Nadig is drawn to Kannada very often. When he need to swear, to vent his road rage (to the amusement of all his TamBrahm friends,) and to sing loudly those old Rajkumar songs with that needed much lung capacity and for many other things.

He came from a regular South Indian family.  He grew up in Namma Bengaluru, surrounded by a Marathi, Konkani, Tamil and Gujju neighbors.  He ate thalipeeth for breakfast and bisi bele bhaat for lunch on the day he sat to draw the famous Kannada typology. He thought to himself, I’m going to call it Nadig, self-righteously! As he sat to draw it all in his grid book, he was listening to 80’s Bollywood music. Tum Pas Aaye from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was playing. “Thu!” he swore, and continue to hum the words verbatum, shaking his head in disbelief, and continued to draw.

He spoke Tamil at home with his avva and akka,  Kannada with his anna, learnt English in school. He was a wonderful musician, he simply wanted to wile away his time singing in the park, His teachers hated him, all except his Music teacher. She wrote sa re ga ma in Kannada in his music book. He waited for Somavaara (Tuesday) and Guruvaara (Thursday) for his singing classes with her.

He learnt Kannada as his second language, but was definitely not great at scoring marks. His Kannada teacher was shocked to see his 86/100 at his final board exams. She exclaimed “Whoever gave you that score must have been drunkard!” Ha ha….yes, it sounds brutal now, but she always reprimanded Nadig to think in Kannada if he wanted to write in it. That was the day Nadig had his first smoke, he remembers clearly now. Well, you see, life is difficult. If Nadig learnt Math and other subjects in English, his brain was finding it difficult to think in Kannada, so he spent hours in smoke, to train his brain to think in Kannada going forward from that day!

So here he was, making the 45 degree angles to sharpen the rounded edges of the script. So here he was, so many smoking hours away, thinking in Kannada while drawing the font! It’s was heartwarming to just draw these lines on the grid. He was quite enjoying it and there was nothing stopping him now, thank you, Kannada teacher!

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