Maushi, Do Vada Pav

Where It All Began

“Maushi, Do Vada Pav”, is a zine which expresses the journey of my learning of Indian street food. It provides an account of five types of Indian street food –Vada Pav, PaaniPuri, Mysore Masala Dosa, TundayKebab and Momos. From different parts of India, they each tell a story which is unique and insightful. With a comic strip in the start of the zine, I intended to include elements of humour, sarcasm and satire to give the viewers a hint of how the mood of the zine was going to be. Including topics from street foods and their history to their anatomical break-up, I explore a wide range of ideas through text, doodles and illustrations.

The zine is both enjoyable and informative, thus I kept my target audience quite large –people in India from the ages 12 onwards can pick up this zine and read it for pleasure or to learn more about their favourite foods. It explains how these foods are a constant reminder of home –through their ingredients, stories, experiences and taste.

Visual Journal

In a four-page journal, I explored the infamous Vada Pav –my memories of eating it, its history, and why it is important to me.

Making a visual journal meant exploring my own thoughts and sifting through information which I chose to absorb while researching. Additionally, it is a space for discovering interconnections between different ideas, stories, concepts and insights. I also recorded my own emotions, explored all my senses, reflected on everything I had just learnt and developed all that onto paper. Personally, using my hands to make each page, using paint, collage, pen etc. helped me stay more in touch with my own process and engage with the activity better.

Ideation