Hanif Kureshi was a junior art director in my group at Ogilvy in the early 2000s, and my enduring memory of him was his frequent disappearing acts - he used to disappear without informing anyone, especially when there was a lot of work.
The Missing Hanif, he was called.
When he resurfaced, his excuses were so cock-and-bull even the Ogilvy security guards guffawed ('I lost my bus ticket and was stranded in Baroda' was probably his favourite).
Anil Madan (Maddy, my good friend and art partner) and I were frequently at the end of our respective tethers, but Maddy had a Gujarat connection (NID Ahmedabad) and probably was a little lenient with uber-talented young Gujjus.
Yes, uber-talented he was. When it came to experimenting, totally wild, out-of-the-box explorations around Indian fonts, for example, he was something else. He was transformed. From a frail junior art director churning out meek layout options in the corner of the cramped Captain Gaur Singh Marg office to an explosive, wrecking ball bundle of talent who could carry a lifetime of work on his frail shoulders.
Of course, it had nothing to do with work, our bread-and-butter work that is, but we all knew we were in the presence of a flowering genius.
I quit Ogilvy a year or two later and moved to Digital, and Hanif went to V Sunil’s ad agency (Weiden + Kennedy I think), and we kind of lost touch. But I believe Hanif truly flowered there - the brilliant and quirky V Sunil and Prasad Raghavan (my boss and art partner respectively, from Contract advertising, in the late 90s and early 00s) were doing some world-class work on Incredible India, Indigo Airlines, Nike and other accounts, and nurtured and mentored Hanif to his full potential I am sure.
I’m also sure he went AWOL there too, and walked the streets of New Delhi and other cities looking for channels of unfettered creative expression. He often worked under the pseudonym ‘Daku’ creating a lot of Banksy-style graffiti in New Delhi (but with a twist), and I remember an annoyed phone call from him once, asking me to take off a Facebook post about a particular graffiti - he believed the police were looking for him for defacing the capital’s streets. Ha.
Hanif's childhood fascination with signboard painting and hand-lettering took him deep into subaltern territory, where he sought out street sign painters, commissioning them to craft alphabets in their distinctive, local styles. He also digitized some of these typefaces (‘HandpaintedType’).
He was always a big-picture guy, literally, and the next obvious step was street art, where he found the true canvas of his imagination. He and his artist friends took over buildings, starting with the Delhi Police HQ and the Tihar Jail (funny, yes) and the Lodhi Colony later, and painted them with wild, vivid pop art-type of illustrations - people, animals, nature, and so on.
Like many Delhi-ites, I was stunned by the giant, larger-than-life and ultra-cool designs, something that would look great anywhere whether a t-shirt or aeroplane; it had the same effect on me as the Bulgarian-born artist Christo Javacheff’s giant ‘wrapped’ buildings.
Now called the Lodhi Art District, the energy behind the 60-plus murals created by national and international artists, all curated and mentored by Hanif, spilled over to projects across the country in Mumbai, Chennai, Goa, Coimbatore; the Delhi and Bangalore metros too.
His work was exhibited at international art events and venues, including the London Design Biennale, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and also at the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale at the Red Fort in Delhi. In June 2024, he held a solo exhibition at Wildstyle Gallery in Sweden.
I saw a lot of wit, humour, and social consciousness in his work. I saw the ability to think scale - he was not content to do a personal project, however brilliant - he wanted to touch the world with his vision, perhaps change it a little.
Most of all, I see a wild-looking scruffy kid from a small town, making dead urban spaces come alive. Making the anonymous, common man on the street feel a little enriched.
Would like to sign off on a funny note as Hanif was a funny guy. Check out this Facebook screengrab from way back, where I wish him a happy birthday and he replies two years later.
Goodbye, Hanif. You will be missed. But your work will live on.
(The author of the article is Shubho Sengupta, a digital marketer with an analogue past.)
 (1)_20241119135037_original_image_33.webp)
_20241112135249_original_image_18.webp)
_20241108133740_original_image_10.webp)
_20241101163253_original_image_33.webp)