Tag Archives: Minimal Bollywood Posters

When in life, one goes to a rock concert, the feeling of envy creeps into the skin. You immediately want to be the one who is throwing his head with a microphone in the hand. You want to be that guitarist who is making the crowd go crazy. While you actual sit in a lame seat in one side of the stage only able to tap your foot with the thumping beats of the drums, you mentally want to jump on to the stage to sing that number which you sing the best in turn making the fans shout out your name loud and girls screaming at the top of their voices.

When you see someone dance on the stage with poise and style, moving elegantly, each move calculated and brilliantly performed, you want to be that person and win the hearts of the viewers by doing those lovely steps. In your mind, you imagine your entrance into the scene and making the auditorium go berserk with fans whistling and hooting for you while in reality you are just tapping your fingers and thinking of what could have been a better step which the dancer missed. You want to hold the dance partner in your arms and make people give oohs and aahs while watching you two dance in tandem.

When you watch that sports match of your school or college from outside the boundary, in your mind, you want to be on the field, you want the crowd to chant your name. You want to take the catch diving and sliding. You want to hit the ball out of the boundary as hard as you can. You want to bowl so fast that the stumps breaks into two. You want to hear the audience scream your name as loud as it can be. But…

But this usually never happens. You live your life like an average person does. You go perform your daily chores thinking that hoping is another thing, reality is another. You believe in fate and give up on your confidence. The peculiar feeling of jealousy and helplessness shadows your mind and you accept it. You assume that not everyone can get fame the way they deserve. You doubt your ability to do the things you like doing. This assumption hinders your mind to think beyond what you could have achieved by thinking a little more. But you assume that this is how life is going to be like so you stay the same. Average.

Hello there! I am talking about myself and you too probably. We are the average guys. We know that we deserve something better and we are not alone to deserve that. But then things happen if we believe in ourself. I am unable to write any motivational blogpost because I don’t want to but this post will tell you something if you haven’t been reading newspapers regularly nowadays.

There is a very rare chance but if you follow this blog then you will know that I started that http://MinimalMoviePostersIndia.tumblr.com blog one fine day on 5^th of January 2012 after being inspired by the original Hollywood one whose link I am not sharing here. I had started it for my own pastime but then people started liking and contributing to it. AR Hemant was probably the first person who appreciated the work and then also contributed to it and shared the same with some of his friends. I became we and people liked it. I was very reluctant to publicize it as I thought if it is good enough people will automatically get to know this. Idiotic I say. When you can, you should make full use of the resources to show people your stuff, as many people told me this soon.

I asked few of my online friends like Meghana Kulkarni who had interest in designing and movies to contribute. She also came along and shared her stuff. More people liked it. And then we had enough posters to be called ourself as a website a well fed growing site. More people started contributing and our engine started and we took off.

On 29^th February someone from Mumbai Mirror noticed our work and published a small but important story that was our first story that got published in any newspaper. Meghana was pro-active in getting a 10 day slot at Grubshup, Pune to hold our first ever exhibition that helped us gain enough velocity launch into the right orbit. On Twitter, I shared the link of the Golmaal poster because of some #SameGuy tweet to the genius @diogeneb and when he retweeted, the site went viral. We got around 900 odd hits that day. This made us established into the correct orbit.

I being the face of MMPIndia, by chance, got phone calls from Indian Express Pune, Pune Mirror, Hindustan Times Mumbai and DNA Mumbai.  Yahoo!, thanks to AR Hemant again, featured our website on their front page. That was huge! The number of hits on the site amplified and we reached more than 1000 hits that day.

6^th March, I went to watch Paan Singh Tomar. After I came back, I made that poster which still half of the world doesn’t understand. Somebody shared the poster link to Anurag Kashyap who shared it with Irrfan Khan. And on that day I got phone calls from both of them. Take a pause. Breathe. Yes. I got actual real phone calls from both of them. I mean wow. Anurag Kashyap said ‘Damn good job’ at least 4 times that day. Irrfan Khan, the PST himself, loved the poster and asked for high resolution copy of it. In the same week, I got to know that my tenure in the client office is about to get over. Bench period was knocking again. But it didn’t happen though.

Next week, I made the Kahaani poster. Somebody again shared the link to Sujoy Ghosh. Somebody was most probably @navjotlive. Sujoy shared it with Vishal Dadlani who wanted the poster for his T Shirt. Same day, Sujoy Ghosh called me on phone and again, I was amazed and still cannot believe it.. Site is on 99 posters as I write and queue already has few posts to be published soon.

Since then we have been featured several times on various websites and newspapers, with and without credit but that happens because it is Internet. We have inspired many people to start up their own Minimal posters pages and some of them didn’t thank us for the inspiration but that’s okay again. Let them enjoy the fame they got because of us but I would certainly like to thank few people, not in any specific order but here are their names: Hemant, Meghana, Hirni, Shaunak , Madhuri, Harshita, Anish, Rajat, Abhishek, Ankur, Sogani, Ojasvi, Vinod Raman, Navjot Gulati and all my friends who saw the work and helped it to become more famous. I cannot write name of everyone but you know it and I know it 🙂

So things for the average guy has been going pretty fine since few days. It was an average day and an average artwork graphically but it was simple and was made with simple intention of bringing few smiles on the faces. We have been able to do it till now. Hoping that this shall continue, before I sign off to make more posters, I would like to dedicate the happenings of last 3 months to few people. They being: Rahul Dravid (for whom I wanted to write the longest ever dedication post but couldn’t do it) and Sachin Tendulkar (for being the God himself, what to say about him) and to all the teetotalers and vegetarians of the world 😉

P.S.: The 100th poster, by number, is shown below.