2025 in Review
(I wrote this a few weeks ago, but with work, travel and the announcement of my first longform comic as a writer, I didn’t have a chance to reread this till now to post it. However, I’m not making any chronological edits, so In Your Skin is still referred to as SEASIDE below.)
Looking back from the lofty, if teetering, heights of age 40, I have spent most of my adult life feeling, at the end of each year, that I could’ve done more. Like I wasted time I could ill afford.
2025 was the first year when I properly began recording my life – in a physical notebook. Before this, I have often written diary entries into an app, I’ve run task management systems, and I have kept rigorous track of how much work I did. But as to the rest, the days would run into a blob of inconsequentiality, and I rarely looked back at them.
So – to my surprise, and rather confused delight, tracking my life in a notebook has allowed me to see just how much I’ve done, and how much work I put into it, backed by evidence. There’s of course still a lot of things I could be doing better – for myself and for others – but, let’s just say, I don’t use my time as badly as much as my brain thinks I do.
So in reviewing 2025, I must begin with this big change that has put things in much-needed perspective.
Journaling
In May of 2025, I started Bullet Journaling. I should say I started it again, but this time was so vastly more successful than the first time that I might as well count it as my first proper attempt. I wrote about the decision here, and did a short follow-up here. I intended to blog about it properly, but it was a very full year, and I didn’t get around to it.
In short, though, what I’ve liked about the Bullet Journal is that not only has it replaced most of my organisation system that existed on the computer, it has allowed me to look backwards in a more meaningful way. Even if I’m not always able to elaborate on every aspect of my day, I know the broad strokes of what I did every day of last year (since May, that is). It allowed me to see patterns, and particularly to realise that all those times I’d blame myself for delaying something, there was usually a good reason that took precedence, and I was more intentional with these things than I’d realised.
There were, for example, days when a friend’s parents were in the hospital, or when I had a heartfelt call or meeting with someone – or took a day off to hang out with K or with family. Usually, I’d have looked back and registered those as days on which I did nothing, but I can leaf through my notebook and see exactly what displaced work or writing and why it was important.
I was also able to look at the things I kept pushing into the future, and see what they had in common – what it was about them that, for whatever reason, didn’t appeal to me. The Bullet Journal was a good way to figure what not to do as much as what to do.
I have also liked how malleable the Bullet Journal is. I went through two notebooks in 2025, and looking at the index, I see that I used my journal for the following purposes:
- To-do lists and time-block planners
- Reading trackers for books, comics, movies, plays, tv shows, albums as well as recommendations I got from people on these lines
- Page tracker for scripting PROJECT SEASIDE
- Notes and shortlists for the American Manga Awards
- Notes on books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism
- Notes on analogue photography and film dev
- Film festival trackers
- Notes on intentions for 2026
- Bucket list
That’s a whole lot of stuff for one notebook to be doing, and it does them all very well. I was also able to experiment with different tools and retain and abandon them as needed.[1] For example, I had hoped that taking Michael Palin-style notes on every day would help me be more regular with my diary. It hasn’t worked as well as I’d hoped, but the upside is that even if I don’t have elaborate diary entries, I have fairly detailed handwritten notes I can look back on – better than nothing.
And finally, as I sat down to write this, I remembered less than half of the things I’m about to note. Having the Bullet Journal to refer to reminded me that I’d been far more active, and in far better ways, than I’d given myself credit for.
I’ve just begun my third Bullet Journal, the first for 2026, and I’m very excited about it.
Work
I lettered 1108 pages of comics in 2025, down from an estimated 1957. When I wrote down that estimate, I knew I had buffered the number by about 400 pages, but I’m glad it ended up being even lower. It enabled me to do everything else that comes below, and to do those 1108 pages better.
The biggest portion of these were part of my Artist-in-Residence contract with Tiny Onion. The rest were either existing projects (like Human Nature), short stories I did so I’d get to work with friends, and one new book with Ram (Resurrection Man). There were a couple of heavy months (the June-September stretch), but for most of the year, I was able to focus and do good work while also taking necessary breaks.
My estimate for 2026 is 1512, which includes a buffer of 500 pages (i.e. these were projects in discussion that I’m not sure will happen, or at least, likely won’t happen in 2026).
In terms of work that was not lettering, I developed two fonts this year – one for Resurrection Man, and one for PROJECT SEASIDE that I previewed here.
Alongside Ariana Maher, I judged the lettering category of the American Manga Awards for 2025. This was a blast – getting to chat lettering for hours with Ariana, and looking at the quality of lettering currently being executed in manga was inspiring.
