Deepesh Sangtani

We’re back! After a successful launch of our hot goss zine, Daily Soaps 1.0, we’re asking you for your office drama and gossip that would make HR wash your mouth out with soap. Don’t worry, your answers will be confidential. Share it with your friends, office colleagues, or even HR (maybe they have more stories) All contributors get a free copy. Last day to submit - 10th May 2026 Link in bio. [open call, zines, books, publication design, experimental zines]

🥭 NEW SPOTLIGHT 🥭 In this intimate profile, Dona spotlights a SAS friend, Kutty Press! Built around the idea of reimagining press and focusing on small but experimental publishing, Bhavani and Deepesh create unique, imperfect, heartful books, zines and prints. Head to southasiansalon.com for the full read!

Private view captures from Jugaading Through Life in New Delhi last week! It was so incredible to get our community together for our first event in India! Thank you so much for all the old and new friends and family that came to celebrate this with us🥭 Featuring some beautiful photographs by @ronfoshizzle 🧡 And delicious food by @lore.delhi 🥭🌶️ Exhibition by @southasiansalon and programmed by @kuttypress.studio ❤️

Launching our first collaborative designed photobook, we had the pleasure of working with the lovely photographer and writer, @ronfoshizzle Of Innocence, and Experience by Ronojoy Sircar is a response to the war. Through poetry and photography, Sircar moves through everyday encounters across physical and symbolic geographies. This photo essay drifts between tenderness, brutality, stillness, and rupture. The blending of concrete poems with triptychs, diptychs, and single images resists a linear narrative, instead unfolding as fragments of memory, sensation, and philosophical reflection. About the author: Ronojoy Sircar is a New Delhi-based multidisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, film, and music. His practice explores memory, urban space, and marginal histories through images, texts, and sound, often moving between archive and artwork. He is the author of Notice, Period (Sahitya Akademi )and Remember, Repeat, Inhabit (Bloomsbury), and is currently completing Faith on the Border: Religion, Culture, and Memory in Taki (Springer). Across forms, his work approaches image-making as a way of listening to what persists in the everyday. Limited run of 15 copies only. Only for sale in India Order now! Link in bio. #photobooks #photography #bookdesign #poetry [book design, book binding, photography book, photobooks, poetry, diptychs, triptychs, memory, writings, design, hand binding]

🥭Jugaading Through Life🥭 Bhavani Balasubramanyam and Deepesh Sangtani Halpïmstök What do you do when you accidentally lock yourself out of your house with the keys still inside? You improvise. Halpïmstök (loosely translated as “help, I’ve made a mistake”) is a device constructed from hardware-store parts, cardboard, and generous amounts of duct tape, designed to reach through a mail flap and retrieve the key from inside the door. Born out of necessity and mild panic, the contraption became a small act of jugaad: resourceful, improvised problem-solving. The piece reflects the everyday adaptations often experienced by South Asian immigrants as they navigate unfamiliar systems and rising costs abroad. Accompanied by an IKEA-style manual, the work humorously documents this “reverse heist” while celebrating ingenuity, survival, and the deeply human instinct to fix problems with whatever is at hand. @deepstagram27 was also the head curator of this show🩷🥭🩷

Neighborhood Diaries, an oral history initiative on CR Park, by Shapno Ekhon was invited to participate in 'Melbandhan' EBDP's Founders Day Celebrations, held on 21st March at CR Park Kali Mandir Society. Shahana Chakraborty, the program lead of Neighborhood Diaries and author of 'And They Lived: Early Years of CR Park', published by Shapno Ekhon participated in a lively discussion 'The Story of CR Park' along with Prof PK Bhattacharya about his book on East Bengal 'Chinnomuler Shadh Puron' who enlivened the session with beautiful poetry and songs. The session was energetically and skillfully moderated by Joy Dey who by his presence and warmth drew out the best from the works of both the authors. The process and significance of Neighborhood Diaries, an oral history program on CR Park run by Shapno Ekhon for the last nine years was shared during the course of the discussion. An innovative travelling exhibition conceptualized and designed by Deepesh Sangtani was on display during the event. The exhibition, a collection of archival photos and choti bois, is inspired by the book, 'And They Lived: Early Years of CR Park' Please get in touch with us through messages or calls (+91 98714 97092) to get a copy of 'And they Lived: Early Years of CR Park' and Living the Memories: Chronicles of Chittaranjan Park' - publications of Shapno Ekhon. #melbandhan #ebdp #bookdiscussion #neighborhooddiaries #shapnoekhon

