They’re mid-edit, waiting patiently for the person on screen to forget the camera trained on them. Somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark, the person stops choosing words for an invisible audience and says the things they actually came to say. Pai’s fingers flash across the keyboard. It’s the frame they’ve been waiting for. Everything else falls to the cutting room floor.
Pai’s calm during an edit is legendary. It is also the only time this calm exists. Pai has never been still for more than 10 minutes in any situation. Bee, their frequent and oldest collaborator, calls them “a delicious scatterspark of kinetic energy.” They go climbing almost every day. Freedom from a brain in constant motion.
Calm. Kinetic. Polarities that comfortably coexist within this tiny, almost waif-like human.
a series of apprenticeships
For someone whose only formal training in the visual medium comes from a documentary-making programme in Prague, Pai’s repertoire is a self-teaching engine. Most of what they know came from learning from someone who knew. Or from learning on the job.
Pai’s father taught them photography as a child. They’ve doodled and illustrated for as long as they can remember, fluidly switching between paper and a tablet.
During their undergrad years in Mumbai, they took some b-boying classes. “I was really, really shit. Genuinely bad”. No strength, no flow, none of the things they hoped they would feel. One evening, they took their camera along to a cipher and shot it. People loved what came back, which led crews to ask them to come and shoot. Pai knew the movements well enough to know when something worth capturing on film was about to happen. A revelatory combination of performance, movement, and not missing the right moments. It set them up for gigs in the early indie music scene that paid so little, their parents had to cover rent.
A colleague at a Bangalore film-making studio gave them working lessons in animation. Two years later, Pai was flying solo.
Pai also finds it near impossible to say no to interesting work. “I will do pretty much anything in the visual medium that interests me.” If it’s something they’ve never done before, the answer doesn’t change. “I’ll figure it out.”
the medium is always incidental
When you ask Pai to demarcate the shape of their work, the list they give you is long. Film, illustration, motion graphics, graphic design, and photography. It reads like the resume of someone who does a bit of everything.
Bee, who has collaborated with Pai for the better part of fifteen years, turns it the other way up. “The mediums are incidental, and underneath all of the imposter syndrome, Pai tells stories that invite you in.” It is a framing Pai squirms at, “it sounds kinda foofy to call myself that”. Say, visual storyteller in whatever medium the story needs, and the scattered desk now looks like a multipotentialite’s toolkit. Pai knows this, but still visibly flinches at a descriptor worn smooth by people who use it liberally to mean nothing at all.
Shoumik, Pai’s partner and collaborator, has observed Pai working on a lot of projects, and puts it differently. Pai is Documentary, they say, not concept art; the joy is “cracking things, like solving puzzles”. As stylised as their art is, it comes from an imagination rooted in lived experience, something tangible. Before they take on any project, they need to know why the thing is being made at all. “If what I’m doing makes no sense to me, I have a very hard time doing it. And then it’s not going to be good.”
must break glass
Every project starts with a lot of questions – what the thing is for, who it’s aimed at, what two companies selling the same product would each be trying to say that the other wouldn’t. References for the feel and the message, both. Even on bog-standard corporate motion graphics, they want the base-level why. Bee says you have to actively participate in the project when you work with Pai; “If you take that extra time at the beginning, you walk away with gold. Pai’s edits can make you catch your breath on a corporate video, imagine.”
Their first pass at almost anything is what they call a “trash fire turn”; something they must get out of their system. “I’m very attached to my ideas. I go at the same thing three times,” which is why the throw-it-away has to happen. Shoumik has watched Pai be reminded that a project doesn’t pay enough, and to rein something in, and watched Pai refuse. “No, but I must,” is the answer. “My name is going on it”.
six months selling your soul, six months growing it back
Corporate work adds names like OnePlus and Motorola to the portfolio. It pays the bills even if the whole pricing thing is “literally vibes”. In established markets overseas, illustrators, photographers and editors often have agents who handle the administrative and financial side of things, so artists are free to create. Or you’re asked for an hourly rate. Very different from India, where a value-based pricing model is seen as an invitation to wrestle. Clients haggle like they’re being fleeced because there is always someone who’ll do it for a third of whatever you’re quoting. It’s the sort of thing they can only do for a stretch before they need to come up for air.
Air is the sort of project they did for the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). A toolkit that sat atop a vast earlier report that mapped legal procedures for changing your gender in every country in the world. Pai’s job was to take all of that and make it usable, not so much for institutions but for a single person figuring out the labyrinth of red tape all on their own. Or helping someone change theirs. Pai designed the layout, the cover, the spot illustrations, none of it their usual work, all of it learned in the doing. They went back to the two-person team mid-design to ask that certain lines be reworded so the layout could carry the weight of what they said. It was the first time Pai thought hard about how information becomes something of use to a person. What did it ask of them is the wrong question, Pai says. What matters is what it gave back. Work they believed in, that might change a stranger’s life.
Air is the sort of project they did for the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). A toolkit that sat atop a vast earlier report that mapped legal procedures for changing your gender in every country in the world. Pai’s job was to take all of that and make it usable, not so much for institutions but for a single person figuring out the labyrinth of red tape all on their own. Or helping someone change theirs. Pai designed the layout, the cover, the spot illustrations, none of it their usual work, all of it learned in the doing. They went back to the two-person team mid-design to ask that certain lines be reworded so the layout could carry the weight of what they said. It was the first time Pai thought hard about how information becomes something of use to a person. What did it ask of them is the wrong question, Pai says. What matters is what it gave back. Work they believed in, that might change a stranger’s life.
work that means something to someone
Then there’s work nobody commissions. Pai makes comics and art about their own mental health and their neurodivergence. It’s a vulnerable and exact lens into the impossible tasks that paralyse daily life for neurodivergent folk, things typicals take for granted. It’s what most people whose public feed is also how work finds them would keep off. But just the sort of thing Pai would make a deeply personal comic on. Shoumik thinks it is the most important thing Pai does. Having a peer say the hard thing out loud, they say, makes it possible for other people to believe they can. The more vulnerable you let yourself be, the more others see themselves in you.
And it points to the kind of work Pai wants to do all the time. People doing real work for communities, queer organising, mental health, health education, and the climate are almost always the ones with the least time or appetite for being seen. Visibility becomes the unfair price of the work. The toll is often too high and Pai wants to be the one who helps them pay for it with their craft.
are you asking me or telling me
In their own context, the cost that’s hardest to talk about isn’t money. “I do okay”. Wouldn’t it be easier to take on something full-time? They’ve tried several times. Pai at work is a time-lapse of someone trying very hard to interpret the world without subtitles, which for Pai is the real labour, harder than the work it contains. Full-time work inevitably wrests something vital out of them. Full-time creative jobs expect an “on all the time” that leaves no empty time to observe the world you’re meant to be covering. Bee says it took her years to understand that Pai often cannot explain, in the moment, what they need to work.
Over time they’ve built a defence out of writing everything down, and a single question they put to anyone who hands them an instruction: Are you telling me, or are you asking me?
The directness sometimes reads as rudeness, a tone thing, sometimes by design. But they are what they seem exactly.
There is no pretence. There are no walls.
Except the one they climb every morning, because climbing is “like a puzzle. If you think too much, it’s difficult to do.” It’s one thing that takes the whole mind and refuses to give it back.
