2023 was an exciting year for India Street Lettering: I received a small grant from the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) as part of their B•LORE programme to make a short film about street lettering in Bangalore’s M.G. Road.

I collaborated with my friend and photographer, Harshay Jha, to create a short typographic tour through this neighbourhood, illuminating the stories that are hidden behind the letterforms on signages in the locality. Along with films by other B•LORE grantees, our film, Letter by Letter, was screened at the B•LORE Short Film Festival in December 2023. You can now watch the film on BIC’s website.

At the festival, I was also invited to mount a small exhibition of street lettering photographs from Indiranagar, Ulsoor and M. G. Road. They were organised in three thematic displays that helped visitors experience the glamourous neon signs of M.G. Road, uncover the language of hand-painted signs through shop boards in Kannada and English, and see letterforms in public spaces come to life when they are built using tangible materials ranging from flowers to metal.