The covid-19 pandemic pushed us to the brink of an abyss—and the abyss stared back with a multitude of answers. Some discovered a lifeline in baking sourdough bread. Others found solace in rustling up dalgona coffee. Siddharth Nair, lawyer-turned-artist, found his refuge in creating a series of profound yet funny ink-and-watercolour sketches and posting them on his Instagram handle @asiddababa.
A selection of these 500-odd images has just been published as a book, Existential Ants (Hachette India, 112 pages, ₹599), complete with pithy captions that work across multiple registers—philosophical, political, and often deeply personal. Like the animals in Aesop’s Fables, the crows, cows, bugs, bears and other creatures in Nair’s menagerie are stand-ins for humans, especially when the latter tend to behave less than admirably.
Here’s a sample: In one sketch, a doting swan parent tells its cygnet, “You give meaning to my life.” And to which, the little one retorts, “This sounds like a gruelling job, and one that I do not recall applying for.” Not a million miles away from how some of us would like to respond to emotionally manipulative parents.
Divided into four seasons, the sketches feature a recurring cast of characters, each with its take on life choices, careers, romance and relationships. They usually appear in pairs and are conspicuously mismatched in size and emotional intelligence. As a bull prepares to charge, a voice, which most likely belongs to a barely visible fly, quips, “If you think that’s impressive, you should see him weaponising his moods.” A perfect description of a bullishly volatile boss terrorising the workplace.
The droll and deadpan style lands almost always, especially when the captions are pithy and impossible to say aloud in polite society. My favourite is the one of a lizard that has just lost its tail in pursuit of an ant. “Oh, I’ll heal from this,” it says, “but, what’s really great is that I’ll be able to use it as an excuse for bad behaviour for the rest of my life."
