When ‘Y’ decided to end the vowels from Planet Typewriter

Roy Phoenix’s book is an allegorical mirror to our troubled times & provides a bit of hope.

Allegories are hard to cook if the person eating them does not have an appetite for them. Roy Phoenix, in my opinion, manages to make the pickiest or inexperienced of eaters appreciate his creation ‘Alphabetica’ with charm and lots of intriguing illustrations.

Published last year (2021), Alphabetica, at its core, is a book of our times. Consonants, the letters that make up the majority of the English alphabet, co-exist with the minority vowels on Planet Typewriter. But, one single consonant questions the existence of the vowels leading to conflict.

For author Kaushik Roy (Think of Roy Phoenix as a pen name), the book was a long time coming. “I initially started with this idea in 2008 and I just couldn't do anything because of my work pressure and then I wasn't sure how to execute those ideas,” he tells us.

Roy is the president of brand strategy and marketing communication for Reliance Industries, a consultant in the same business, and a filmmaker too; quite the busy bee.

While writing this book, Roy asked himself on whom he should lay the responsibility for creating the whole problem? “I realised it had to be 'Y' because there is always this thing about the person who leads all this kind of tyrannical approach. He starts with a grudge that becomes this huge kind of scar so 'Y' is the person who is special because she thinks she can do without vowels because she can form so many words and therefore she is the person who had to be in my story.”

And while he plotted the story, we couldn’t help but marvel at the illustrations in the book who’re nothing short of brilliant characters. Turns out, the love for art goes back to Roy’s childhood. “When we were kids, we'd have a lot of literature which would have illustrations.”

He credits his father who ran an advertising agency for introducing him to the world of art. “For my summer holidays, I'd go to his office. One thing I won't forget is that the art directors refer to the fonts and letters as characters... this word 'character' stayed with me.”

He started in the advertising world as a visualiser, then a senior visualiser, and finally an art director. He was Mudra Communications’ (now DDB Mudra Group) chief creative officer from 2000 to 2003. “My background in advertising is purely the art form but I started writing seriously when I started writing for films,” he reveals.

It was in 2007 when Roy’s movie ‘Apna Asmaan’ starring Irrfan Khan and Shobana hit the screens. Roy tells us the thought of making Alphabetica as an animated movie did strike his mind but “it's difficult and India is still not the country where we'd do an animation film that gets returns monetarily.”

If you thought writing the book was hard, getting it read by agents was a Herculean effort. “The first few forays with agents was disheartening,” he laments because they, in his opinion, had not read the book. “They said it is a children’s book… I realised it was a spontaneous response because it had the word alphabet in it and it was about the A, B, C, D.”

“It requires a bit of maturity and a certain bit of awareness to connect because satire has to be one where you will find a parallel in every word and every line and who is it about,” he adds.

In the end, he chose Notion Press. “The only limitation here is that they don't do any physical distribution so everything is on Amazon which is good because with print on demand, you don't carry inventory and you can sell it across the world.” He is, however, in talks with a few publishers to distribute Alphabetica at offline bookstores.

If compliments are an author’s weakness, then the words of former JWT (now Wunderman Thompson) national creative director Ivan Arthur must be Roy’s kryptonite. “It's brilliant, why didn’t I think of this?” messaged Arthur to Roy on Facebook.

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