We're Sorry for the Inconvenience, But This is a Letter of Revolution, Not the Swan Song
Published on June 30, 2025
Begum is a reality created and morphed by you as you read this. If interested, begum exists for the pursuit of divine madness: of creation. Begum was born to be free and to create. When you stop, begum ceases to exist. Your attention is the thin barrier between the existence of the begum and the void.
The Wrath of a Beautiful Mess
Mostly predictable, also ignorable, it came home. We're a year and a half old now. In the past few months, like any other organization, group, company, or team, we failed. We messed up, and we hit a wall. Hard. Our attitudes became our undoing.
Chaos erupted. Then, in a misguided attempt at grace, we draped it in the fancy cloak of "authentic creative process." This left us helpless in situations that were previously avoidable. The studio collapsed, the work stopped, and our internal body ceased functioning. We lost trust in each other, then in ourselves, and then in the work we were doing. Begum wasn't sustainable because it was moving toward ego instead of purpose. We were reckless and, yes, a bit embarrassed. But what truly satisfied us? We sullied our own lives with our own two hands. Most lives, sadly, are dirtied by the hands of others.
We were consumed by shame. Everything we saw felt inadequate, embarrassing. It all looked empty, pathetic, and foolish through that lens. Shame twists every emotion into a personality flaw, every casual choice into a giant mistake, every small blunder into a moral failure. Shame tells you that you're damned, you've accomplished nothing, and it's all downhill. We watched ourselves helpless and horrified at times.
In that time, we learned: humans are inherently discontinuous, gloriously self-contradictory. We're not built for constant feeling, conduct, or selfhood. And paradoxically, it's in the laboratory of loss and uncertainty that our capacity for kindness truly calibrates and supercharges. This, we've come to understand, is always a practice.
Finding Joy in Sisyphean Existence: The New Us
As they say, "A bad day is a good day in the larger space of things," and "love is a skill." We're here to love again. The details of our internal conflicts died with time, and the stories changed. We aren't the same today, and we won't be who we are tomorrow.
I think failing is okay; giving up is also okay. What's not okay is giving up on giving up. What's not okay is doing something we don't like. Failing, after all, is far sexier than not trying. I had to ask myself: do I enjoy the work, or do I just enjoy the idea of being a founder/leader who will create this amazing studio/playground for innovation, art, and design, and everything in between? The answer was uncomfortable.
Fear comes with both change and stagnation. Complexity was never the problem; it was always ambiguity. We have clarity now. We've rebuilt the foundations of our beloved yet abused studio. It rotted because all flesh rots; we feel, we love, we also destroy. We needed to figure out what we were without the performance, without the manifestos, without the mythology we'd woven around ourselves.
The very reason for our existence was the infatuation with this idea of free creation, the idea of begum. It's similar to love. The mind emotionally and physically projects romantic thoughts and desires to form and maintain the relationship with Begum, the beloved act of creating. It's a lovesickness, a beautiful shyness, a nervousness around that cherished process.
As a studio, we always measure the possession of good by the amount of enjoyment and delight it brings to the people we're building for and the art that comes out of it, rather than by the respect of fellow citizens. We're convinced that being abandoned to pleasure is the highest form of happiness. And we were good even when we messed up.
We believe good can be radical; evil can never be radical. It can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor dimension. Yet—and this is the horror—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of markets, affecting billions in place of trust. We were never evil with our work and will never be. Evil comes from a failure to empathize. It defies thought, for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine its premises, it's frustrated because it finds nothing there. This is the banality of evil. We were evil with how we handled our potential and time. Our reflection is the difference in the opposition of contradictions to the things that matter.
We believe in refining our craft more to filter signal from noise for our partners, adding genuine value, and sharing it with openness and transparency.
We still believe we are creatives. As creatives, we're supposed to be gloriously unrealistic. It is the artist's, the innovator's, the visionary's responsibility to negotiate with reality, to reimagine it, to rebel against it. We are all of it. To settle for "reality" would be to kill the collective future we're striving to build.
The studio emerging is different. We run miniskirtbegum like a household… a home. A household has people, dreams, budget, income, and resources to manage; all the moving parts are the same, but the focus is different. A business will let every person in it die a terrible death if it makes the business a profit. A household will spend its last rupee to keep the people in it safe and healthy. A household will use money as a resource to add value to the lives of the people in the household. A business will use people as a resource to add monetary value to the business.
We don't want miniskirtbegum to run like a business. We want it to run like a home, because we live here.
At miniskirtbegum, we are not our jobs or roles or work. Maybe soon, in the post-reality era, we won't have one, but what should be left at the end of this world is the "experience."
We are mystics, which keeps us sane. The day we kill the mystic, we create morbidity. We have always cared more for the truth than for consistency. If we see two truths that seem to contradict each other, we embrace both truths and the contradiction. This exact balance of apparent contradictions has been the whole buoyancy of Begum till now and will continue to be. We believe that we can understand anything with the help of what we do not understand.
Brands & Begums & People: Forging Honest Partnerships
Have we considered that others do not deserve the burden of working with us? We had. For our clients, we were not the best partners. We still aren't the best partners, but we try, we always try. With this changed attitude, we've reorganized, restructured, listened to every buildup, and rebuilt for months. There is clarity now.
