TECH. ARTS. COMMUNITY.
Maitreyi Kulkarni
Museologist, Creator, Writer
Maitreyi Kulkarni is a postgraduate Museology student in MSU Baroda, Vadodara, who has completed her Bachelor's in History from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. She has a keen interest in creative and academic writing along with conservation. Her other interests include Hindustani Classical Music and Theatre.
Challenges
10
Crashing Waves
For this challenge, we had invited the fellows to bring their final projects to life through the powerful mediums of either a short film or a graphic novel. Maitreyi’s graphic novel Crashing Waves presents the protagonist Sakhi’s life in disarray. She is a PhD aspirant in art history, passionate about the city’s heritage, but her routine is shattered when she discovers cracks in the city’s great tsunami barrier—a structure built to protect millions.
7
After an engaging workshop with Nina Sabnani, the fellows applied their imagination to craft a narrative using five images that Nina gave as prompts. Maitreyi’s story follows Tanuja, an eight-year-old girl from a small village, who finds and bonds with a stray puppy named Waghya, becoming deeply attached to him.
6
For this challenge, we wanted the fellows to create supporting characters that would inhabit their envisioned future world. Maitreyi created the character of 78 year old Indrajeet Patil, who is Sakhi's jovial but critical grandfather, a retired national-level tennis player and coach. Thomas (Diesel) Ashish, 25, is a competitive and snarky co-worker of Sakhi’s, with a passion for art history that matches hers.
5
Fellows developed characters who would live in their imagined future worlds. Maitreyi created the character of Sakhi Patil, a 28 year old demisexual tour guide in Mumbai. She has a passion for art history and juggles her job at Walk n' Discover with her PhD thesis.She has dark, olive skin and a hooked nose.She usually dresses in haram pants and a cropped top with the company’s logo, while sporting jhumkas, while wearing a black leather jacket over it. She sports sunglasses and a dupatta around her shoulders.
4
For this challenge, we wanted fellows to continue building on their explored futures, focusing on world building. We wanted them to visualise it as the opening scene of a sci-fi film, where the focus is on the setting rather than the characters. 5 to 6 frames were created using Gooey's Animation Generator in draft mode (2 FPS). Maitreyi created a stunning vision of Mumbai's coastline, where a massive tsunami barrier stretches across the horizon.
3
For this challenge, we had asked the fellows to illustrate their peers’ predictions for the future. Maitreyi illustrated Dielle Coutinho's prediction. By 2050, Mumbai’s coastline has a tsunami barrier with storm surge gates. A sponge city model around the Mithi River supplements storm-water drainage capacity during extreme weather.
2
We asked the fellows to explore what the future would look like. We also asked them to forecast a series of predictions for the next few years, with a timeline of no more than 25 years ahead. Maitreyi made the following prediction about the future. Over the next two decades, more literature pertaining to class consciousness, racism, queer issues, communalism and casteism will be banned and disinformation about these concepts will spread further. While fictional allegories in dystopian literature will be found, any parallels as such to literature set in the real world with real locations will be censored heavily or completely banned. There will be a shift in what gets published more often too, with the focus being more on "aspirational capitalism".
