Dipping the desi in design

Chaiwalas and chaatwalas have turned cool with a helping hand from a group of designers on a mission to glam up local hangouts

Rachana Ramesh

Do you have a street chaat shop you frequently visit for a samosa and pani puri? Its display board is most likely taken over by a big brand and its menu has tonnes of typos. Small shops lack a look of their own. But here is a group of design enthusiasts to provide them a charming identity.

“India has such a rich design culture. It is so diverse that every street you go to portrays a different design language”, says Ria Mohta, an architect-turned-illustrator, and now the founder of Pen and Chai -- a community that creates design awareness across India. It thrives to educate people about the importance of good visuals in public spaces.

Pen and Chai collaborates with creators and artists across the country to inspire individuals wanting to contribute to the creative effort. They can do so by coming up with ideas about art for public engagement or by working on the ground with the group.

“I used to spend a lot of time on the streets of Mumbai, eating dosas and having coffee breaks. In Mumbai, life literally runs on streets’’, says Ria about her internship days in the big city. That’s when Ria noticed how small street sellers often do not have a unique identity. “If you go to a small, cool drink shop, you’ll see a huge Coca-Cola board. The shop won’t have a board of its own.” Big brands tend to take over and rip off these street dwellers with their own advertisements displayed in bold on their boards.

Nagpur-born Ria found that unfair. “I was just a random girl wearing baggy jeans and loose t-shirts asking if I could design their boards and menus for free. They were suspicious and would ask if I was from Coca-Cola or Paytm”, she adds.

After she came across a migrant from South India selling dosas on the streets, who was willing to let Ria extend her creative energy to his shop, Pen and Chai was born. “He was so excited and spoke about the temples and the obsession of dosas in South India. He also told me about his invention of schezwan dosa to suit the taste buds of people from Bombay”, she says. Inspired by his narrative, Ria designed the street dosa shop’s boards and menu. “There are also so many typos in the menus of these shops. I wanted our design knowledge and their rich culture to coll aborate t o make the design more disciplined”, says Ria.

This one step evolved to become ‘the street side project’, a wing of Pen and Chai, where they redesigned and branded smallscale shops to provide them with a sense of identity along with spreading the importance of good design in business.

The ‘poster project’, where they designed posters for small shops to help them build their idea of belonging, followed later. ‘Pen and chai zine’ has been their latest initiative -- a monthly magazine of blogs, interviews, articles, poems, artworks, and much more. A monthly dose of inspiration that you can read with a cup of chai on the sidewalk -- and perhaps redesign it.