Our story

• 1993—The beginning
Our consultancy began with editing mostly scientific manuscripts. Simultaneously, both Vijay and Sadhana started learning typesetting and graphics software, in order to have greater control over the meaningfulness of the page layout.

• 1998—First turnkey job
BluePencil’s big break came in 1998, when Dr. Kanayo Nwanze, the then Director General of the West Africa Rice Development Organization (WARDA), gave us our first turnkey job — we had to edit, design, and print a slim report, and deliver the books in Côte d’Ivoire. This was the beginning of our association with Pragati Offset, internationally acclaimed printers.

• 1998–1999—Work picks up
One assignment followed another, and before long, we built up a team of dedicated editors, artists, and designers, all working towards crafting publications of international quality. It was around this time that Vijay quit his job and joined Sadhana. Then, C Venu Gopal began to provide us typesetting and graphics support, and became a quintessential part of the BluePencil team, our veritable Man Friday.
 
• 2000–2010—The busy years
We rarely advertised, and news of BluePencil’s existence and competence travelled only by word of mouth. New clients began coming to us slowly, mostly from West Africa—FARA, ASARECA and CORAF/WECARD, followed by Africa Harvest and Access Agriculture.

• 2003—Creative assignments
Vijay worked on a set of illustrated geography books for middle-school children, which compelled him to visualize and design educational graphics. Sadhana wrote a set of humorous poems “Autorickshaw Blues and Other Colours”, which was published by Katha, New Delhi.

• 2008—BluePencil in Mozambique
It was a proud moment in December 2008 when Sadhana travelled to Maputo, Mozambique, to showcase BluePencil’s books at the Annual General Meeting of the CGIAR. It was also an opportunity to meet some of the clients we had been working with ‘virtually’ for more than a decade.

• 2008 onwards—Local jobs
There was an increase in assignments from research institutions based in India (Azim Premji University in Bengaluru; Public Health Foundation of India and National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad). Some out-of-the-ordinary assignments came our way: a 600-page tome on philosophy; a nostalgia-filled book about Vidyaranya, our children’s 50-year-old school; a retrospective of a 66-year old women’s college in remote corner of South India.

• 2011—BluePencil Creative
Sadhana’s interest in nature motivated her to write a book on trees, “Just look up…to see the magic in the trees around you”, which we self-published. This is when we adopted a new label: “BluePencil Creative”.

• 2015—HydandSeek: A visual tribute to Hyderabad
A collection of street photographs, taken by photographer Lakshmi Prabhala, conceptualised by Sadhana and designed by our daughter Ragini.

• 2016–2022—Publications for FAO
Apart from local work, we worked on a series of gender studies for The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

• 2018—A book on Warangal
The HydandSeek photographer-editor-designer team came up with another book — Orugallu to Warangal: Journeys across time. This time, our daughter Malini joined the team and wrote a chapter on a folk performance for this book.

As we look back, it is the people we met and the special moments on every assignment that made it all worth it. The ecstasy at getting our first editing job, our first turnkey job, the first glance at the very first printed publication and many more thereafter, our first self-published book and a few more. Memories of the time a team of clients came back to our office because they had forgotten to take a selfie with us; the time one of our editors walked in to help us with an annual report, and walked out a month later, engaged to a writer friend she had met through us! The time when a client told us the book looked so good she wanted to eat it; the hug from an 83-year-old writer whose biography we worked on; and the tears of another who brought out a book in memory of her son…