Pachakam

Pachakam started as a footnote. I was building OurFit, my circular fashion app, and I wanted it to have a community side to it, something you could read in between scrolling through listings, like the back pages of a magazine lying around at a barber shop. The plan was a cover and maybe one article to show what that section could look like. I ended up enjoying the design process a lot more than the app screens it was supposed to support, so I kept going and built out a full issue.

It's a concept. Nobody commissioned it and it was never sold anywhere. I designed every page and wrote all the copy, and I picked the subjects the way I'd pick what to argue about with friends, things about Kerala I actually pay attention to and have opinions on. The cover says Art, Music, Dance, Culture, Craft, from Mala Naadu, and that was pretty much the brief I gave myself.

There are three main pieces in the issue. One on Mammootty and Mohanlal and the hold they've had on Malayalam cinema, one on Kani Kusruti, and one on Kerala's drug crisis. There's also an opener on Gabri, the rapper from North Paravur. This post is about why I picked those stories, what I found when I started reading into them, and how the look of the magazine came out of the stories themselves.

Why a magazine, and why Kerala

Most of what gets written about Kerala is either tourism copy, backwaters and houseboats and God's Own Country, or it's crime news. There isn't a lot in between that talks about the place the way people from here talk about it among themselves, which is half affection and half being completely fed up. I wanted Pachakam to sit in that space. The cinema piece is basically a fan writing about the two men he grew up watching, and the drug piece is someone from the same place being angry about what's happening to it.

I also wanted to see if I could make something investigative look fun without making the subject any less serious. That push and pull ended up deciding most of the design.

Two aces of spades in the same hand

If you grew up in Kerala you grew up with Mammootty and Mohanlal. Both have been leading men since the early 80s, both have done hundreds of films, and for about forty years there hasn't really been a third name sitting at the same level. Every new generation of actors gets measured against them, both have fan clubs in pretty much every town, and a release clash between the two still gets treated like a derby.

I called the piece Duopoly because that's what it looks like if you step back and look at it as a market. Two people have held the top of an entire film industry for four decades. Producers plan around their dates, directors write for their image, and a huge amount of the industry's money and attention runs through two names. In the magazine I put it like this:

In the cultural imagination of Kerala, Mammootty and Mohanlal stand not merely as actors, but as twin sovereigns of a decades-long hegemony. While Mammootty commanded with granite-like gravitas, Mohanlal seduced the Malayali psyche with fluid, divine ease.

The thing I didn't expect when I started writing was that the usual rivalry story doesn't really hold up. In an industry full of ego fights, these two have stayed friends the whole way through, publicly and by most accounts privately too. So the piece turned into something about how strange it is that the monopoly and the friendship have existed side by side for this long.

What I'd add now, looking back, is the other side of it. When two people hold everything for that long, the whole structure of the industry grows around them. In 2024 the Hema Committee report came out on working conditions for women in Malayalam cinema, and in the fallout Mohanlal stepped down as president of AMMA, the actors' association, along with its entire executive committee. I'm not pinning that on either of them personally, but it showed how long the same small group of people had been sitting at the centre of things. At the same time both of them have been doing some of their most interesting work lately. Mammootty especially has been picking roles in films like Kaathal and Bramayugam that a superstar his age had no need to take, and Mohanlal got the Dadasaheb Phalke Award last year. The duopoly is still there, but it's a different conversation now compared to when I started the piece.

For the cards I picked two of their most over the top characters on purpose, Mammootty as Kochu Kurup from Thuruppu Gulan and Mohanlal as Vasco da Gama from Chotta Mumbai. These are the mass versions of them, the scenes people still quote at weddings. Thuruppu Gulan is already a card game term, so the playing card idea was sitting right there in the title. The floral fabric behind them is loud on purpose too, it's supposed to feel like the curtains of an old single screen theatre or the sofa cover at a relative's house.

Kani Kusruti

Kani is the counterweight to the duopoly piece. In 2024 she walked the red carpet at Cannes for All We Imagine as Light carrying a clutch shaped like a slice of watermelon, and the film went on to win the Grand Prix. The watermelon has become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and she brought it into a space that is very carefully kept free of anything like that. The line from the magazine I still stand by is this one:

Kani has made a career of this specific kind of rudeness. The rudeness of refusing to be the idea of a Malayali actress.

I titled the piece The Powerful Geometry of an Unbent Spine. The pages are black ink bleeding over a grainy background, heavier and quieter than the rest of the issue, because I didn't want her section to look like a celebrity feature.

Inside Kerala's drug crisis

This is the piece I most wanted to write, and the one I read the most for.

