Vinayak Varma: The Bengaluru Pages

In 2008, I joined the staff of a local listings magazine called The Bengaluru Pages. TBP was owned by MP/businessman Rajeev Chandrasekhar's Jupiter Group, and it shared its offices with Radio Indigo. This was the first time I had worked for a periodical, the first time I had stepped into a proper radio studio (where I got to record a couple of funny voice-overs for ads, for the first time), the first time I had my articles published in a magazine, and the first time I was earning enough to be able to eat out regularly at expensive restaurants. It was all happening, and it was awesome. By the end of that year, my byline was getting seen all over town, and ditto with my waistline.

TBP was amazing for both my career and self-esteem. Putting together a 100-page magazine every two weeks, illustrating for it, writing for it, editing for it, spending nights at the office for it, and hitting up PR people for free movies, events and meals for it, all of it teaches you to properly balance working hard and playing hard. It teaches you discipline and it teaches you abandon. These are the sort of experiences that you should actively hunt out if you want to understand your true limits. TBP made me grow the **** up. But TBP also taught me to abandon any Ozymandias-ish pretensions I had about the longevity of my work, because the magazine shut down after less than two years of operations, burying with it hundreds and hundreds of pages worth of time, creativity and sheer effort that its little team had invested in it. Man, but I still miss working there.

|Note: As the magazine is dead, my TBP illustrations now belong to me. If you'd like to reuse any of them, write to me. This is shameless and morbid, I know, I know, but it's also good commerce!|

Here's a sampling of the illustrations and designs I created for The Bengaluru Pages. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!