I also created three logos for Upar Ek Studios – a game studio run by my friends Omkar, Divij and Mayuresh. This includes the wordmark for “Upar Ek” (which we’re planning to expand into a monospace typeface for later use – I didn’t do the tile logo, just the wordmark), and the logo for the re-release of their first game Kabutar, both of which you can see on their website. I also did the logo for their second game – this time a customised logo starting from a typeface (the first two were hand-lettered with digital brushes). I’ll do a process post for that one when the game is announced.
Writing
I finished scripting the entire first draft of PROJECT SEASIDE by the end of May, and I wrapped up the final scripts for Issue 1 and 2. Other than that, I just wrote stuff on this blog, though I did occasionally write semi-elaborate film reviews on my Letterboxd. Actual creative writing kinda takes it out of you when it comes to writing other stuff, I feel.
Usually I’d be a bit miffed that I didn’t write any short stories or short comics, but PROJECT SEASIDE has taken up all available brain-space for the year, and it has deserved it.
Photography
I shot 3500 digital photos and 37 rolls of film in 2025. In case of the former, I haven’t sat and edited most of them yet, and in the case of the latter, around 10 of them are yet to be developed.
I’ve discovered that I don’t love the process of editing – especially if I’m supposed to do it to take a break from work or writing, which are already creative activities – but I do love the process of shooting, figuring out themes and compositions, and collaborating with muses. The lesson I’m taking into 2026 is to shoot more film, because it means taking more decisions in the moment of shooting, and the editing process gets much easier. With digital, you’re leaving too much for your future self to do, and my future self happens not to be very motivated to sit in front of a laptop and select from hundreds of pictures, and that’s unfair to my collaborators.
I was far more intentional later in the year while attending Danny’s art residency – but that one was also important for other reasons that I wrote about here.
I also attended an analogue photography workshop in May, where I learnt to develop rolls of film on my own, and also made a silver gelatin darkroom print (I’d post it here, but I haven’t had a chance to pick it up from the lab where we did it).
My intention for 2026 is to shoot film more than digital, and to develop my own rolls at home more. I’m investigating if I should also have a scanning setup at home (they’re expensive, and built for frequent use). I also spooled my first roll of film (K’s brother is a film photographer who spools his own film and gave me a lesson). So the ideal scenario is that I shoot a lot more film and develop and scan at home to make the process cheaper and more fluid.
We’ll find out if that’s the case.
Entertainment
I thought I’d fallen behind in reading this year, but when I totted up the number, it turns out that I read 58 prose books in 2025, which is more than a book a week. Of these, 24 were novels, and 34 were nonfiction. I’m a little surprised at that – I usually read far more novels – but I think my reading was more fragmented this year (for which nonfiction tends to be more convenient), and I was taking in a whole lot of stories via film, so I ended up with fewer novels.
My desire to read more plays continued to be confounded, as I read a total of two plays, and no poetry collections, though I read a fair few individual poems while I was scripting PROJECT SEASIDE (I avoid reading fiction while I’m writing).
I read 49 volumes or runs of comics (I count each comic as one unit, whether it’s a multi-volume epic or a single Shortbox comic). This is much lower than usual. Most of these were manga, European comics or American comics from before 2010. I did read individual issues of my friends’ comics that they sent me, but I don’t include those in this count. I might say I was trying not to be overly influenced by modern trends as I scripted my own comic, or that I’m simply a bit burnt out on reading comics after working on and writing comics, but I think it goes deeper than that, which might be worth exploring in a future post. Anyway, I’d like to read more comics this year, and I’m disappointed that I’ve averaged less than one a week.
On the other hand, it’s been a banner year for movies. I have, easily, watched more films in 2025 than any other year of my life. I watched 121 films in 2025 – including rewatches. 43 of these were at film festivals – PIFF in February (21), and IFFI in November (22). 2025 was the year I became a film person. It seems very likely that’ll remain the case for the next few years at least – I mean, comics as an obsession have been going on for two decades now.
I also watched 20 seasons of tv, but that stalled out around May, after which, every time I had a choice, I watched a film rather than an episode of tv. No regrets.
Personal/Miscellaneous
I was about to write that I did less drawing than I would’ve liked, but then I remembered a creative project that I told basically no one about (i.e. I didn’t talk about it on the Internet).
Inspired by our mutual friend Pranav who spent a few years turning Inktober prompts into recipes, my friend Omkar did his own Inktober project in 2025, where he turned Inktober prompts into film flexagons (which is a neat zine format) and made reels based on them (you can see them in his highlights). We were chatting about this at the end of September while he planned it, and I mentioned that I’d had an old zine idea to draw frames from some of my favourite films and write about them. I wondered out loud if, rather than writing about them, I might simply draw a frame per day and letter the film’s title. I made a list of fifty frames from films I loved, and every day I pulled a random number from the pile and drew it. My conditions were – no rulers, and no whiteout. These were meant to stop me from overthinking and keep me moving forward.
