Design against Design: India’s emerging new visual culture

In five weeks, a six-legged insect has become one of the most reproduced symbols in Indian visual culture. It is on masks. It is in posters. It is being illustrated, animated, stitched, stencilled, sung about, and printed on t-shirts. One artist, Gaurav Sardana, drew a Gandhi figure being pulled forward by one. Nobody owns the copyright. Nobody licenses it. There is no style guide. Every cockroach looks slightly different from the last and that is the design. The symbol works because of how badly it was meant. A word chosen to diminish a generation has been reclaimed until the original sting is no longer recoverable. The cockroach is now ugly, friendly, defiant, sometimes even funny on purpose. It is rare to encounter an Indian symbol with no authority deciding what it should look like and even rarer, to have its meaning gets sharper over time. This is what makes the cockroach the most universal design move of 2026! Illustration Credits: Gaurav Sardana

Illustration Credits: Gaurav Sardana