other side, to a point that it no longer draws any reactions. But when Twitter user @wistyloony tweeted: The traffic light on the other side is always greener, and it was combined with 23-year-old Akshar Pathaks images and visualisations,it connected instantly with the traffic-struck souls across the the cities in India and got more than 200 likes.
Pathak,a Delhi-based graphic designer spent most of 2012 making minimal Bollywood posters that cleverly captured the essence of movies in a single dialogue or visual from the film. I did almost 500 posters after which it got a bit boring. So I started making conceptual posters out of the tweets I read on my Twitter timeline every day, says the NIFT graduate,who adds with a laugh,because Twitter is a sheltered workshop for evil geniuses. That is how his new project,Tweetard came into existence.
For Pathak too,providing conceptual images,typefaces and simple diagrams for the clever,funny and sarcastic tweets on his timeline has been fun. For example,when Twitter user @spinandswirl tweeted,Roti,kapda,makaan,internet, Pathak put the words on the old movie poster of the Amitabh Bachchan and Manoj Kumar-starrer Roti Kapda Makaan,and made the result even more hilarious.
So how does he choose these tweets,since the internet is full of parody accounts,jokes and social commentary? I usually look at whatever is posted on my timeline I follow a lot of people and a lot of people follow me,so there is really no problem in choosing funny tweets, he says. He also plays around with brand logos,altering them subtly to match the text and meaning of the tweets. For instance,a tweet by @NumbYaar says,Maggi is a perfect Indian brand. It says 2 minutes when it means 5-10 minutes. Pathak put the text inside a red speech bubble on a yellow background with a typeface that matches the popular instant noodles brand.
Has he got into trouble over copyright issues yet? Not really, says Pathak. First of all,I dont use my project to make money. Secondly,I dont use it in a slanderous way, he says. But he sheepishly admits that he hurt the sentiments of a popular author when he made a poster out of a sarcastic tweet by @KajuBadamChor about the mistakes of his life on the cover of the book itself.