We cannot listen to the music without pretending we're the artists, for we are the animals of creation. Guided by desire, intellect, and sensation—moving through irrationality, rationality, intuitive intelligence, scientific intelligence, and filtered by art—we continue to work with brands and people who are creating something: objects of love. The most beautiful stone for their wife.
Being big or radical or new isn't the point anymore. Being present is. Being honest is. Being worth the trust people place in us is. We share a common language or "pre-language" with our partners—the language required for a friendship.
The world around us
We live in a world where the very tracks of progress, much like in the trolley problem, are paved with people. They thrash and wail, begging for mercy from the machines(brands) that use their bodies to move forward. There's no longer a dilemma, no real choice; the world simply is as it is.
Today's economics isn't about how a country spends its money, but how its businesses spend theirs. A higher GDP should mean higher wages, yet they stagnate. Why? Because businesses prioritize fast growth and investor returns. This leaves countries with less tax revenue, tight budgets, and cuts to public services, creating bigger, more expensive problems down the line. We exist in a society whose entire policy seems designed to excite every nerve, straining every human desire and synthetic passion to sell us products from our factories, printing presses, and studios.
Society, Brands, and the Search for Ourselves
Everything begins and ends with the man, including the heavens, the hells, the myths, the glorifications, and the curses. We are confined to ourselves. The man fashion gods he can handle, a replica of himself. Perhaps there is no grand narrative, and perhaps the man is truly free.
Man has been circling around god for a thousand years, and he still doesn't know if he is a falcon, or a storm, or a great song—late will he realize that it was he all along. The world is a mirror of man.
There's a recursive nature to brands and people. While people generally seek to evolve from an aesthetic stage to an ethical one, most current brands hinder this growth. The future, for both, often appears bleak.
Brands today largely sell positivity. But positivity tells a sad person there's no reason to be sad. Warmth, on the other hand, asks that sad person if they want to get some ice cream. The true antidote to negativity isn't forced positivity; it's genuine warmth. In this new "glass world," our human characteristics become symptoms to be solved by commercialized medical practices, stripping emotion of its core. As purity and passion fade in petty social constructs, the world cries out for something real, for some warmth. More brands aren't the answer; ultimately, they have no intrinsic use to anybody.
It's also clear that brands, systems, and various movements often exploit people's identities. They prey on those who lack purpose, using them to further their own agendas. Groups and organizations offer a false sense of power and belonging, but you end up achieving their goals, not your own. Advertisers, political movements, and corporations make you feel like part of something bigger when, in reality, you're a small cog in their machine. From simply watching sports to joining a complex political movement, the system uses you to its benefit, eroding your personal identity in the process.
Our Approach: Facilitating Real Conversations
We aim to facilitate these new-age conversations between brands and the people they serve. We recognize that conversation has rules of politeness and norms. But to move beyond superficial small talk, we (miniskirtbegum and the brands we work with) need to risk breaking them.
Most brands are terrified of being human because humans are messy, contradictory, and sometimes wrong. But wouldn't it be refreshing if brands could be a little bit of an asshole? If they could have opinions, make mistakes, and then genuinely apologize for them? We believe this authenticity is crucial. We're here to help these brands navigate this new age society by embracing their humanity, flaws and all, and fostering connections built on something deeper than just manufactured positivity.
The New Internet: Post-Reality Era, the age of "Perceived Experiences"
We are also working towards accepting and solving problems in the post-reality era (era of AI), where we're not just going to be debating facts but whether entire experiences are real. Synthetics have always evoked real emotions in people so we believe that maybe the feelings evoked are real. This is the post-truth era, a multi-dimensional truth.
We want to purge the world of bourgeois sickness, "intellectual," professional, and commercialized culture; the world of dead art. We want to create for people, not just critics, dilettantes, and professionals. We want to bring the world into our work. We want to do the kind of work that fascinates us.
Performance is such a dominant cultural narrative. Moving forward, we will not analyze ourselves in the third person. We don't want to think of our identity as being performed. The majority of our contemporaries view their identity as their professional identity they're monetizing. The persona of "creator" sits as an imagined barrier against an uncertain future of work. We, as creators, are completely self-determined. We don't rely on external institutions, brands, and people to build our brand. We create independently, and we reflect independently. We will not leave miniskirtbegum underprepared and overexposed to any work in any total economic uncertainty. We are trying to build infrastructure that needs to support the transition to the post-reality era.
We are and will be working with brands and people who are creating objects of love—the most beautiful stone for their wife, the most honest story for their customer, the most useful solution for their problem.
"The world calls to me like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing my place in the family of things."
Does the revolution require breaking rules? Are we breaking rules? Yes! We think the rules are inherent in our being, encoded. To break them will require breaking us, which we have already been doing. And even if the rules can't be broken, the loopholes can surely be exploited.
We cannot make the revolution at scale with our work, but we can be the revolution, instilling it in our spirit, or it will be nowhere. We still remember how powerful we feel when we're creating. Don't see us, or hear or follow us; we'll still be here building the infrastructure for future conversations.
Miniskirtbegum is not about monumentalizing the mundane. We will always be a moment of work, mischief, and luck.