Thank you so much to everyone who came and supported us at TWO(!!) simultaneous events in Delhi and Dundee. What a wild sentence to say! Thank you @guidoborso @offsetprojects and @dundeezinefest for an incredible weekend. More exciting (SIMULTANEOUS) events soon! Come say hi at Plymouth and Delhi 27-29th March 🥰

🥭JUGAADING THROUGH LIFE🥭 An exhibition by South Asian Salon in New Delhi In a world driven by systems of efficiency and standardisation, Jugaad celebrates improvisation and ingenuity, ways of making, reusing, and reimagining with limited means. Our exhibition ‘Jugaading Through Life’ repositions Jugaad beyond its stereotype of frugal innovation, recognising it as a design philosophy and a social practice that reflects everyday life and shared experiences across South Asia. Exhibition Runs: 27th – 29th March, 11 AM–6 PM RSVP to the Private View: Friday, 27th March, 5:30 – 7:30 PM (Link in Bio) 📍Hosted at the amazing Offset Projects, B-85 Okhla Phase-II, New Delhi @offsetprojects DIY Weekend workshops curated by @kuttypress.studio • Cyanotype Workshop — Pulp Society @pulpsociety • Clay Character Workshop — Jyotsana Singh @jyojondhar • Sketch Stories: Objects, Streets & Caricatures — Lohit Mathuria @lohit_mathuria • Stamp Making + Flipper Zine Workshop — FruitySideUp! @fruitysideup • Painting Workshop: Technique & Cognitive Expression — Tahani Khan @tahanikhan0 Limited spots for all workshops. Register now! — link in bio🥭

The travelling exhibition designed for the Neighbourhood Diaries is ready for Round 2! Our first trial had a bunch of curious visitors spending time exploring the portable setup. Designed as a modular travelling exhibition, the archive can move across neighbourhoods, carrying these documented memories to different spaces. We’ll be running our next trial on 21 March 2026 at Kali Mandir, Chittaranjan Park, along with a small adda session around memory, neighbourhood stories, and community archives. We’re also looking for new spaces where these documented stories can travel next. Have a suggestion? Drop it in the comments. Videos by @ronfoshizzle and @siddharthasarkar22 #documentation #travellingexhibition #communityarchives #exhibitiondesign #bookmaking

What a journey it has been bringing these photobooks to life. The photographs by @akshaykapoooor are intense and powerful. After much nudging (and pestering), we finally decided they had to exist in print. Farmers Protest (I) captures active scenes from the protests, including interactions between protesters and the police, with photographs from significant events such as the tractor rally on 26 January 2021. Farmers Protest (II) focuses on everyday life at the protest sites, documenting quieter moments across the three major locations: Singhu Border, Tikri Border, and Ghazipur Border. The CAA–NRC Protests photobook brings together photographs from multiple protest sites documented over a period of two to three months, reflecting the scale and persistence of the movement. We’re currently working on a more expansive publication that will bring together the full body of photographs along with field notes from the journeys behind them. I’ll also be sharing a short video soon, walking through my design process and how I curated the photographs for these books. The sequencing and layouts were shaped by considerations of movement, symmetry, and recurring objects within the images. You can now find these photobooks at @thebookshopinc @printedmatter.kochi @editionsjojo @offsetbookshop @studio.3fold and many more to come. Soon to be at @champacabooks You can also order your copy through the link in bio. Grateful to everyone supporting small print publications and independent photography. [photobooks, publications, books, photography, documentation, archiving, bookstores, libraries, book design, publication design]

SOUTH ASIAN SALON PRESENTS THEIR FIRST EXHIBITION🥭JUGAADING THROUGH LIFE🥭 In a world driven by systems of efficiency and standardisation, Jugaad celebrates improvisation and ingenuity, ways of making, reusing, and reimagining with limited means. Our exhibition ‘Jugaading Through Life’ repositions Jugaad beyond its stereotype of frugal innovation to recognise it as a design philosophy and a social practice that reflects everyday life and shared experiences across South Asia. Additionally, the exhibition will feature a series of DIY, hands-on workshops curated and led by the fabulous @kuttypress.studio Private View: Friday, 27th March, 5:30 – 7:30 PM - RSVP LINK IN BIO Exhibition Runs: 27th – 30th March, 11 AM–6 PM 📍Hosted at the amazing Offset Projects, B-85 Okhla Phase-II

Day 3 of skiing in #gulmarg