Hello there!
I'm Paramita Brahmachari. I am a freelance designer. I work from my home in Kolkata, India. I have no formal training in design. But I come pre-addicted to the good books. EDUCATION I studied Comparative Literature and Film Studies for my Undergraduate and Postgraduate degrees, both from Jadavpur University. In 2012, I completed my Doctorate, which was jointly affiliated to the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University and the Centre for Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) as part of an Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) fellowship, and immediately joined a freshly introduced four-month course on book design, taught by the fabulous Sunandini Banerjee at the Seagull School of Editing and Publishing. WORK I wrote film reviews for The Telegraph in Kolkata for nearly seven years while I was in university and after, sometimes, although rarely, also writing on music and visual arts. I freelanced widely at the time, but it had mostly to do with writing, research and texts. I remember one of the stranger jobs, purely due to its setting, was as copy-editor of books, journals, and essays for the Anthropological Survey of India, back when it used to be housed in a building behind the Indian Museum, along with the other Survey offices. There, I would walk past a surreal collection of taxidermied large mammals and birds – a giraffe, a zebra, possibly an emu, and suchlike – at the Zoological Survey on the ground floor. The Anthropological Survey offices themselves had several long, dark corridors lined with cabinets thickly stacked with variously classified, and oddly tiny skulls, this I somehow found very comforting, and grounding. DESIGN It wasn’t until August 2016 that I first had a paid assignment for a book cover. Since then, barring a year or two in between, when I could not work because of family emergencies and then the COVID lockdown, I have loved the time I spent working on covers, reading books, noting down motifs, colours, characters, or other oddities. I learnt how to draw in recent years, and love to experiment with pastels, watercolour and printmaking, and often use my newly acquired skills in my cover designs. I also hand-letter text on some of my covers. To date I have designed books with Aakar Books; Bloomsbury Academic (U.S.A.); Jadavpur University Press; Pan Macmillan (including its imprints Pan and Picador); Niyogi Books, Routledge, Taylor and Francis; Stree-Samya and Yeruvaka Books. I still very occasionally edit, and translate (the latter only from Bangla to English), but designing books is the work I live for. WHY 'neurotic egg' It is, to begin with, a very apt description of my resting state of mind. But it equally works as an analogy for how I work – all the frenetic skitterings of ideas in my head, the slow incubation of something clearer as they fall in line, and finally take shape, like a mystery egg about to hatch on paper, or onscreen.