“To write and draw and tell stories is my primary purpose. Everything else is a means to an end,” says writer, illustrator and sequential artist Amruta Patil, one of the few Indian authors to deviate from the writer/artist dichotomy and create a graphic novel. After brief stints in copywriting, museum gallery lecturing and school teaching, she wrote Kari, her debut novel. “A blend of the real and imagined Kari draws its breath from the metropolis, from the heady burst of newfound independence and the gut-wrench of love lost; it’s about an inner landscape and journey,” she says. Trying to find the right balance between substance, passion and brevity, her writing style is complemented with artistic experiments in ink, marker, charcoal, crayon, decorative patterns among many. Extending her passion and commitment to writing and drawing, she co-founded Studio Umbilical — a design studio that will soon be a publishing house — with Luke Haokip. Both also publish Mindfields magazine — a quarterly journal on ideas and alternative learning. Following Kari is 1999 — a novel based in Goa and Parva – The Epic — another graphic novel based on the Mahabharata.