As you ring the bell on the bright orange door to Sudarshan Dheer’s office, you can’t help but notice a large wooden eye staring at you from where the peephole should be. Inside, Dheer sits behind a table that seems disproportionately big for his diminutive frame. One wall of the small room is dominated by a dark, wooden sculpture of a pair of irises —one has a yellow pupil, another, red. Japanese calligraphy stands, hangs, and lies everywhere. Weirdly shaped clocks tick away monotonous seconds. The science of proportions seems to have lost out to artistic liberties.

Like his office, this graphic designer’s fame is equally asymmetric; almost inversely proportional to the familiarity and presence of the marquees he has helped create in public memory. That tale began several years ago.

In 1974, when Indira Gandhi’s brand of nationalism was sweeping India, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HP) threw open a challenge to create a new identity for itself. The ad industry, including heavyweights Lintas and Hindustan Thompson Associates, and the National Institute of Design turned up in full force with the then equivalent of Power- Point presentations to woo the managers of the new icon of nationalism.

In the end, however, it was the unassuming persuasion of Dheer’s design that charmed them. Sudarshan had just then made an important decision in life — to quit advertising, which delivered his daily bread, to doodle in design. The HP assignment was to be his biggest break.

The white pony-tailed Dheer, then in his late 30s, made a line drawing of a gusher within a circle, the HP logo that has now sprouted up in every city and town and along highways throughout the country.