Working quietly from their home, Adeela and Junaid have created Sawab, an online store featuring contemporary framed art prints, stretched canvas prints and wall stickers. These products, with styles, themes and motifs derived from the rich Muslim cultural heritage, add aesthetic appeal to your home or office and make elegant gifts.
By Nigar Ataulla
Reading Enid Blyton tales as a little girl and growing up fascinated by pixies, goblins and fairies, I still carry an awe for things out of the ordinary even now, when I am supposedly ‘grown up”. And that was why I was bubbling over with excitement when I got an assignment to do a story on Adeela Abdul Razak and Junaid Bhura and the wonderful things that this duo are up to these days.
Doing a bit of homework by scanning their website, I conjured up images of this couple as two little pixies weaving beautiful designs while sitting on toadstools in a cottage covered with ivy and moss!
One sunny Saturday afternoon, I set off to meet Adeela and Junaid in their home in a quiet lane in Koramangala, Bangalore. This friendly, unassuming husband-and-wife team personified simplicity and elegance. Their work”they enthusiastically showed me samples of it”reflected wonderful creativity, innovation and grace, and, most importantly, represented Islam as a joyful, serene religion that embodies peace and spiritual solace.
Sawab”that’s what their venture is called”was born just a couple of months ago, when Adeela, wanting to decorate her home with wall art that reflected the rich Muslim cultural heritage, hit upon the idea of starting a venture that would produce such artifacts, not just for her own home but for many others searching for the same. A trained designer, she put her skills to good use by designing a range of several dozen art products with ‘Islamic’ motifs.
A growing number of people, Adeela explains, want elegant artifacts for their homes or to give as gifts that reflect their Muslim cultural heritage, but these are not easy to procure and are often very expensive. They don’t want to keep tacky stuff that might be easily available but which they don’t consider elegant and ‘contemporary’. Sawab steps in here, providing a range of elegant art products drawing on ‘Islamic’ motifs at a fairly affordable price. Today, Sawab is a registered online store featuring elegant contemporary framed art prints, stretched canvas prints, wall stickers and more, drawing on motifs rooted in the Muslim cultural heritage, particularly Arabic calligraphy”especially, but not only, in the ancient Kufic script. For Ramadan this year, Adeela designed striking letter banners and pretty Eid envelopes.
Although it was set up only recently, Sawab has been getting orders from across India. Customers can choose from a range of several dozen products whose details are hosted on the Sawab website (www.sawab.in).
Supported very enthusiastically by Junaid, who is a freelance web developer and consultant in Bangalore, Adeela’s creative work will certainly inspire many youngsters to be innovative, and use their talent and time in a very constructive way.
(To know more about Sawab, do email Adeela at [email protected] and to know more about Junaid’s work, do peep into www.junaidbhura.com)
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