Kaustabh Sinha

What is it about an Apple MacBook that makes many of us swoon? Why doesn't any other laptop, even if it's equipped with better technical features, elicit the same awe? The answer lies in the way Apple designs its products. Some Apple aficionados would even go to the extent of saying that the MacBook works even when it's switched off since doubles as a design accessory and adorns desks across the world.

That just goes to show how important, even if secondary, design is for an industrial product. And there have been numerous instances where the French have put aesthetics at par with functionality. For the Bonjour India festival, the Embassy of France and Culturesfrance have put together, with the support of the Bajaj Group, an exhibition that showcases 20 iconic samples of French design. It is on between February 12 and 28 at Pune's Ishanya gallery.

Tara Bohra

In 2005, Nicolas Wild, a comic book artist, was dispatched to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he found himself in a country re-emerging, dazed, from the smoking rubble of invasion/occupation. The task at hand: to help the newly installed Karzai government in explaining the new Afghan constitution to children. The next was to work on a recruitment campaign for the Afghan army – possibly one of the most life-threatening jobs in the world.  

Wild’s account depicts both the ever-imploding Afghanistan we see alongside reporters’ bylines, but it also shows the resilience of the expatriate life; the taste of caviar and carousing, which has a way of replicating itself in the most unlikely quarters. ‘Kabul Disco, Or how I did not get kidnapped by the Taliban’ weaves together a sequence of ironic and enlightening episodes – the episodic format an inevitable result of the book’s original form: a series of blogs. ‘Kabul Disco’ is the first in a three-part-series. Next up is ‘How I didn’t become an opium addict in Afghanistan’. I’ll make sure to take a hit of that.