For a long time the drug story in Kerala was about ganja. Idukki Gold was almost a brand name, people from outside the state would ask about it half as a joke. That's not the story anymore. Over the last several years the stuff showing up in seizures has shifted to synthetic drugs, mostly MDMA and methamphetamine, and more and more of the people getting caught with it are young, students and people in their twenties. The quantities in the news are counted in grams now, and they come in through couriers, in pockets, in pouches small enough to go unnoticed.

The state's response has mostly been raids. There's a very familiar kind of photo that comes out of these, the police lined up behind a table of seized packets, and in 2025 there was a big statewide drive called Operation D-Hunt with arrest numbers in the papers almost every day. I'm not saying the raids are pointless, but they look a lot better in a press photo than they work on the ground. That was the argument of the piece:

The state loves a bonfire. It loves the theatre of the raid, the press photos capturing the triumphant police commissioner standing over bales of seized ganja, but in this performative crusading, the government has not strangled the market; it has merely forced it to evolve.

The basic logic is simple once you see it. If you're smuggling and the pressure goes up, you move to whatever carries the most value in the smallest space. A truckload of weed is hard to hide. A few grams of a synthetic drug worth the same money fits in a matchbox. People who study drug policy have a name for this, the iron law of prohibition, the harder the crackdown the more concentrated the drug gets. Kerala went from the drowsy, red-eyed hunger of weed to something a lot more dangerous, and the crackdowns played a part in pushing it there.

It also stopped being a story that happens somewhere else. In 2025 the drug conversation in Kerala got pulled into cinema too, with cases connected to people in the film industry and a lot of arguing about whether violent, stylish films were feeding it. That's partly why it made sense to have the drug piece and the duopoly piece in the same issue. Cinema is the biggest mirror Kerala has, and it was ending up in both stories.

For the visuals I wanted to stay away from the usual stock photo of a guy in a hoodie with a syringe. The portrait is a halftone face with a little yellow tab on the tongue, and stuck over it is an embroidered name tag patch, HELLO, I AM, with Addiction written in script. The name tag is the kind you wear when you introduce yourself at a meeting, and making it an embroidered patch you'd iron onto a jacket was a small nod back to OurFit. The page facing it is clinical white with pills and blister packs scattered around the headline like stickers, and the headline CRISIS is set in a bouncy, almost cartoonish type in deep red. I wanted that to feel slightly wrong on purpose, the way the drugs are packaged to look like candy.

How the whole thing looks

The cover sets up everything. It's a yellow to red gradient, the Malayalam wordmark is cut in a heavy custom letterform, and there's a woman in silver wraparound sunglasses with a Nokia 3310, the Windows XP hill and a couple of CDs stuck around her head like stickers. There's also an old radio QSL card in the corner. All of that is the stuff our generation grew up around in the 2000s, and putting it next to Malayalam type was a way of saying this is Kerala culture too, it doesn't have to be kathakali and kasavu every time.

After that, every story gets its own material. The cinema pages are on that loud floral fabric. Kani's pages are black ink. The drug pages are white and clinical with pills. The Gabri opener is a yellow blur with his Malayalam headline set really big. The essays are mostly in tight all caps so the text reads like part of the image and not like a block of copy sitting on top of it. The colours that keep coming back are yellow, red and a deep maroon, which are the colours you see on half the shop boards in Kerala.

The back cover is Ravi Varma's Shakuntala, the painting where she stops to pull a thorn out of her foot and looks back over her shoulder, except here she's in a black dress and the thing in her hand is a stiletto. There's a keyboard End key stuck right in the middle of it. It's the last page, so it's the end, that's all there is to that joke.

Where OurFit comes in

OurFit is a marketplace for pre-loved and upcycled clothes, built around the way we already pass clothes around in Indian households. The people I had in mind for it are the ones who'd dig for a Y2K jacket or a 1-of-1 upcycled piece, and they're also the people who'd read about Gabri and Kani and have strong opinions about the Mammootty and Mohanlal thing. Pachakam was meant to be the reading side of the app, the culture that goes around the clothes.

If you put the two next to each other you can see them sharing a language. The stickers and cut-out objects on the Pachakam cover are the same idea as the category tags in the OurFit feed, the loud reds and oranges carry across, and the Y2K references are in both. The embroidered patch on the drug spread could just as easily be a listing on the app. I designed them at the same time and kept going back and forth between the two files, so a lot of decisions in one ended up in the other.

You can read the whole issue on my site, it's set up as a flipbook, click the cover to open it and drag or use the arrow keys to turn the pages: auroo.art/pachakam.