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Born into an army family in the south of India, Kevin Ilango got used to moving around a lot. He now recalls his young life as a bit of blur, a montage of scenes that add up to the extraordinary life of a normal army kid.
“Some of the bits and bobs I actually remember are chasing snakes in the intense Coimbatore summers, learning to swim in Faridabad, shooting an AK-47 at the age of four and losing my way back from school in the Delhi fog,” Kevin recalls.
In a life of snapshots that tell a bigger story, it’s perhaps not surprising that young Kevin found himself drawn to creative pursuits. Luckily for us here at The Narwhal, Kevin’s family nurtured their young artist, who has joined our team for a three-month art and design fellowship.
Already, Kevin’s talents have brought a new dimension to our storytelling, including through dynamic illustrations of transmission lines snaking across northern Ontario and Okanagan apples blown from a tree in a gust of wind.
I sat down with Kevin to learn more about the winding path that brought him to our pod.
My mother’s youngest sister Vimla, a self-taught artist and educator, introduced me to arts and crafts when I was around five. She somehow figured out I would rather make drawings and paper flutes for the school play than spend the evenings kicking a ball around.
We weren’t a family that really belonged in the arts, as my father went into the army life at a very young age and my mother’s dad was also in the army. Yet, from drawing pictures to braiding hair to writing a 250-page profanity-laden fan-follow-up to Pulp Fiction when I was 12, my folks were always encouraging me to be creative.
The location-inconsistency of my childhood came to a halt when I was 10 because of an unpredictable eight-year stay in the Czech Republic (now Czechia). The first three years were due to my father’s tenure as the defence attaché at the Indian embassy, and the remaining five were due to my mother’s role as an educator at the international school I attended and would eventually graduate from.
While my folks kept a strong relationship with India to make sure we don’t lose touch with our roots, experiencing a foreign land for almost a decade straight while having moved to different cities in my own country almost every year prior was a very abrupt shift, and I think one that turned me into a history geek that was always curious to know by comparing. It was a big deal for me to realize that the entire population of the Czech Republic was still just under that of the city of Delhi.
Of all the privileges that an international educational experience gave me (this includes getting to come out as a queer brown kid at a time when that was no doubt far more difficult for any of my friends in India), the one from Prague that still has ripples in my life and career was the presence of my history teacher, from Vancouver, who not only flooded me with extra credit assignments but also cultivated in me a love for film. Her knowledge of the city and general curiosity somehow over the years percolated into me through her teaching methods, and she always left me with the value of “challenging the assumptions of the question.”
I didn’t get to interact with art and design seriously until after my undergraduate degree in history, when I pursued a career in filmmaking and found myself assisting a film curator at South Asia’s largest film market, Film Bazaar. Getting to work on film catalogs, website content, marketing graphics and a film library viewing software, somehow reshuffled my goals for a creative career and I figured I found more purpose in graphic design. This led to studying art direction at a communications institute, followed by a stint in a marketing-comms firm, and eventually leading to a role as a graphic designer at a long-form narrative journalism magazine.
Working at The Caravan brought a number of fulfilling experiences, and some of which I hadn’t imagined would have a place in the world of journalism. For example, in my very first month I created four graphite portraits for a profile on leading figures of Tamil New Poetry, an underrepresented regional-language literary movement located in my father’s native Tamil Nadu. This was huge for me because I had never imagined this random skill (that I always felt belonged solely in the fine arts) would have a role to play in journalism, and yet simply because Tamil poetry and its makers had been so consistently disregarded in the national discourse of arts and aesthetics, a lack of photographs led to an opportunity to illustrate.
Being able to draw also allowed for a lot of rapid iterating for cover designs, preliminary sketches which helped in art directing commissioned illustrators, and also creating quick rough drafts for the illustrations I would contribute myself. Of this mix, illustrating Facebook’s shadow ban of Kashmiri activism following the abrogation of Article 370, portraying the Gond leader Heera Markam, animating the July 2019 cover “In Sua Causa,” getting to design experimental layouts for photo essays and creating the interactive web pieces for the “Modi Meter” were some of the most rewarding projects in my time there.
I hate pulling from aphorisms to answer big questions like this, but here we go. One of my earliest mentors in advertising once very sharply demarcated art and design by stating that “artists talk to themselves, designers talk to everyone.” I know obviously these categories are blurrier in practice, but seeing the two disciplines as separated helped me understand something about the purpose design serves and what role it could play in journalism.
Not to harken back to my time at The Caravan once again, but because the very first issue I worked on focused on the MeToo movement in India, that is perhaps the clearest example in my head of how design supplemented journalism as it presented a unique challenge in how to design with an ethics of and a sensibility in representation.
The issue carried three long-form stories that detailed the accounts of women who had survived harassment and assault in their respective workplaces. Tanvi Mishra, the creative director at the time, made the unique decision to have only one photograph of the perpetrators in each of the stories, while the spoken words of the survivors would be used as enlarged pull quotes such that text itself would become the imagery. Beyond any beautiful branding project I had ever come across, this was the first time I had seen design go beyond making a thing look good. Design here complemented the ambition of the journalistic endeavour, the powerful were held to account and were the only ones whose faces the readers would come across, and the many individuals who had braved the expected patriarchal backlash, while all mentioned by name, were represented only through their words.
Speaking broadly however, journalism does not always produce solutions but it does the very important work of diagnosing, and it does this by engaging the public through imparting knowledge and inviting it to create knowledge together. It seeks to speak to everyone too, and together with design it does something I find very important: it produces something that is valuable simply because it allows itself to be accessed and understood by the greatest number of people at the time.
Getting to bring my approach to design to The Narwhal is a practice-shaping opportunity. The ethos of the reporting here prioritizes intelligently communicating critical information, but also life-affirming, uplifting stories. As a web-first news organization, The Narwhal is uniquely positioned to take advantage of new media formats in journalism, which I’m most excited to explore. Additionally, The Narwhal’s reporters really walk the talk with the organization’s tenets for deep dives with their beats, and that these can even look so different from each other. For example, Emma Mcintosh following the money in Ontario’s green economy targets, or Matt Simmons leading an online discussion about the future of B.C. wildfires. The Narwhal encourages both looking again and looking deeper, and I’m excited to see where I can bring elements of design to contribute to that.
Ramen and a melodramatic film. I don’t know why, because Ramen in Toronto is not the fried Ramen I was used to in India, but a good bowl of soupy noodles with egg, pork and bok choy, and my umpteenth viewing of Gangubai Kathiawadi really hits the spot.
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