My key decision, though, was to not post it on Instagram, or really anywhere online. I didn’t want to refresh for likes, feel like not enough people had appreciated a post, or even that I’d done something particularly well or badly. I sent each drawing to Pranav, Omkar, K, and eventually five more people, over WhatsApp. It gave me all the social approval without any of the minuses.
So I ended up with 31 drawings, most of which I was somewhat happy with. They were drawn on 4x4-inch square pages of an A4 sized paper folded into a zine and then cut into a square – essentially four square zines. Omkar’s suggestion is to draw a cover and make a proper 32-page zine. I haven’t scanned them in yet, but I might just end up doing this. If I do, I plan to post something about it here. But till then, this project can remain in the material world.
I also went on a social media fast this August – what Cal Newport calls a Digital Declutter, and I wrote about the experience here and here. I also wrote some general notes on attention here. Once I came back from the fast, I found myself distracted by how noisy everything felt, so, at the end of September, I deleted all my entertainment apps from my phone – not just social apps, but stuff like e-readers, podcasts, games, feed readers, all of that. It’s now been three months, and the only apps I ended up putting back on the phone because I missed them were Readwise, Readkit and Audible. I don’t use these to distract myself – they’re specifically for times when I want to listen to a book (while taking a walk, for example) or when I want to catch up on news during breaks from work (I hate reading text from a computer screen).
Unrelated to any of this, but still in the app realm – I moved my note-taking and writing from Apple Notes and Ulysses respectively over to Obsidian. For one, I wanted to move to a plain text format (which technically Ulysses has, but it doesn’t store anything as plain text). And second, I didn’t want to use apps that sync across devices – I wanted to keep everything in one single-purpose place. You always think having your work accessible everywhere will make you more productive, but that doesn’t work. Better to sit in one place with one device for one purpose.
It’s been good. My notes are all backed up to iCloud, but they only live on the computer. If I note anything on my iPhone or iPad, it’s stored in an inbox folder that’s also on iCloud where I can move it over and integrate into my desktop Obsidian.
Finally, there’s the personal stuff. K and I celebrated our second anniversary together early in 2025. I took a good number of breaks – I (mostly) didn’t work while attending film festivals, and also took three weeks off in July and hung out with friends in Goa. More and longer breaks in 2026, hopefully. I’ve got some planned already.
These same friends also gifted me a guitar, so I decided to pick that up again. It went well for a couple of months, but I’d forgotten how bad being a beginner can sometimes be. I pick up things quickly, but then I plateau, and it’s difficult to persist through that plateau till the next upward thrust. So it’s been a couple of months since I last picked up the guitar, but that’s a big thing for this year.
I got my very first suit stitched, to be best man at my friend Sahil’s wedding. It’s a nice, classic single-breasted suit, and Sahil and I had a great time nerding out on tailoring in the run-up to it. (Tailored clothing feels like something I might get into this year, just for kicks.) I got a lovely pair of semi-brogue oxfords to go with it, but that was in January, so it’s not a 2025 thing.
Finally, my existing tv died on me mid-October[2], and I took two months to think about how I might like to replace it. I realised that the film-watching experience matters to me a whole lot more now than it did in 2018, when I bought my old tv, so it was worth investing in. I finally went with a very nice 65-inch Sony Bravia (I could’ve gone bigger, my friends started looking at me crazy when I suggested that), paired with a nice home theatre setup, also from Sony. As I told K the day the system was delivered – I finally understood why they call it a “home theatre” with “surround sound”. It’s a much more fulfilling experience.
See? Like I said, that’s a whole lot. And I remembered so little of it it wasn’t even funny.
I thought about doing some more 2025 posts – favourite movies, books etc., but I’ve either already talked about them, or (in case of books) I wasn’t that excited about anything. So onwards and upwards.
2026 will hopefully have more frequent posting – updates on PROJECT SEASIDE will be a big theme, as will collating coverage as it happens. Shorter but more frequent.
I’m still struggling to figure out how to combine the time-block planner with the Bullet Journal, for example. The advantage of my old time-block planning notebook was to see one day per page, which doesn’t work here. I’ve particularly struggled with adding the “shutdown complete” aspect of the time-block planner, because I’d like that to be the last thing I do every day, and the time-block planner is the first thing I do every day. Eh, the experiment continues. ↩︎
Which is why you can see a big gap in my Letterboxd movie diary from mid-October to mid-December which is broken up by IFFI and the few movies I watched in the cinema. I have lost the desire to watch film or tv on a small screen. ↩︎