My Manifesto
EST. 2026 // VISUAL ARCHIVE
Hello. I am Darshan.
I make things.
Sometimes I design them. Sometimes I photograph them. Sometimes I film them. Sometimes I write about them.
Sometimes I spend three hours deciding whether a line should move six pixels to the left, and then three weeks making something that could’ve technically been done in three hours. I think that’s fine, honestly.
I’ve never been great at picking just one thing.
Designer? Yes. Filmmaker? Trying. Photographer? Absolutely. Writer? When nobody’s looking. Researcher? Unfortunately, also yes.
I like the messy zone where all of this bumps into each other.
I like things that feel alive.
Not perfect. I’m honestly a bit suspicious of perfect things.
I like things with fingerprints on them, stuff that looks like a person actually sat down and made it. A weird typeface choice. A composition that doesn’t quite behave. A photo taken at the wrong moment. A drawing that was never meant to become anything. A sentence that ends up more interesting than the thing it was describing.
I like maximalism, but not the kind that just dumps everything on the screen and calls it a day. I like excess that means something. More layers, more references, more questions, but hopefully some reason behind it too.
I’m interested in people.
Which is probably why I get distracted by everything around them.
How a word changes meaning depending on who says it. How a street feels different after 7 PM. What people keep on their tables. The little rituals they do without noticing. The stories stuck inside ordinary objects. The unwritten rules everyone somehow knows.
India’s full of this stuff. I want to look at it, sometimes seriously, sometimes academically, sometimes with a camera, and sometimes with a completely ridiculous poster.
I also watch way too many films.
Cinema’s become one of the main ways I make sense of things. I watch films, write about films, take photos that remind me of films, redesign posters for films, borrow nothing directly and somehow still steal everything, and occasionally convince myself that a third three-hour movie in one week counts as “research.”
It usually does. Probably.
This website is what happens when all of that gets mixed together.
Chitra-Chaalak isn’t trying to be a clean, organised portfolio. It’s closer to a personal archive. A workshop. A notebook. A sketchbook. A place where finished projects sit next to half-formed thoughts, where photos sit next to films, where design sits next to research, and where something completely unnecessary is allowed to sit right in the middle of it all.
Why not.
A NOTE ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
This site is made for desktop. Yes, on purpose.
I wanted to build something that feels like a place you walk into, not another responsive rectangle that politely reshuffles itself the moment you resize the window.
Some things here move. Some things react. Some things probably don’t need to exist. Some things might break. Some things I’ll probably change tomorrow.
That’s part of the deal.
This site is always being worked on. Projects will show up and disappear. Pages will change. New experiments will land. Old ones will get embarrassing. Some stuff will stay unfinished because unfinished things are part of the archive too.
So if it looks a little different next time you visit, good. That means you caught it alive.
THERE’S NO FINAL VERSION.
I don’t really believe in one.
The work keeps changing. The way I think keeps changing. What I’m curious about keeps changing. So this site should too.
Think of it less as a portfolio and more as a running record of whatever I happened to be curious about at some particular point in time. Some of it will hold up. Some of it will be questionable. Some of it will make me wonder what I was even thinking. I’m keeping all of it anyway.
ONE LAST THING.
I don’t want to make work that looks like it came off a template. I want to make things that feel like someone was actually here.
Someone looked at something. Someone cared about it. Someone made a mess and changed their mind halfway through. Someone stayed up too late fixing the typography. Someone laughed at their own joke. Someone tucked a tiny unnecessary detail somewhere nobody would ever notice, and published it anyway.
That someone’s me.
Welcome to the archive.
- Darshan AKA Chitra Chaalak